#i really don't think of myself as a marvel fan but i got some receipts huh

[whetstonefires]

Why do you think Kamala Khan, Miles Morales and Sam Alexander were given their own Teen Titans-equivalent team (the Champions) rather than simply having them join the Young Avengers, who were already popular in their own right?

Bunch of reasons!

Age bracket. Miles and Kamala were introduced in their early teens and had reached their mid teens when the Champions were formed; Young Avengers were by this point college aged.

Tone. The Young Avengers had a long sprawling soap-opera type team history that encouraged relatively meandering interpersonal drama focused storylines, where the team was often its own biggest problem to a higher degree than is usually true of superhero teams. Champions ran to a much faster, punchier narrative that could be fit around the fact that some members had other books they were mains in. And their concept was to do cleaner heroing less tied down by baggage than the Avengers, who'd just shat themselves spectacularly with Civil War II, while the Young Avengers are literally a team about baggage despite none of them initially being real legacy heroes or even having met the Avengers they were riffing on.

Geography. Miles is from Brooklyn and Kamala is from Jersey City and afaik the Champions operated primarily around the greater metro area. It would be weird to write the Young Avengers like that, but disruptive to find a way to keep involving those two when the story didn't stay put. Sam didn't have this limitation, and neither did Viv or afaik Amadeus, but they weren't the big draws.

Marketing. The point of putting Miles and Kamala in the same book, with other heroes their age, is they're the hot new thing people are into, in particular people who were not already part of the Comic Book Purchasing demographic. Young Avengers content is catered foremost to nerds who have been engaged with comics for 20 years; Champions was meant to work as an entry-level title.

Related to all of the above, writing logistics would have been such a pain, trying to satisfy multiple audiences with different stakes in the title and allow Miles and Kamala to headline while also being the babies of a group where they didn't really fit in. Awful idea. Editorial was so correct.

In summary: Did you ever see that short Titans run I believe just after Flashpoint, where DC put Damian on a team mainly staffed with characters from the NTT era for nostalgia cred, so you know people around Dick's age cohort, and had Damian lead it and made characters like Beast Boy happy about being micromanaged by this rude little twerp? Unreadable.

My question was how Marvel had the balls to launch the Champions into a market where they also had a teen-team-style West Coast Avengers book out, the new Wasp running an all-girl team, and a new Runaways book. Actually idk which came first but that's not the point. Like four very different narratives being done but it was still four youth team titles at once, way to splinter your base. Was Disney just running tests on market saturation?