I really liked the book, I made a point of collecting the complete run and I really wish they'd stuck around longer. I think it would have gotten interesting if it had lasted long enough for them to develop the team a bit more (I know there were plans to add Black Goliath to the lineup).

The book always smacked to me of "Team books are selling, what heroes do we have available that aren't doing anything? Okay...throw them in a team book."

I think I've only read a couple of issues. They didn't impress me.

This was a concept that didn't have a concept. It was pointless, and it showed. The idea was simply, let's make a team book, and then they just threw in a bunch of random characters with no attempt to figure out chemistry, or have the team make any sense.

That's essentially because it was created by committee. Tony Isabella originally pitched a buddy road trip series - I guess kind of like GL/GA hard traveling heroes - with Iceman and Angel. Editorial then completely overhauled it into The Champions, saddling it with all sorts of arbitrary requirements.

Here's what Isabella had to say about the team's creation:

"my relative dislike of the Champions comes mostly from it not being the book I wanted to write. I pitched a “buddies on the road” series starring Iceman and the Angel. Sort of Route 66 with super-heroes. My original idea was trashed during a meeting with the editors that, in retrospect, was hilarious.

Imagine the then-writer of Fantastic FOUR telling me that a super-hero team had to have FIVE members. And then following that with equally insane proclamations like: every super-hero team needed a strong guy, every super-hero team needed a woman, and, finally, the utterly insane notion that every super-hero team needed one member who had his own title as well.

Given the editorial proclamations, I think I wrote some okay comic books for the series. But it was never the book I wanted it to be."

mysteryisland.net/tonyisabella

Tony wrote a little more about the Champs in his blog:

"The short version...I originally pitched the Champions as a “buddy book” starring the Angel and the Iceman, who has recently left the X-Men. It was Route 66 with mutants, just two good-looking heroes from different backgrounds traveling the country, meeting gorgeous young woman and helping people wherever they went. I thought that teaming the wealthy Warren Worthington with the middle-class Bobby Drake would be great fun.

After editorial edicts that every super-hero team had to have five members (like the Fantastic Four), that every super-hero team had to have someone with super-strength (Hercules), that every super-hero team had to have a woman (Black Widow) and that every super-hero team had to have at least one member who also had his own series (Ghost Rider), Marvel and me ended up with the Champions as they actually appeared in the comic books. I tried to make sense of this strange team and, though a great many readers have told me over the years how much they loved the series, I don’t believe I succeeded."

and

"When Len Wein laid down the commandment that every super-hero team needed a member who also had his own book, he suggested Luke Cage be added to the Champions. Which struck me as just about the worst choice for the position. For one thing, the Champions were located in Los Angeles and Cage was located in New York City. For another, I wasn’t writing Cage at the time and would have to coordinate any such move with Cage’s writer...and I was certain the writer would not want to uproot Luke from Manhattan, a position with which I was in absolute agreement.

I briefly considered Black Goliath, but I didn’t want to add Bill Foster to the team until his own title was more underway. It was always my intention to add him at a future date, which is why Black Goliath was also set in Los Angeles.

I went with Ghost Rider for the most devious of reasons. Since I was writing Ghost Rider, I knew I could keep Johnny Blaze so busy in his own book that his Champions appearances could be limited to the occasional storyline. Of course, I never gave that reason to Wein. Len was just pleased that I was obeying his new commandment."

tonyisabella.blogspot.com/search?q=Champions

I own the entire series, read it once, and have not really thoight about it since. The biggest problem, as others have mentioned, is that there is no reason these five characters should be on a team together, and as such, it is a disjointed mess.

I only read the first and final issues of The Champions, and neither impressed me in the least. CB nailed my feelings on the small bit that I read: