#Marvel ##Marvel Movie##Marvel Comics##Headline Creation Challenge#Mention the first Avenger of the Marvel Universe, and one is likely to think of Steve Rogers' Captain America. However, this question does not have a definitive answer as you might think.
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The Avengers plan was the idea of Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, before being promoted to Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. To provide greater protection for the world against threats from around the globe and elsewhere, Fury sought to assemble a team of super-powered and highly skilled personnel as an emergency response unit. Since its founding in 1965 by Peggy Carter and Howard Stark, S.H.I.E.L.D. has dealt with superpowers and has demonstrated awareness of advanced technology and supernatural objects.
Fury enjoyed a long and illustrious career in the U.S. government, serving as a colonel in the U.S. Army before serving as a CIA agent before joining S.H.I.E.L.D. As a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, Fury meets Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in 1995 and learns about the greater threat from extraterrestrial forces to Earth and its people. Fury, who has spent most of his life protecting citizens from enemy threats, decides to aggressively pursue the Avengers program and build an index of potential recruits for the team. Now, considering that Chris Evans' Steve Rogers disappeared in the ocean, no one expected him to survive since 1945, and S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't officially formed until 20 years later, and Fury's initiative only became clearer 50 years after Rogers' disappearance, and he didn't recover until 2011, it's clear that Steve wasn't the first to be officially recruited.
What inspired the Avengers' action?
Similarly, although Carol Danvers was the main inspiration for the program, and the call sign "Avenger" when she served in the U.S. Air Force was included in the program's code name, she was not an official member of Fury's team. Carol chooses to return to outer space and use her powerful powers to help the citizens of every world, while leaving Fury with a special pager to call her if he needs her help. With neither the original Super Soldier nor Captain Marvel able to join the team, Fury began his search and didn't see real progress until he was promoted to Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and focused resources on the project.
There were other early influential hero teams that may have given Fury a reason to believe that there were some heroes with incredible abilities who could form the Avengers. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) worked closely with the U.S. military, eventually working with Howard Stark and S.H.I.E.L.D. to develop Pym particle technology. One of his colleagues, Bill Foster (Lawrence Fishburne), has also been working on a related project codenamed "Goliath". Pym and his wife Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) served on the battlefield as the prototype of Ant-Man and Wasp. These incredible minds, along with early innovators, such as Abraham Erskine, the inventor of the super-soldier serum, were at the forefront of bringing humanity into a new age and developing forces that might support Fury's belief that the initiative to rally extraordinary figures into the Avengers was feasible.
The first Avenger
There are two candidates who can be considered the initial members of the team, one is Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), aka Black Widow, and the other is Clint Barton, played by Jeremy Renner, aka Hawkeye. None of them have literal superpowers, but their abilities in combat, weapons handling, espionage, and intelligence are at the highest level physically possible, making them perfect candidates for proactive strikes. Hawkeye became an agent for S.H.I.E.L.D. after being recruited by Fury in 2004 and was tasked with convincing Black Widow to help him fight the Red Chamber, which trains young women to become killers. They all became highly respected and trusted agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and played a major role in recruiting the Avengers as other superheroes also entered S.H.I.E.L.D. vision.
However, neither Hawkeye nor Black Widow were full members of the Avengers in the early stages. Like Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), they are assigned to learn more about potential candidates, but strictly speaking, Coulson himself is not an Avenger. The next possible number one Avenger is Iron Man Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). Coulson appears in both Iron Man and Iron Man 2, discussing the plan with the capricious Stark. At the end of Iron Man, Fury also appears at Stark's high-tech home to discuss the plan, which heavily hints that Tony may be recruited. However, we do see in Iron Man 2 that Stark is considered too volatile and unreliable to play the role of advisor.
Avengers collection
Stark's influence (and immense wealth) continues to help form the Avengers and find other possible members, and when the Chitauri invaded with Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in The Avengers, Stark was the first to be introduced and officially part of the team. There is also a scene in the end credits of The Incredible Hulk that shows that Stark played an important role in forming the Avengers before the Avengers took place, which seems to coincide with the short film Advisor S.H.I.E.L.D., where Coulson revealed that Stark was sent to stop Ross's intention to get Emil Bronski into the League. This provided an aid to the continuity error created by the timeline between Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and The Incredible Hulk, but it also cemented Stark's involvement in the program and his willingness to work with S.H.I.E.L.D.
In the end, the "Avengers" movie seems to be the first time that the entire team has been fully assembled, and every member has officially enlisted. This makes it difficult to determine who the first Avenger is, as agents such as Hawkeye and Black Widow change their roles to become Avengers, and Stark upgrades from his status as an advisor. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) was also recruited by Black Widow in the movie, who rescued him from hiding after the events of The Incredible Hulk.
Captain America, who was rescued from ice and thawed in 2011, has the potential to become the first Avenger as he wakes up in a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility and continues to serve the U.S. government. S.H.I.E.L.D. is aware of his extraordinary abilities and illustrious career, and his training may have been purely for him to lead the charge when the Avengers were formed, which is exactly what happened when Loki appeared on Earth to conquer humanity. Thor (Chris Hemsworth), like Danvers, is committed to taking on alien responsibilities, but his brother's antics get him to Earth in time to join the Avengers and defeat the invasion of the Chitauris.