Buzzapp Master 
The following story contains spoilers for Thunderbolts* (2025).
THE AVENGERS ARE no more. Once a collection of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the Avengers have dissipated after a battle that saw the death of several key members and the destruction of their iconic headquarters. A new team arrives to take their place, but who is the mysterious figure influencing their decisions? And what are we to make of their most powerful member, the Sentry (also known as… Bob)?
That description, of course, fits the MCU at the end of Thunderbolts*. Ever since Avengers: Endgame, with the death of Iron Man and Black Widow and Captain America’s retirement, Earth has remained unprotected. As we’ve seen in Black Widow, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the duplicitous CIA head La Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has been filling that gap by assembling her own team of heroes—heroes she can control.
That description also describes the Marvel Universe in 2004, when the Avengers: Disassembled storyline laid waste to the venerable team. But, as in Thunderbolts*, the world cannot go without the Avengers along.
By the end of the movie, and carrying into the film’s credits scenes, an official new team is anointed, aptly called The New Avengers. They’re made up of Bucky, Yelena, Ghost, John Walker, Red Guardian, and Bob/Sentry.
A team of New Avengers has risen, carrying on the tradition and taking the universe in a surprising direction. What does this mean? We’ll know soon enough, with these events almost certainly tying directly into The Fantastic Four: First Steps later this summer and Avengers: Doomsday next year. But for now, we can look at the long comics history of the New Avengers team for some vital history and possible hints.
Out With the Old Avengers
Marvel Comics
Before the Avengers existed in the world of Marvel Comics, there was the Justice League of America and its predecessor the Justice Society of America. Both key elements of the DC Comics universe, the Justice Society and the Justice League were founded on a simple, brilliant concept: Take all the best characters from your shared universe and put them on a team together.
First introduced by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1963, the Avengers initially seemed to do the same for the Marvel Universe, then still in its infancy. The first Avengers stories featured Iron Man, Hulk, and Thor, along with Captain America joining a few issues in.
Even then, the Avengers weren’t quite the Marvel equivalent of the Justice League. After all, the incredibly popular Fantastic Four and Spider-Man weren’t members. However, Ant-Man and the Wasp, characters who never resonated with readers like they did with Stan Lee and Marvel Editorial, were there from the beginning.
Instead of trying to compensate, Marvel quickly leaned into its differences from the Justice League. By the time Avengers #17 hit stands in 1965, all the big names besides Captain America had quit, leaving Steve Rogers to recruit the former villains Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and Scarlet Witch. Dubbed “Cap’s Kooky Quartet,” the line-up set the path that Avengers stories would follow, filling its ranks with not just the big names, but mostly C- and D-listers like Swordsman, the Inhuman Sersi, and Jack of Hearts.
It’s fitting, then, that one of those D-Listers kicked off the end of the classic Avengers era. The Avengers: Disassembled storyline by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist David Finch kicked off in 2004’s Avengers #500 when Jack of Hearts explodes, killing Ant-Man and mortally-wounding Lionheart. By the time the story ends in Avengers #504, Hawkeye and Vision had also died, the source of the threat is revealed to be Scarlet Witch, gone mad with grief after losing her children, and the Avengers disbanded.
The old Avengers are gone. The New Avengers are here.
In With the New Avengers
Marvel Comics
The cover to 2005’s New Avengers #1, written by Bendis and penciled by Finch, is shrouded in darkness. We can make out the silhouettes of Captain America and Iron Man, both mainstays on the team and two of Marvel’s most popular characters. But the other shapes match characters who have never been official members of the Avengers, including Spider-Man and Wolverine.
Marvel New Avengers, Vol. 1: Breakout
Even more shocking are the characters seen in the issue’s first pages, in which Luke Cage and Jessica Drew, a SHIELD agent who once operated as the superhero Spider-Woman, are guiding Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson through the ocean-bound supervillain prison known as the Raft. When Spidey baddie Electro causes a blackout, the villains go free, forcing Matt, Jessica, and Luke to fight for their lives. They get backup in the form of Spider-Man, Captain America, and Iron Man, who rush in to lend a hand. But the biggest back-up comes when Foggy finds the sullen Robert Reynolds and begs him to help, urging him to take his super-heroic form, the Sentry.
In that rag-tag group, Tony Stark sees echoes of the early Avengers line-ups, an odd-ball set of heroes who band together out of necessity. Thus, the New Avengers were born, a line-up that crystalized in the second story arc, which saw Wolverine join after the team battles dinosaurs, renegade mutants, and the second Black Widow, Yelena Belova.
Marvel New Avengers 1
At the time, the New Avengers felt antithetical to the classic Avengers concept. By adding big names like Spider-Man and Wolverine to the line-up, Marvel appeared to be stacking the deck with money-makers, putting profit over stories. That feeling only intensified as the New Avengers became the center of Marvel’s storylines throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, where the division between Captain America and Iron Man led to the Civil War and persisted through the Secret Invasion and Dark Reign crossovers.
Two decades later, the New Avengers now look like a modern update on the original Avengers formula. Sure, Spider-Man and Wolverine are money-makers, but they’re both characters near-and-dear to Bendis’s heart, characters he would return to time and again. Same is true of Spider-Woman, Luke Cage, and Sentry, none of whom were big-sellers, but all of whom interested him.
New Avengers line-ups that followed would continue in this vein, eschewing tradition to give the creative team room to bring together interesting characters. That’s particularly true of writer Jonathan Hickman’s 2013-2015 New Avengers series, considered by most to be the best run on the title. Part of Hickman’s epic run that began in Fantastic Four and continued through the Universe-defining 2015 series Secret Wars, New Avengers was the dark counterpart to Avengers.
Where Avengers told massive heroic stories and featured a huge line-up of characters, New Avengers focused on the Illuminati, a secret society in which Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Black Panther, Namor, and others worked to stop the destruction of all reality. Where the Avengers fought in the open, the New Avengers worked in the shadows.
New Avengers told some of the most memorable stories in Marvel history, stories that continue to influence the MCU and the Marvel Comics Universe. And it would have been impossible without the launch of the original New Avengers in 2005.
After the Thunder, Before the Wars
Marvel Comics
In the final post-credit sequence of Thunderbolts*, the team of heroes, now fully-christened as the New Avengers, looks to the sky and sees a strange object breaking through the clouds. It is the pogo plane NK-1, the starship flown by the Fantastic Four.
More than a tease for this July’s much-anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the post-credit scene also underscores the importance of the New Avengers. Universes are dying. The Secret Wars are coming, battles to prevent realities from collapsing. In the pages of Marvel Comics, these battles are fought first by the New Avengers.
With Avengers: Doomsday coming next year and Avengers: Secret Wars coming in 2027, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about to face its greatest threats. Good thing that it has a the New Avengers ready to save us once again.
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