The Avengers First-Look - An Exercise in Bad Photoshop

UPDATE: Now with non-shitty/non-photoshop pictures of the actors and helmer/geek god Joss Whedon on set in laughing and action-figure posing mode (in green-screen too!) Also via EW and seeing all this still doesn't muster up much of a reaction from me. I am a DC guy after all...

I want you kids to close your eyes, clear your mind and think back to when you first saw how Rooney Mara was going to look as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Andrew Garfield as the new Spider-Man and Henry Cavill as the new Superman. Those first-looks of them in character looked great, didn't they?

Now open your eyes to a big surprise this morning. Marvel/Disney has dropped our first glimpse of The Avengers, the big superhero team-up shindig that opens the 2012 summer movie season next May, in the latest issue of EW.

It looks pretty shitty, doesn't it? The wonders of bad photoshop at work here with those always-weird looking necks attached to the actor's heads and Marc Ruffalo playing Derek Zoolander as Bruce Banner.

Way to make a great first impression, fellas. For the first time (in quite awhile), it looks like Warner Brothers/DC might have bested Marvel at something.