Sal Buscema

The sixth Avengers omnibus covers the conclusion of Englehart's run, centered on the Celestial Madonna storyline — one of the most ambitious Bronze Age Marvel narratives, weaving Mantis's mysterious origin through past, present, and future while simultaneously resolving the Swordsman's arc with his death in combat. Englehart used the Vision and the Scarlet Witch's relationship as the emotional spine of the era, building toward their eventual marriage in a standalone special that remains one of Marvel's most unusual romantic narratives.

Steve Englehart's Avengers run is the most politically sophisticated in the team's history — he used the book as a direct commentary on the Watergate era, with the Secret Empire storyline revealing a vast government conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of power, a conclusion so resonant with contemporary events that Marvel editorial forced Englehart to leave the outcome implicit. The Avengers-Defenders War gave way to something more psychologically complex: Englehart's Avengers were a team operating in a country whose institutions were actively corrupt.

The fourth Avengers omnibus continues Roy Thomas's era into the period of the legendary Avengers-Defenders War — the first major inter-title crossover in Marvel history, where the two teams were manipulated into fighting each other by Loki and Dormammu across eight issues spanning both books. The crossover established the template for Marvel's event publishing model and proved that interconnected storytelling across separate titles could work as a commercial and narrative strategy.