This week’s episode of She-Hulk, “Mean, Green, and Straight Poured Into These Jeans,” sees Jen’s best friend and paralegal Nikki (Ginger Gonzaga) trying to find a designer who can make Jen a wardrobe that will fit both her human and Hulk bodies. Nikki’s task takes her and her colleague Pug (Josh Segarra) to a boba tea shop that’s a front for a superhero haute couture house, but she and Pug get waylaid when the shop owner tries to sell them a bunch of bootleg Avengers stuff instead of taking them to the designer.
You can’t put the name “Avengers” on a knockoff T-shirt without risking Tony Stark’s estate coming at you with a lawsuit though, so the boba guy improvises. Thus, the Avongers (and the Avingers) are born.
Apparently, the Avongers lineup includes Holk, Thur, Iron Person, and Hawkguy. All the characters have slight differences to skirt around copyright issues. Thur carries a shovel, Holk is purple and has a mustache, Hawkguy has a little hawk’s talon at the end of one of his arrows, and the knock-off Captain America (Commander America? Corporal Amurica? I’m just spitballing here) has an eagle on his shield.
Marvel, never a company to miss out on an opportunity for marketing synergy, changed the real Twitter profile and tagline for the Avengers into the Avongers, “Earth’s Toughest Heroes,” as soon as the new episode started streaming on Thursday.
And, of course, fans were quick to produce fan art of the new team-up!
She-Hulk‘s marketing campaign has been very immersive, with bus ads promoting the fictional law firm GLK&H and Titania taking to real social media platforms to be obnoxious. It’s a lot of fun to feel like your favorite Marvel stuff is coming to life, even if it leaves you feeling like you’ve eaten too much dessert but there’s more on your plate and you keep shoveling it in. Oof, I love it, make it stop.
No word on officially licensed Avongers merch yet—and yes, I realize how silly “officially licensed bootleg merch” sounds. Predictably, though, you can get the bootleg stuff if you look for it! We’re living in an infinite prism of bootlegs of bootlegs! Soon we can all walk around like Nikki and Pug, rocking our Avongers shirts and shields and hammers. You’ll never see Avengers stuff at a con again—it’s all Avongers from now on.
Let’s hear it for Earth’s Toughest Heroes!
(featured image: Marvel/Disney+)
