WEST COAST AVENGERS: ASSEMBLED PREMIERE HC
Written by ROGER STERN, ROY THOMAS & BOB HARRAS
Penciled by BOB HALL, AL MILGROM, DON HUDSON & LUKE MCDONNELL
Covers by BOB HALL
After operating for years out of New York, the Avengers form a second team -- this time based in California! Fresh off their honeymoon, Hawkeye and Mockingbird -- under the direction of the Vision, chairman of the East Coast Avengers -- gather Tigra, Wonder Man and Iron Man (secretly James Rhodes) to fight the forces no single super hero can withstand! See the team's earliest adventures against the deadly Maelstrom and his Minions! The malevolent Crossfire! Spider-Man foe the Blank! The ionic-powered Goliath (later Atlas of the Thunderbolts)! The all-powerful Graviton! Guest-starring the Shroud, Tony Stark and honorary Avenger Moira Brandon! Collecting WEST COAST AVENGERS (1984) #1-4, IRON MAN ANNUAL #7 and AVENGERS #250 -- plus material from AVENGERS #239, #243-244 and #246; and AVENGERS WEST COAST #100.
208 PGS./ Rated A …$29.99
ISBN: 978-0-7851-4321-5



Aparently on sale in February. Color me surprised...I never thought I'd see these stories collected.

-- Uncle Rog

Very cool.

Yay!

This saves me the trouble of having them bound myself!

Very cool. Also, that was one of my favorite "floating heads" covers.

NIce, but, as I have them all, I won't be partaking. Sorry.
Still quite cool, and an excellent run of issues.

Hopefully it sells well.

I was delighted to read about this today. I suspect I will be getting it!

Though I like Englehart, wish they had gotten you for the ongoing!

That really was a fun series.

I did. Although I thought it would get the Essential treatment.

I loved that series when it first came out.

Agreed. But I am torn. The West Coast Avengers by Englehart and Milgrom was what really got me interested in the Avengers as a whole and Hawkeye especially. Love the Lost in Space/Time arc.

Although I have to say I would love to have seen what Rog could have come up with for the Whackos. Did you have any potential stories in mind, Uncle Rog?

A number, but as stories within the AVENGERS. My idea behind establishing a second base of operations for the Avengers was to keep some of our errant Avengers together and under the guidance of the Avengers editorial office. In those days, other writers kept trying to glom onto Avengers that weren't regularly appearing in the book and use them in miniseries -- too often for for someone other than The AVENGERS editor.

My long-range plan was to drawn on both the New York-based and the California-based Avengers, mixing and matching heroes for whatever wild challenges I could come up with.

But the miniseries was so successful that Marvel decided to spin the WCA off into its own monthly title...to be written and drawn by people other than the ones who had made the successful miniseries, of course.

By the time I heard about the WEST COAST AVENGERS series, it was already a done deal. And I had to scrap plans for about a year’s worth of stories.

-- Uncle Rog

So why did the main series pass you by? It seems odd that they would not want to give you first crack since you'd clearly done a good job on the start up. Did you read any of the regular series? If so, any thoughts on the stories?

This mini series was a favorite of mine. I reread it many times.

Yeah, but publishers don't think that way. And nine times out of ten, neither do editors.

Similarly, I wrote the first Justice-League-in-the-animated-style story for the late, lamented Superman & Batman Magazine -- drawn right purdy by Ty Templeton & Rick Burchett, 'way back in 1994. But after the Justice League animated series was launched, no one at DC asked me to write the associated JUSTICE LEAGUE ADVENTURES comic.



In the case of WCA, what happened was that Steve Englehart had been lured back to Marvel. I suspect there was some editorial interest in having him write a series that was in the vein of what he’d done with the AVENGERS in the 1970s. Made perfect sense from a marketing standpoint.

But editorial could have done a better job in the way they treated us writers and artists.

(No big surprise there.)


I read every issue up until the time Marvel fired me.

It's been over twenty years, so I don't remember too much about those stories. All I recall is that it was very different from what I had planned.

-- Uncle Rog

IAWTP.

I loved that issue,Rog! It was especially cool since it pre-dated the JLA animated series if memory serves. Did they ever reprint it in a standard comic? I hope so because more folks should have the chance to check out that hidden gem.

Thanks for the insight, Rog. Obviously the world of comics is not a meritocracy. Such is life.

Never reprinted...but it was released a year later as the Audio Cassette: DC Comics Super Heroes - Attack of the Elementals.

-- Uncle Rog

This just in from the Marvel Masterworks Boards...

"Another batch of hardcovers printed in China - this time in May - are being bumped to the end of the month. Thus the following books have a new ship date of 5/26 (original ship dates in parentheses): Marvel Masterworks Avengers Vol. 10 HC (5/12), Marvel Masterworks Golden Age Captain America Vol. 4 HC (5/19), Avengers: West Coast Avengers Assemble MPE HC* (5/5), Captain Marvel: The Death of Captain Marvel MPE HC (5/5), and X-Force Vol. 1 OHC (5/5)."

*This being the revised title.

-- Uncle Rog

Just a little bump-reminder...