The Avengers Unlimited

Here's how the lineup from 2001-2004 season of the Bruce Timm's Justice League program —in my view the best superhero tv program ever made— would look with the shoe on the other foot.

Thor
Captain America
Thundra
Iron Man (James Rhodes)
Iceman
Silver Surfer
Ms. Marvel (Una, a Kree warrior on Earth)

assisted in some episodes by Sub-Mariner, Ghost Rider, Sandman, the Eternals, Dr. Strange

The Avengers, 2006-2008

Thor
Captain America
Thundra
Iron Man
Mockingbird
Vision
Tigra
Warbird
Angel
Falcon
—joined later by Iceman and War Machine

The Avengers, 1961-1978

Founding members

Thor
Captain America
Thundra
Mr. Fantastic
Iron Man
Sub-Mariner
Silver Surfer

Recruits

Hawkeye
Ant-Man/Yellowjacket
Captain Mar-Vell
Mockingbird
Beast
Vision
Ms. Marvel (Una, Mar-Vell’s wife and partner)
Scarlet Witch

The “Big Seven” of the Avengers

Now that I’ve established enough pairings, I can say what the first lineup of the alternate Avengers would be.

The Avengers: Founding Lineup

Thor
Captain America
Thundra
Iron Man
Mr. Fantastic
Sub-Mariner
Silver Surfer

It’s been written somewhere (hell if I can remember which message board it was) that the Avengers are like a championship team —composed of players with varying abilities who work together in order to triumph— and the JLA is like an All-Star team — top of the line players.

In the prevailing Marvel iteration, we have three characters forever linked to the Avengers, two loners who nonetheless were involved in the Defenders, one marginal character, and the leader of the Fantastic Four…but this is what it looks like with the shoe on the other foot.

The most important superheroine = a character with whom fanboys are only dimly aware

Wonder Woman- Thundra

Here we come to a rather imperfect kounterpart match-up —although it may seem spot-on.

Wonder Woman is not only one of DC’s big three franchises, but is without question an icon of American culture. Everyone —your mom, my mailman, your six year old cousin— knows Wonder Woman, the princess of a race of immortal warrior women.

But Marvel has no iconic female character: the closest would be Susan Richards, but she’s hardly a princess of an legendary gyno-cracy, is she? I have struggled to find the ideal kounterpart for Wonder Woman in a MU that tends to proffer female characters that “strike a pose and point,” resulting in laser blasts or somesuch, instead of gals that throw a mean punch.

What about Warbird/Ms Marvel/Carol Danvers, a tough broad character I like very much (and one often subjected to the “women in refrigerators” treatment)? She’d do, were she not an all-american woman. Same goes for She-Hulk. Valkyrie, a representative of the Norse mythology iteration of the Amazon paradigm, would suffice, if that selfsame Asgardian pedigree were not already reserved for another DC classification (it’s fairly obvious that Val’s introduction in the early 70s was to address Marvel’s shortcomings vis-a-vis strong. liberated WW-style characters). Storm, Sue Richard’s only competition as Marvel’s best-known female character and one that comes from an exotic background, would do, were she not to have an even more suitable kounterpart (Storm and WW battled one another in 1995’s DC vs. Marvel crossover). And if Thor was a chick, it’d be a no-brainer. But WW’s provenance as a member of a race populated exclusively by women is her key trait.

Ultimately, I’ll go with Thundra, who comes from an alternate future that finds puny men dominated by “Femizons.” She’s a minor character, evidently created to spar with the Thing in the early ‘70s and, like Valkyrie, to spout feminist boilerplate written by Roy Thomas and his nerdy peers who, I imagine, were struggling with how to address second wave feminism (and defensively at that). I’m not hugely familiar with how she’s been written over the years, but at any rate bet that she was often portrayed as a WW surrogate.

So this pairing is imperfect, in that I’d prefer to assign match-ups based on unintended similarities— or at least similarities that aren’t based on transparent tributes to an iconic character. But this works for the nonce.

Commonalities:
Both are prime exponents of a race of warrior women (that the Amazons have mythological underpinnings and existed on Earth since time immemorial and the Femizons in an alternate timestream isn’t a problem: both locales are separate from the general populace). Both are noble, headstrong and do not need a man to protect them: Wonder Woman’s strength is second only to Superman’s, while Thundra has been said to be the toughest female character in the MU.

Differences:
Wonder Woman is one of the three most respected superhumans in the DC diaspora; being that she’s relatively obscure and only appears every once in a while,Thundra occupies no such position. Thundra also collaborated with villains from time to time, of which WW wouldn’t dream. WW also occasionally adopts a secret identity and avails herself of various mystical totems, both of which do not apply to Thundra.

Alternate histories:

TH: Thundra is the greatest warrior of a matriarchal society in a future timeline, and travels to the modern continuum. While she intends to act as a messenger of peace, she realizes that she must use her unparalleled mettle as a champion of Earth. She helps found the Avengers, and becomes a world figure.

WW: Princess Diana comes to “Man’s World” from the matriarchal society of the Amazons in order to combat the Doom Patrol’s Robotman and thus prove man’s inferiority to woman’s (gawd, that must have been a shitty FF story). She allies with various villains before joining forces with the Doom Patrol and the Justice League. She eventually retires to another plane of existence, occasionally returning to assist superhuman operatives in the present continuum.