I thought I was going to have to drop Mighty Avengers because Greg Land's art is so off-puttingly plastic. (That great art above is by Ronald Wimberly.) But the series is too damn good for me to abandon. I might even like it more than Daredevil or Hawkeye.

Mainstream comics efforts live or die on their ability to spin up fantastic new worlds and keep the stories within going for as long as possible. But too much familiarity is the enemy of reader loyalty. Nothing makes folks stop bring comics faster than coming across something they feel like they’ve already seen.

Mighty Avengers just became my favorite mainstream comic, because it’s giving me something that I’ve been wishing for forever. Brown superheroes, broke superheroes, jerk superheroes, all of them barely getting along but having to save the world any damn way.