The first season of Marvel’s The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes has come to a close. If you missed it, you’ve done yourself a great disservice.
For a long-time now, DC has maintained somewhat of a mopnopoly on really good serialized television adaptations of super hero stories, but with The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Marvel seems to have taken their place on the pedestal.
That’s not to say that we’ve never gotten a good Marvel series before.
For example, the newer Spider-Man series was acceptable, but still mostly very childish.
In contrast, The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, boasts a solid arc, relatable characters, interesting challenges, and improved mythology development.
The first season starts out by allowing the audience to take a slow introduction to the team, giving each hero an episode or two on their own.
We don’t see the team coalesce until nearly half-way through the season, when the major super villain prisons are broken out of.
This event forces the heroes to unify, and most of the second half of the season is spent trying to figure out who orchestrated this massive breakout event, and every time the team thinks they have it figured out, they are revealed to be wrong, and a new enemy emerges as the culprit.
The fights are both engaging and clever, using each hero in compelling ways, rather than just letting everybody try to punch everybody else. Their team is built visibly stronger each episode as they figure out how to make their powers work together more effectively.
The most impressive aspect, I think, is the well-formed hint dropping toward future plot-points. Despite the nearly constant action, nothing happens in the show completely out of the blue. Every challenge the team faces has a solid foundation in the events of the last few episodes, which makes the whole thing feel very put-together. It is certainly more like a serialized story than an episodic one.
Overall, it’s one of the best animated super hero stories ever, and certainly the best Marvel series. It comes at the perfect time to take advantage of the hype around the Marvel films, and anyone who has been enjoying the Marvel Film Universe will not go wrong picking up this series.
The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes season one is nowout onDVD infour volumes. A second season is planned, but air dates have not yet been announced.
