Marvel has created some amazing superheroes over the years, but what’s better than superheroes? Superteams, obviously. The first comic book superteam that set the stage for the rest came from DC Comics, when the publisher decided to put their best heroes together as the Justice Society of America. Marvel in the Golden Age would create the Allies and the Young Allies to compete, but they never rose to the level of their distinguished competition (later, Roy Thomas would create the Invaders, a team that took the basics of the Allies and made them into a more modern team in the Silver Age). However, all of that would change after DC’s Justice League debuted in the Silver Age. Marvel began their shared superhero universe with a superteam, and since then has created some of the best teams of all time, including the Avengers and the X-Men.
The Avengers are basically a copy of the Justice League and Justice Society, a team that took all of Marvel’s heroes and brought them together. The X-Men started out as the Marvel teen team, but all of that changed in the mid ’70s and the X-Men went on to eclipse every other Marvel team until the ’00s. However, these aren’t the best Marvel teams. There are some amazing teams out there in the Marvel Universe that aren’t the Avengers and the X-Men, and these three teams are the top of the team pyramid if Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and Marvel’s merry mutants weren’t there.
The Fantastic Four was the first Marvel team of the Silver Age. Those classic Fantastic Four stories are brilliant, as Jack Kirby was able to create characters and concepts that Stan Lee’s dialogue brought to life brilliantly. The Silver Age was the time when superhero sci-fi was at its height; DC had Superman, Action Comics, The Flash, The Atom, and Green Lantern (not to mention ’50s Batman comics and Hawkman) all telling amazing sci-fi stories, so Kirby and Lee took this idea, and dialed it up to a thousand. It’s plain to see that early Fantastic Four was Kirby’s baby; Kirby’s ideas were always much grander than anyone around him. Kirby and Lee made a great team because Lee was able to take Kirby’s massive ideas and inject familial drama and that special Lee dialogue that you either love completely or hate with a passion. However, it fits the Fantastic Four perfectly, and set the stage for Marvel’s First Family for decades to come.
The Fantastic Four were intrepid Cold Warriors of the highest order; Silver Age Marvel was obsessed with the Cold War and the American exceptionalism of the time. Scientist Reed Richards, his best friend and pilot Ben Grimm, his girlfriend Sue Storm, and her brother Johnny Storm decided that they had to beat the Soviets into space, so they snuck onto their rocket (known as Marvel-1) and lifted off. Richards had done all of the math right… except for shields for cosmic radiation. The four of them were inundated with it and returned to Earth with amazing powers, well except for Grimm, who became a monster, and decided to use their powers to explore the universe and save the world. It was the perfect origin for a new kind of superteam, and it’s why the Fantastic Four have been able to stand the test of time. The team perfectly combined big concept sci-fi and familial drama, and the Fantastic Four was off to the races.
The Fantastic Four were once Marvel’s bestselling comic, a fact emblazoned on the cover of every issue for decades, but the X-Men changed all of that. However, there’s just something about the Fantastic Four when it’s done right. Lee and Kirby leaving was a huge blow to the book, and it would meander until John Byrne took it over and created some of the best Fantastic Four stories of all time. The Tom DeFalco run on the team is better than it has any right to be, bringing the classic flavor of the team to the ’80s and ’90s. There have been some fantastic runs since then as well, with Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo’s ’00s run, J. Michael Straczynski and Mike McKone mid ’00s run, the Jonathan Hickman epic of the ’10s, and the current Ryan North run (and honestly, the James Robinson/Leonard Kirk and the Dan Slott run are pretty good too) all impressing readers. The Fantastic Four are an amazing team with brilliant adventures, and hopefully their upcoming MCU appearance will make them popular again.
There are few people that would have put X-Force on a best Marvel teams list, but they’ve grown immensely since their debut. Marvel’s mutant teams can be rather complicated, and X-Force is no different. The team had its genesis in the New Mutants, the group of young trainee X-Men. Magneto eventually took over the team’s training when he was working at the X-Mansion, and Magneto’s ideas would make it easier for Cable to take the team over. The grizzled mutant soldier started hanging out with the older teens of the New Mutants, honing them into a force that could help him with his mission, which was to keep the terrible future he was brought up in, an Earth ruled by Apocalypse, from happening. However, Cable saw that the New Mutants would never be useful to his war while they lived at the X-Mansion. Cable drove a wedge between the school and the team, and the New Mutants followed Cable. X-Force was born and they became the more violent black ops team, working out of the Adirondack Mountains and fighting Stryfe and the Mutant Liberation Front, Gideon, and the mercenary Deadpool. X-Force became the black sheep of the mutant team family, and proved to be immensely popular with the edgy teens of the ’90s.
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X-Force actually got better once Cable left the book, as experienced mutants like Cannonball, Boom Boom/Meltdown, Warpath, Sunspot, Siryn, Rictor, and Shatterstar were way more interesting as a group without adult supervision. The mid ’90s X-Force didn’t sell as well as the early ’90s iteration, but nothing was selling like the early ’90s, but the stories got better as the years went on. X-Force would get its first major shake-up in the early ’00s, when Peter Milligan and Mike Allred recreated the team as a mutant superhero celebrity group, one where team members died all the time so the team lived it up as much as they could. This new view of X-Force, which would be rechristened X-Statix when legal trouble with X-Force co-creator Rob Liefeld reared its ugly head, but it showed that X-Force could become something new. This led to the ultimate version of the team.
X-Force was recreated by Cyclops and Wolverine as the official black ops team of the reduced mutant race when the team had moved to San Francisco. Wolverine’s version of the team took the basics of the old team, and added a whole lot more violence to it. Wolverine’s team was a kill squad, and since then this has become the most popular conception of X-Force — Marvel tried to change the team again, bring back the original group, and most recently just put together a random team and christened them X-Force but it hasn’t worked. X-Force works best when its a group on the fringes, doing the work that no one else wants to do. They’ve grown remarkably over the years, and have earned their spot as one of the greatest Marvel teams ever.
The Defenders deserve all the love in the world. The team brought together Namor, Hulk, Doctor Strange, and the Silver Surfer as the “non-team”, a group of heroes who didn’t like each other and didn’t want to work together but somehow made it work. The Defenders proved rather popular, and soon created their own legacy. The Defenders became the home of Marvel characters that had nowhere else to go, like Beast, Gargoyle, Knighthawk, Iceman, Valkyrie, and many others, and gave readers some of the most underrated adventures in the publisher’s history. The New Defenders era of the team, when Beast brought together a new group, is outstanding as well, bringing the team to a new level.
Unfortunately, the Defenders’ status as Marvel’s non-team hurt them as the years went on and the X-Men, the Defenders, and Fantastic Four’s comics benefited from Marvel’s ’80s upswing in quality made them made popular. The Defenders disappeared. Marvel would try to bring them back as the Secret Defenders in the ’90s, but it wouldn’t work. They tried again in the ’00s, reuniting the original four members of the team under the Justice League International creative team of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire for miniseries that was outstanding but didn’t really lead anywhere. Readers got the Fearless Defenders next, which was a team of female superheroes that captured the spirit of the original Defenders. In recent years, the Defenders have returned for some brilliant cosmic stories by Al Ewing and Javier Rodriguez, showing just how great the team is.
The Defenders are honestly the most Marvel team ever. Their adventures captures the drama that have made Marvel superhero tales so unique. The team has mostly been solidly B-list, and helped give heroes that had nothing else to do a place to go. The Defenders are a great part of Marvel history, and a team that doesn’t get the kind of respect it deserves. However, they’re the best of the best.
What Marvel teams that aren’t the X-Men or Avengers do you like the most? Sound off in the comments below.
Marvel has created some amazing superheroes over the years, but what’s better than superheroes? Superteams, obviously. The first comic book superteam that set the stage for the rest came from DC Comics, when the publisher decided to put their best heroes together as the Justice Society of America. Marvel in the Golden Age would create Read More