Yesterday Newsarama ‘debuted’ an X-Men teaser for post-Second Coming, the latest in the X-universe shake-ups that have been prevalent for the last few years.

Of course, it would have been a more effective debut if the ad hadn’t shown up in some of last week’s Marvel Comics…

Anyway, also yesterday, Marvel released yet another ‘I am an Avenger’ teaser – this time spotlighting double-duty pulling Luke Cage in an outfit best described as minimalist – on the oddly named relaunched New Avengers:

That got me thinking: I wonder if there’s a concerted push to differentiate the Avengers and the X-Men these days at Marvel. After all, under Bendis the Avengers have become arguably the biggest franchise at the company, knocking the X-Men into second place – and you may have noticed that I’m not a huge fan of what’s going on in the X-books right now.

Still, I look at these ads and I see the collective ‘we are’ X-Men while ‘I am an’ Avenger. I suppose that’s the way it’s always been; the Avengers were originally formed of characters all strong enough to hold their own features due to the limitations placed on the number of comics the company could distribute at the time. The idea was if you like Thor, you might pick up Avengers in addition to Journey into Mystery and then would be tempted to check out Ant-Man and the Wasp in Tales to Astonish, or Iron Man in Tales of Suspense or so on.

That pretty much went out the window early on when Cap joined with #4 – his first Silver Age appearance after a dry run in with an impostor in the Human Torch feature in Strange Tales #114.

By the time Avengers #16 rolled around, Cap was the only member with a co-feature, but the limitations on the number of books had begun to ease, so it no longer needed to be the cross-pollinating book that it started out as, but the original idea is still right there in the masthead (or used to be back when every Marvel book came with a masthead):

And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes and heroines found themselves united against a common threat…

These guys aren’t a team, they’re a collection of individuals who get together to fight big threats.

The X-Men on the other hand have always been a team first, individuals second. The original roster’s closest thing to a breakout star was the Beast, who bounced into his own feature in Amazing Adventures, over a year after the X-Men were effectively canceled and put into reprints.

It wasn’t until the advent of the new team of X-Men that Wolverine became a hit character – and even then it would take an incredible amount of time after the book relaunched before he got his own mini series (7 years!) and even longer before he got his own ongoing (11 years!).

I think this distinction has been lost over the years, but when I see these ads I kind of hope it represents a refocusing on what always differentiated the two teams.

And, if at all possible, an end to this island nation nonsense…