My favorite Avengers team was also back in the Silver Age and usually sans the Big Three (well, Thor and Iron Man). It's the line-up just before yours, when the Avengers core line-up consisted of Hank, Jan, Hawkeye, Pietro, and Wanda, with Cap coming and going, and Herc and Black Widow making regular appearances.

I think I prefer solo titles that have well-developed and stable supporting casts more than team titles. I've been reading a lot of Thor and Daredevil recently, and the early dynamic in both books was only possible due to the world created by the supporting cast in each. For Thor, it was not only Jane Foster but also the entirety of the Asgardians, while for DD, you had Foggy and Karen; they were all three-dimensional characters with their own issues and challenges. Spider-Man always had a strong supporting cast, as did Cap; it was "their" book, but what made it interesting, to me at least, were their interactions with the people in their lives that weren't part of the superhero business.

I do like old team titles, like X-Men and Avengers and Excalibur, because they felt organic and the characters were together with a sense of purpose. Team titles today have become, IMO, too bloated with characters that there is never any development. X-Men lost me as a real fan (even though I kept buying it for years afterwards) when they split into the Blue and Gold teams, as the idea that there were two separate groups of X-Men at the mansion bugged me. The recent incarnations of the Avengers are nothing more than All-Star teams, designed to drive sales rather than to tell any type of character-driven story; it always seemed like Cap, Tony, and Thor actually "liked" each other (as much as fictional characters could), while recent lineups of Wolverine, Spidey, and others seemed thrown together because the writer decided it would be cool to have all of those big guns on the same team.

And later on I think series like Wolfman's ToD and especially Moench's MoKF took the strong supporting concept to another level, where the cast as a whole was nearly as significant as the ostensible lead.

I also like ensemble series like the Eternals, where, once again, it's the entire cast rather than any single character that's important, though the focus might shift to a particular individual or sub-set for particular stories.

I haven't read enough new comics to say much about how they work. My impression is similar to what you say about the recent Avengers here but that impression is based on very little so I should really reserve judgement. I do plan to give some of those comics a try one of these days.

Those were some of my favourites, particularly MTIO. For some reason, the Thing works really well in team-ups with pretty much anyone. I think the Starhawk/Moondragon/Adam warlock three parter was probably the highest point of a very good run, for me.

All depends on what era of JLA you are talking though-The early Silver Age Gardner Fox stories were broken into chapters where each chapter often featured only one or two members of the JLA teaming up to solve a particular aspect of the plot conflict, with each chapter featuring a different team up, then all gathering in the final chapter for resolution. It was the same formula Fox had used for much of the JSA stories in All-Star. The team up books like Brave & Bold, MTU amd MTIO are very much the successor to that formula of story-telling, without the climatic big group chapter at the end. Once you get past the early Silver Age JLA though, yes you're right, the scale of the kind of story being told with cast size definitely changes.

-M