Solo Avengers

In my on-going quest to re-read my Marvel comics from A to Z (complete series only), I recently finished Avengers Spotlight, formerly known as Solo Avengers. The series only lasted 40 issues in the late 1980s and was probably the first series I collected from issue # 1 until it was cancelled--I therefore hold a great deal of nostalgia for the comic. It was one of Marvel's attempts to revive the "split-book" format popular in the 1960s, and starred Hawkeye ("The World's Greatest Marksman") for half of each issue and another Avenger for the other half. The Hawkeye stories tended to be very light-hearted super hero stories, putting the expert archer up against goofy super villians like The Bullet Biker (yes, a guy who rode around on a bike with machine guns), The Orb (a guy's who helmet was a giant eye, which I think shot laser beams), and The Pernicious Plantman (the name says it all!). I still find the stories fun and refreshingly different than the grim and gritty trend that struck super hero comics for quite a while in the late 80s and early 90s (eventually, however, even Hawkeye was struck by the bug near the end of the series, as he gets gunned down by a drug gang and, after his recovery, dons bullet proof armor and makes it his mission to stop the L.A. "gang menace").