Wolverine finally joined the Avengers in 2005 - and it changed the Marvel Universe forever. The Avengers first assembled in the comics way back in 1963, and over the decades they've included some of the biggest superhero names of them all - as well as some amusing Z-listers. Most readers are familiar with the likes of Iron Man, Captain America, and the Hulk; far fewer would recognize the Two-Gun Kid, Doctor Druid, or Firebird. What's more, not every incarnation of the superhero team has really felt as though they deserved to be known as "Earth's Mightiest Heroes."
Moving into the 21st century, Marvel Comics began to take a different approach. As Sean Howe notes in his book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, the publisher began using statistical techniques and computer algorithms to assess creator and character performance. This allowed them to recognize a major up-and-coming writer, Brian Michael Bendis, who had already proved himself through books like Ultimate Spider-Man and Alias. And so, in 2004, Brian Bendis was invited to one of Marvel's creative retreats. There, he outlined a completely different vision for The Avengers, a book that had been seeing declining sales for years.
According to Bendis, he didn't originally mean to make a New Avengers pitch at all. He and Mark Millar simply started complaining that they felt the book had lost its way, as demonstrated by its character roster. "We were told to feel free to talk," Bendis recalled in an interview with CBR, "but sometimes we were the only ones talking which can be embarrassing. Mark and I really got into a tizzy about Avengers. It was just us b******, saying things like, 'Why isn't it really Earth's Mightiest Heroes? What the f*** is Jack of Hearts?... Why isn't Avengers a book made up of the coolest guys? Why doesn't it have characters like Spider-Man and Wolverine?'" Chaos erupted at the summit, but Marvel bosses liked the idea, and by the end of the retreat Bendis had been put in charge of a relaunch. He swiftly disassembled the Avengers, then kicked off a new series called - appropriately enough - New Avengers. Just as Bendis had suggested, it brought Wolverine and Spider-Man into the lineup, alongside other superheroes he considered Marvel's coolest.
With the benefit of hindsight, the addition of Wolverine was the most remarkable one of all - because, frankly, Wolverine is actually not a great superhero. His presence in the Avengers ensured the team had a darker edge than ever before, as demonstrated by the scene in which Iron Man asked him to join in the first place. Tony Stark argued the Avengers needed that one last ingredient, a member who wouldn't hold back if any of them went rogue, who would go to the places he and Captain America couldn't - in other words, someone who would kill. Conveniently enough, the darkness of this decision was highlighted by events over in the X-Men books, with Mark Millar launching a famous and celebrated arc called "Enemy of the State." It saw Wolverine brainwashed by the Hand, becoming a top assassin before finally breaking free; the timing was opportune, emphasizing that Wolverine was most certainly not your typical Avenger.
Bendis' grand idea - that the Avengers should be an assembly of Marvel's biggest brands - was a success. Oddly enough, though, he had made one mistake; he had failed to realize that characters can become overexposed. Wolverine is a classic example because he was already becoming a dominant force in the X-Men books, to the extent he seemed to be part of every single team. Now, under Bendis, his influence had expanded beyond the X-Men range, and he was an actual Avenger as well. The overexposure led to a period where the character began to lack definition, with every writer interpreting Logan in a different way, and readers struggling to figure out how his story fits together. Marvel even began to make jokes about it in the comics themselves. And, in the end, by 2014 they made the decision to kill him off for a while in order to give his brand time to recover. In a sense, the death of Wolverine itself is the final consequence of Bendis' New Avengers run.