Mid-Week Poll: Favorite ‘Avengers’ Character

The summer blockbuster season officially begins in earnest this Friday with the release of the highly-anticipated Marvel superhero team-up extravaganza ‘The Avengers’. As we wait for that, now seems like a good time to vote for our favorite ‘Avengers’ hero who will be appearing in the movie.

For the purposes of this poll, let’s try to limit our judgments about these characters to their portrayals in the existing Marvel live-action movies, and not include any previous incarnations in comic books, cartoons, etc. That might not be fair to poor Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who makes his first appearance in the new film, but I doubt that anybody planned to vote for him anyway (if I had to guess).

I hate to say it, but I’m actually not particularly excited for ‘The Avengers’. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I was never much into superhero comics as a kid. ‘G.I. Joe’ and ‘The Transformers’ were my thing. I never read an issue of ‘Batman’ or ‘Superman’ or ‘Spider-Man’, and the first time I’d ever even heard of ‘Iron Man’ was when the Robert Downey, Jr. movie came out. The other part of this is that most of the Marvel movies I’ve seen haven’t been very good.

I like ‘Iron Man’ (more so the first film than the second), and he gets my vote here, mostly for Robert Downey, Jr.’s very fun portrayal of the character. I’ve only seen the first ‘Hulk’ movie with Eric Bana, which obviously was pretty terrible, and a few scenes of the second with Edward Norton (which didn’t seem much better from what I watched). How the Mark Ruffalo version will fare remains to be seen.

Recently, I made a plan to rent a double-feature of ‘Thor’ and ‘Captain America’, but unfortunately VUDU only had the former available for purchase, not rental, so I only managed to see the latter. The praise that ‘Captain America’ has received from fanboys utterly mystifies me. I thought it was fairly awful.

I still plan to see ‘The Avengers’, probably in the theater, mainly because I want to support director Joss Whedon. I think it’s about time that he had a big success.

Anyway, I’ve included all four of the major heroes in the poll, along with some secondary characters such as Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury. Because I’m aware that a contingent of fans are obsessed with Clark Gregg’s tertiary character Agent Coulson, I’ve thrown him in as well, even though I don’t understand that fixation at all.

Who gets your vote?

Who Is Your Favorite 'Avengers' Character?

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16 comments

  1. HuskerGuy

    Ironman for me, but I was tempted to vote Black Widow just because ScarJo is so incredibly hot.

  2. I wouldn’t have thought this would be the case, but out of this slate of movies I like Thor the best, followed closely by Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man.

  3. Barsoom Bob

    I voted for Hulk. He is my favorite Marvel character since the days of the TV series that I used to watch every Friday night.

    I liked Ang Lee’s film. Well crafted, although the special effects weren’t really up to the task at that time. Trying to make a real adult villian, and sub text, instead of a comic book villian, did it in with the movie going public, but I enjoyed it more than the second which turned into a cartoon at the end.

    My attraction to Captain America was the period detail and not making the hero conflicted or a wise crack spewing hipster. The villian and his henchmen were totally uninspired but the hero’s journey carried the movie for me. We are having a very intense debate about the same thing over at thejohncarterfiles as to whether JC would have been better received if the hero had been a straight up hero, out of fashion now, instead of the conlicted reluctant hero that Andrew Stanton turned him into.

  4. lordbowler

    Hard choice between Iron Man and Captain America. But, I’ve got to go with the All-American Hero Captain America.

    When based solely on the movies, Iron Man wins hands-down!

  5. JM

    Agent Coulson, for the win!

    The only films I remotely like are Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk’ and ‘Iron Man 1.’

    I love Robert Downey, Jr., but ‘Iron Man’ is RDJ-lite. Needs more cowbell.

    They say Ruffalo Hulk totally steals ‘The Avengers,’ which makes perfect sense because if you give Joss Whedon a rage monster… shit gets mighty.

    And Scarlett Johannson’s hotness finally has a script to display her talents!

    100% of my anticipation for ‘The Avengers’ is Whedon-based, but at this point the thing that excites me the most is that he shot it 1.85:1!

      • JM

        Ruffalo went so emo in his motion-capture performance they’re paying him to hulk out in six more films.

        Which will probably be wasted unless they get Joss to direct them all.

  6. EM

    Because of Josh’s ground rules, I’m refraining from voting in the poll, since I haven’t seen most of the relevant movies and didn’t like what I did see (Iron Man and the beginning of Iron Man 2). If I were to go by the characters’ comics portrayals, I would have to go with Captain America, with Hawkeye as a close second, as both characters in general and Avengers in particular.

    Despite my usual apathy for comics-based movies, I am somewhat interested in The Avengers and might actually go to see it in the near future. If I do, perhaps I will vote in the poll after all.

  7. Jason

    Hawkeye does gets a few minutes of screen time in “Thor”, actually, though if memory serves I don’t think he is ever called by name.

    • Pretty sure Coulson calls him “Barton” in that particular scene, but that scene always made me laugh. How obvious it is that he’s about to grab a gun and then he must think, “Wait, duh. I’m Hawkeye,” and then grabs his bow. That part is just too silly.

  8. I voted Black Widow… I would probably say Tony Stark normally, but DAMN… Scarlett was… hmm… breathtaking lol! 😀

  9. Luke Hickman

    I think the results of this poll would change drastically is asked to viewers upon exiting The Avengers.