The Little Book Of The Avengers by Roy Thomas (book review).
The worse thing when opening this book is realising that in the nature of its small size that it won’t open fully without damaging the spine, which is a shame as it contains so much information about Marvel’s team, the Avengers. The book does open better the further you get into the book but it does mess double-page spreads. This is one of a current set of four ‘Little Books’ from Taschen which will be covered in the next month or so. You get a lot of art, comicbook pages and covers from across their history. The introduction by Roy Thomas comes in three languages, English, German and French, although the rest of the text is in English. You also get a little sampling of foreign language reprints from France and Spain.
In some respects, I wish this book was more a history of Marvel’s mightiest heroes team but it might have made the book much larger. It’s more like dipping in on some events, a lot of them from the 1960s-80s, which does explain why the original logo and not the arrow-shaped one isn’t used. The much later period is only covered briefly but when I came across the Pet Avengers as funny as it is, you do have to wonder if Marvel is following DC’s Legion Of Super-Pets from the 1960s.
These little books are bound to be seen as good yuletide gifts and I doubt if they’ll be confined to a corner of the room afterwards. The art is well printed and it does fill in some gaps in your knowledge. For me, it became a matter of recognising which comics I had and was there any significant picture left out. I think showing the Vision with a teardrop but there were other scenes from those comics so gets down to you can’t get everything in there.
I should point out this book is released stateside in early December.
GF Willmetts
November 2017
(pub: Taschen. 190 page A5 softcover. Price: £ 6.99 (UK), $ 9.99 (US). ISBN: 978-3-8365-6780-0)
check out website: www.taschen.com