10 best Avengers of all time

As I wait for the premiere of "The Avengers" movie, being a longtime fan of the comic book on which it's based, I’ve made a list of the top 10 members of Marvel Comics' premiere super team. There have been dozens of heroes that have come and gone, but here's the group that is tops in my book.

Reuters

1. Captain America

Steve Rogers was the United States’ super soldier during World War II. He volunteered for an experiment which gave him superhuman strength and agility. Armed with a near unbreakable shield, he battled the Axis of Evil. Towards the end of the war, he jumped onto a Nazi drone plane, and when the plane exploded, Cap was thrown into icy Arctic waters, where he was frozen for years until he was rescued by the Avengers. Despite being the weakest member, Cap quickly became the leader of the team. His leadership has guided the Avengers through many incarnations, the rock they all look up to.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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