2012/01/14

Avengers Six: JARVIS!

And here we are at the end of my 6-day countdown. Big thanks to everyone who followed my blogs!
I thought I'd save the best for last, and so we now have the Avengers' venerable butler: Edwin Jarvis!


If there is one character in the Avengers' long history that truly deserves superstar status, it's this guy. After all, he's been there since day one and will probably be there until the very end. If he dies somewhere along the line, his death will be mourned by fans more than Captain America, the Wasp or any other Avenger who ever was.

From United They Stand. Notice the "A" logo on the jacket sleeve.

I take it back: You can take away everything on this list (including the Quinjet) and just leave Jarvis with the most unlikely group of heroes and you'd still have Earth's mightiest!
From Mighty Avengers 21. No mansion, no Quinjet, no big three. Still every bit the Avengers! (Jarvis is the one with the red scarf.)

I mentioned how some of the items on this list humanizes the Avengers, and none more so than Jarvis himself. After all, the Avengers is primarily an organization. Not a family. Not a school. Yet with Jarvis around, the team manages to find its heart.

From Ultimate Avengers
You can have the most powerful sorcerer or cosmic entity on your squad and still need Jarvis around. After all, who can a leader like Captain America turn to for advice about matters like team dynamics than the one person who has seen virtually every incarnation and lineup of the group since the beginning? When the fate of the world rests on your shoulders, who else can you turn to for just a little unburdening?


On of my favorite chapters in the I Am An Avenger anthology is this touching Jarvis / Wolverine story.



That's probably my only complaint with the Marvel movies and the current cartoon: Jarvis is reduced to an AI. I wonder who they would've gotten to play him in the movies if they choose to portray him as a real person. I bet that would've been a hard role to cast!

Even the Transformers know who to ask. From Lilformers.
This is part 6 of 6 in a series of blogs about what I think makes the Avengers.
Part 5: The Charter!
Part 4: The Communicard!
Part 3: The Quinjet!
Part 2: The Mansion!
Part 1: The Battle Cry!

4 comments:

  1. Regarding Jarvis as the recently portrayed AI, I theorize that it was done so to separate any comparison with DC's counterpart Alfred. Already Alfred was written as the Noble Badass, bringing down the bad guys with impeccable dignified style only Alfred can pull off. With Jarvis, any attempt to make him do so would conjure fan comparison, and I would envision that as being one sided and unfair to Jarvis.

    If anything, Jarvis would probably be considered more hardworking than Alfred, considering Alfred has only one dysfunctional super hero to take care of, as with Jarvis with five to ten socially inadequate ones. Any human being at that point would quit. But since this is comics, it can be done. However, turning Jarvis into an AI makes him a proper godlike entity: he controls everything in the mansion, talks to everyone simultaneously, takes all requests, and at the end of day properly defrags his virtual brain to cope with the issues of the next day. And his deadpan humor along with his semi-monotone voice serves him well.

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  2. (Take a stab at telling that to the Bush organization). Everything is energy! Recollect Tesla curls. Putlockers

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  3. Joss Whedon and Jason Aaron have endeavored to unequivocally foster characters like Cyclops and Wolverine. Could all that be reduced assuming the X-Men line rebooted? Soap2day

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  4. What makes Magneto so lethal isn't simply his capacity to control any sort of metal in presence, remembering the iron for our blood. Yet, it's the reason that he battles for. Goojara

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