So I ended up finishing West Coast Avengers today, meaning all I have left to read is the Harras' run on Avengers before I'm completely done with all the 20th century Avengers comics that I was interested in. I had read some of WCA as a young kid, so it was pretty fun to go back and see how much I remembered of it.
Engelhart — It was a pretty typical Engelhart story. Lots of weird plots, tons of continuity and callbacks and very good characterization, especially with the likes of Tigra and Hank Pym. I honestly never really liked Hank at all up until this point. He's way better as a support character than as a hero. Lost in Space Time is the best story here and, as an old Marvel fan, seeing the references to the silver age Fantastic Four and Dr. Strange time travel stories were really cool. The only real negative I have to say is that the plots sometimes got really weird, like the cat people storyline with Tigra kind of felt outside of left field even if it did help continue her character arc.
Byrne-Byrne's run left me with mixed feelings, almost the opposite of Engelhart's in many ways, with good plots but horrible characterization. The plots were actually fascinating and probably the best of the whole series, but he seemed to treat the characters as if he hated them all. His sidelining of Hawkeye and Mockingbird, I thought, was dumb and removed my favorite characters up to that point, and his treatment of the Vision was just bizarre to me. I never really cared about his and the Scarlet Witch's relationship, so breaking them up was fine, but completely undoing every major storyline and development of the character was stupid. I also hated that he started the whole mental illness storyline with Scarlet Witch going evil, as I know that's the excuse Bendis would use to justify Avenger's Disassembled years later. It was a little painful to read, to be honest, and if I ever reread the series I think I'll just skip Byrne's part.
Thomas-Thomas' run is good, but not great. Solid stories, many fun moments and it feels a lot more like a typical Avengers story than what Byrne was writing. If you liked his stuff back when he was writing the main Avengers title in the 60s, you'd probably like this. It kind of feels like the opposite of what most of the Marvel books were like at the time. Far slower, less extreme and more traditional than the others, which was nice to see. Even though there weren't any storylines which stuck out to me during this time, I liked how he brought back Goliath Hawkeye and did a way better job than the first time around with it. Also, he did a good job of having the Scarlet Witch deal with the nightmare that Byrne ran her through. The ending was depressing for no reason though. He just killed off Mockingbird for no reason and then the book basically ends, so you don't really even get to see any fallout from it. Totally lame and a missed opportunity if you ask me.
