Hickman's Avengers Recap Pt 4
Welcome to the fourth and final part of this gargantuan recap of Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers books. Sorry that this is dropping after the first issue of Secret Wars, but they’ve been a lot of work.
In Part 1 we covered the first arcs of Avengers and New Avengers that build-up to Infinity, in Part 2 we discussed the Infinity event itself, and Part 3 covered the remaining separate arcs of both Avengers titles before they started crossing over full-time.
This is the biggest one yet, so make sure you use the LIKE button to save it for when you’ve got time to read the whole thing. Now, lets get stuck into it one last time.
Background Knowledge
Developments in the 616 Universe
When we next meet up with the Avengers time has skipped forward by eight months, and a lot has happened in that time period. The Avengers and New Avengers books are at the forefront of the Marvel timeline during this story, so pretty much anything goes. Some of the changes are supposed to be surprises, but others we know about because they took place in other books.
In Original Sin, Nick Fury said something to Thor that made him no longer ‘worthy’. He could no longer hold Mjolnir so he had to leave his hammer where it fell, on the moon. In Jason Aaron’s Thor, an (at the time) unknown female picks up the hammer and is given the powers and appearance of an Asguardian god. Our Thor starts calling himself Odinson (to avoid confusion) and he uses his axe Jarnborn and a metal ‘destroyer’ arm.
In Remender’s Captain America series, Steve Rogers has the super-soldier formula drained out of him. This ages him considerably and makes him somewhat frail (depending on the artist). In Nick Fury’s absence he take on a commanding role at SHIELD and leads the SHIELD Avengers. From this position he wages his war on the Illuminati.
Catching up with the Ultimate Universe
The Ultimate version Reed Richards will play a key role towards the end of Time Runs Out, so it’s worth knowing a bit about him first. He was basically a younger version of the Reed we know until Bendis wrote the Ultimate Doom Trilogy, where he basically turned evil and tried to kill everyone to protect his identity. He was ultimately foiled and left stranded in the negative zone.
Hickman then started playing with the character in his short-lived run on the Ultimates the Ultimates book for about a year. In his short-lived run he gave Reed Richards a couple of things, a city in a time bubble that he used to build a highly advanced society over hundreds of years (he seems to be immortal), and a massive elongated head to fit in all his extra brains.
Some time later Reed earned his way back into the good graces of Nick Fury when he shrank his head back down and helped save the world in the Cataclysm storyline, when the Ultimates had to fight Galactus from the 616 after he came through a rip in the fabric of space-time at the end of Age of Ultron. But he’s still a megalomaniac and he’s been doing stuff behind Fury’s back ever since.
The Beyonder
The last thing you should probably have a working knowledge of is the original Secret Wars, which was really the first Marvel event book. The idea was that a very powerful being known as The Beyonder created a planet called Battleworld and populated it with a large amount of heroes and villains to see who would ultimately win.
All you really need to take from this is that The Beyonder had the power to shape universes, similar to Franklin Richards in a lot of respects. We’ve only seen The Beyonder once over the last few years, when he appeared in Bendis’ Illuminati mini-series on the approach to Secret Invasion.
The Illuminati found him on a planetoid in an asteroid belt, happily playing in a recreated Manhattan with Superheroes he’d conjured from nothing. He’s child like in this story and The Illuminati think that his powers come from being both an Inhuman AND a mutant. They give him a talking to but ultimately end up leaving him be, so he’s still out there somewhere.
Time Runs Out
There are a lot of moving parts in this story, the entire cats of both Avengers books and several new characters. I’ve tried to break down each storyline into chunks and bring them together at the appropriate times rather than do the recap piecemeal. There are now four main factions; The SHIELD Avengers lead by Steve Rogers, the independent ‘New’ Avengers lead by Sunspot, The Illuminati, the Cabal and Doctor Doom.
The Cabal and Doctor Doom
Namor meets with Doctor Doom in Latveria and comes clean about the Incursions and tells him that the Cabal have been working keep their Earth alive by destroying the others. The Cabal are taking great pleasure in these acts but Namor has lost his appetite for it and wants to recruit Doom as his ally, but Doom refuses as he feels Namor is no longer the man he knew, and he clearly doesn’t know as much about the Incursions as Doom already does…
We see that he’s had scientists hard at work studying the fragment of the other earth from the incursion in Latveria. They’ve figured out that it is broadcasting like a beacon to the Mapmakers, and have been able to map the multiverse using the transmission its sending out. We also see that he has Molecule Man with him, who Doom refers to as a necessary piece. They found Molecule Man because his frequency is exactly the same as the one the Mapmaker artefact is emitting.
Molecule Man is helping Doom somehow, and his true nature won’t become entirely clear until the very end, but there is some foreshadowing at this early point with Molecule Man saying that he is becoming more and more mentally unstable as there are less of him now. Doom asks him to stop focusing on the universes ending, and start considering how everything began in the first place. In answer to his question Molecule Man decides to show Doom rather than tell him, and teleports him away.
They arrive in white space at the location of the first dead universe, Molecule Man tells him that part of him used to live here and they need to travel backwards to see what truly happened. Doom builds a time machine and they tunnel back in time… we’ll catch up with them next at the end of the story.
The SHIELD Avengers hunting the Illuminati
The Illuminati now consists of Amadeus Cho, Brian Braddock, Beast, Reed Richards and Doc Green (an Intelligent version of Hulk), Tony Stark, Doctor Strange, Black Bolt and Hank Pym (who apparently joined at some point) are MIA. They’re off the grid, moving from location to location and just arrived at a new base; the underground city beneath Rome from Hickman’s SHIELD series.
Amadeus Cho is infiltrating Avengers Tower (which has been repurposed as a SHIELD base). He’s in the process of stealing some of Tony’s weapon plans off the mainframe and transmitting them back to the Illuminati when SHIELD’s Avengers team (lead by Sue Richards) intercepts him and captures him. Luckily Cho was able to transmit the files they wanted and not the Illuminati have the schematics for the Dyson Sphere Tony was building (Sol’s Hammer).
The Black Panthers try to infiltrate Wakanda, which is now abandoned except for the Cabal who still keep their planet destroying bombs in the City of the Dead. The Cabal are busy with an incursion so they think they’ll have some time, but Maximus and Proxima Midnight have stayed behind and prevent the Panthers from doing any damage. T'Challa translocates back to the Illuminati but Shuri sacrifices her life to give him enough time to escape.
The SHIELD Avengers follow the translocator signal to Rome but by the time they arrive the Illuminati have already moved on. Steve tells Sue Richards he feels she has proven herself to be loyal even though they’re chasing down her husband, he lets her in on everything they know about the Illuminati’s movements. We also find out that Black Widow and Spider-Woman are MIA at the moment.
Sue then covertly meets Reed and we see that she is acting as a mole for him, she also refers to something Reed did to Franklin that he is still recovering from (which we see more of later) and gives him a note from Val who tells him there’s no way to win, the universe will end and he needs to figure out a way not to lose. This is strangely similar to Doctor Doom’s way of thinking (which we also find out more about later.
We find out that Tony has been captured by the Cabal, he’s being kept in the same prison Black Swan was held inside for so long. She visits him regularly and Tony reveals that he knows she has been trying to find a place to regrow her family from DNA samples (if you remember we found out in a flashback that she took a sample from her dead brother and lost the key to the Library of Worlds.
Black Widow and Spider-Woman infiltrate Necropolis and talk to Tony, they tell him that they know he had a falling out with the other Illuminati and that he arranged a Secret Meeting with Steve to try to bury the hatchet, but it didn’t go well. They say they left the SHIELD Avengers because Steve is too righteous for the situation they’re in, but that Tony is equally wrong in his approach. They will only free him if he admits it, but he sticks with his convictions and they leave him in the Cabal’s custody. After that they head over to Sunspot to join his team…
The New Avengers
Sunspot performed a hostile takeover of AIM and now runs AIM island, he recruits Canonball to help, who is now living on the Shi'ar homeworld and has a child with Izzy. The Zebra-children have grown up and they’re working with AIM to build a portal to the other side of the Multiverse so that Hyperion and Thor can travel through, but there are a couple of other interested parties that want to go with them.
Ex Nihili have noticed that that stars are dying prematurely, another symptom of the universe dying. Abyss realises the centre of this is Earth so they travel there to see what can be done to stop it. Starbrand and Nightmask are also in space, dealing with an Aleph that seems to have come through from another universe, they also head to Earth to meet up with Sunspot. Together with Hyperion and Thor, they all travel through the portal
The universes that make-up the Multiverse are stacked on top of each other (or side-by-side) and that stack is being compressed. The 616 Universe lies at one end of the stack, and the start of the Incursions is at the other. This might explain why some Earth’’s in the multiverse have known about them for so much longer (Black Swan was a child when she first experienced an incursion). The portal AIM developed is designed to throw this team to the other end of the multiverse where the incursions began so they can attack the cause of the problem, Rabum Alal, The Great Destroyer.
Sunspot reveals to the rest of the team that he also has an insider in the Illuminati camp; Beast. We learn that he visited Cyclops at the Weapon X base, which he now calls Nation X. He has Sentinels standing guard and reveals to Bobby that he has a Phoenix Egg and intends to hatch it should all else fail, using the Phoenix’s life-giving power to save the universe. While there he met with Beast who told him all about the Illuminati’s plans to take out the cabal.
By this time Natasha and Jessica have arrived and conversely reveal with SHIELD Avengers plans to defeat the Illuminati with overwhelming resources Steve Rogers has been keeping up his sleeve. The New Avengers are of the view that their friends need to stop fighting each other and work together on the real threat.
Also with Sunspots team of New Avengers is the planetary defence robot that AIM hatched and then recaptured after it defeated the Avengers. Sunspot pulls it back out of the white space and gives it purpose, it now calls itself Pod. Turns out when the origin bomb containing Pod landed, the suit enveloped a young girl who has been inside it all along. We also learn that Shang Chi visited the self-replication origin bomb site at some point and submitted to it, causing an army of Shang Chi’s to be born around him.
When we catch up with Hyperion, Thor and Co (The Multiversal Avengers) we see they have found the Temple of the Black Priests, which exists in the white space of destroyed universes, just like the Mapmakers home city. Thor is able to wield Thorr’s hammer now that he is Unworthy, and uses it to fight the Black Priests to a standstill. As they start getting the upper hand the leader of the Priests reveals himself to be Doctor Strange.
He explains that the Black Priest’s purpose is to destroy earth’s to prevent both universes from being destroyed, he compares this to Triage and refers to them as surgeons of the Multiverse. He goes on to say that both the Ivory Kings and Rabum Alal (The Great Destroyer) seem to be working against each other, but to the same purpose; the early death of everything. The Black Priests have also decided to tackle this problem head on, so they take one target each.
The Illuminati vs SHIELD Avengers vs New Avengers
The pieces start coming together as Reed purposefully initiates a translocation, drawing the SHIELD Avengers to their location in a helicarrier. As a battle ensues between the two teams the New Avengers turn up and send the army of Shang Chi’s to disable the helicarrier. The brain-damaged version of Hulk from the other universe is deployed to deal with Doc Green, and Steve travels down to have a face-to-face with the Illuminati.
Each team is turning over their cards; just when things are looking bleak Steve plays his last one and the Mighty Avengers join the battle. When the scales start to shift Reed shows his own hand; Sue Storm traps the SHIELD Avengers in force fields and shows her true allegiance, but they have another ace up their sleeve in the form of Namor and Black Bolt who are both with the Iluminati as well.
As they clearly have the upper hand, Steve agrees to parlay with the Illuminati. They tell him about their plan to end the Cabal and Steve says he will co-operate on the condition that they all hand themselves in afterwards (which everyone but Black Panther agree to). Reed timed all this to coincide with a blue incursion so that the Cabal were off-world and the Avengers wouldn’t have a problem with destroying the planet they were on. The plan to use an AIM designed shield to trap them on the other planet when it detonates.
Namor goes with the Cabal to set the bomb, then flees to the shield platform which floats between the planets. When he arrives he finds Black Panther, and they finally have their confrontation. Panther stabs him and Black Bolt shouts FAREWELL, knocking him back to the dead Earth. They then activate the shield and the planet detonates a short time later, apparently ending the Cabal.
Now that they’re on the same team Reed brings the Avengers up to date on the various ways they tried to solve the incursion problem over the last eight months, including putting Franklin in some kind of machine and harnessing his powers, but they all failed and Franklin was injured in some way as a result. He’s been using the Bridge to predict incursions and noticed that the number of universes recently reduced from thousands to 22. The good news is that Earth 616 will miss all the following incursions except for the last one.
External Threats
We catch up with Ultimate Reed Richards and Nick Fury, who is rebuilding SHIELD and wants Reed to help by creating contingency plans for any potential doomsday threats. Once they’re apart we see that Reed is still using the AI from the City, and he’s fully aware of the incursions. He’s been handling them himself in secret and so far he’s destroyed sixty-seven alternate Earths, the City tells him about the recent mass-destruction of the multiverse, leaving only 22 surviving. Their next incursion will be in two days.
Ultimate Reed travels to the incursion site two days later and finds it’s a blue incursion, this turns out to be the same planet that the Cabal were trapped on, and the two incursions happened at the same time. The Cabal flee to this other earth just before the dead planet explodes, and they are met by Ultimate Reed when they land
Hank Pym returns from the mission he’s been on; he was sent out into the Multiverse eight months ago in a similar way to Thor and Hyperion. He was charged with finding Rabum Alal but instead he found the Ivory Kinds, otherwise known as The Beyonders. He explains that the Beyonder we’ve met before is only a ‘child-unit’, programmed to imitate the creatures it interacts with, and the Beyonders are actually a multiversal race of creatures that have the powers to bend universes at their whim.
He watched as they destroyed the Celestials across multiple universes, then other conceptual beings that have been around since the Multiverse existed; Eternity, Infinity et al, and eventually The Living Tribunal. You don’t need to know much about these beings, but if the Beyonders are capable of killing them then they’re basically the most powerful things in all of reality.
We saw that the Living Tribunal was dead in New Avengers issue 8 but we’re only just finding out why, fortunately though his body won’t go to waste as Reed decides to use it as the hull of a lifeboat he’s building. This idea came from Val when he told him he needs to figure out a way not to lose, and that is to build a ship that can keep a small population alive after the final two universes collide.
Meanwhile the Shi'ar have realised the multiverse is contracting, as their are symptoms of it throughout space (like the dying stars mentioned earlier). They now know that Earth is at the centre of the problem and along with the rest of the Galactic Council they decide to destroy the planet. They get the full armada together and head towards Earth in force.
Battling Beyonders and Revealing Rabum Alal
The Multiversal Avengers have been travelling through universes using Nightmasks powers, but every time he uses them he regresses in age, a symptom of the broken system that created him. They find an universe with a shattered Earth the Mapmakers had mined and access the data held in a dying Mapmaker, this leads them to another universe where the Beyonders are present.
We also get some hints that universes will die even if their Earth is destroyed during an incursion, it seems this doesn’t save the universe at all, it only slows its death. The Universes are dying anyway, like the stars in the 616 that are prematurely going into Supernova, so by the end there will be nothing left regardless of however many Earth’s have been sacrificed.
Anyway, the Multiversal Avengers find a fissure in space-time and two Beyonders come out. The combined Ex-Nihilii and Abyss are able to transform one into a tree using their fantastic gardening powers but sacrificing their lives in the process. Then Starbrand is wounded and loses containment of his powers causing him to detonate but taking out the second one in the process.
As the only two survivors, Thor and Hyperion discuss what to do next, but before they can decide a whole army of Beyonders comes at them. Thor tries to pick up Thorr’s hammer but he finds he is no longer unworthy. They attack with all they have, knowing they will surely die in the process, and we see them become overwhelmed by a wave of Beyonders.
Since we last saw them the Black Priests have been hunting down Rabum Alal by looking for a door to the library of worlds (most universes with doors have been destroyed). The eventually find one and use the key one of them took off the Black Swan a long time ago. Doctor Strange leads them inside and they’re soon ambushed by the Black Swans.
They kill everyone except Strange, as Rabum Alal has asked for him to be bought before him. The Swans take him deeper into the Library and to a mysterious figure that turns out to be Doctor Doom. This is an older version of Doom, the one that travelled back in time with Molecule Man some time ago.
In the final issue of New Avengers we learn what happened in the intervening period. We’re told that Molecule Man is a universal constant, every universe has an identical one and they have a sort of shared consciousness. They travel back in time to the origin of the Molecule Man from the first universe to be destroyed, that starts the cascading effect on the multiverse and the incursions to begin.
When they arrive our Molecule Man kills the other one, and explains to Doom that he has to go around killing the other versions of him, because the Beyonders made him to be a time bomb and plan to destroy all universes at once by detonating all the Molecule Men at the same time. The only chance of preventing the death of everything is to cause the early death of ALMOST everything. Doom plans to save a fragment of reality by sacrificing the rest.
The problem is that every time one of them dies, the remaining ones get incrementally more mad, so after a while our Molecule Man won’t be much help. The premature death of Molecule Men causes the Multiverse to contract, but it takes 7 years of killing for the first incursion to happen.
Doom can’t do it all on his own as there are near infinite universes and he only has 25 years until D-day, so he starts a religion and recruits the Black Swans. They move into the Library of Worlds, which was built by the Beyonders ages ago when they were still interested in observing life, from this place Doom can’t be observed by the Beyonders because it exists outside of reality.
The Beyonders realise something is wrong, so send a virus into reality that infects any A.I. capable of travelling through the multiverse. This is what altered AIM’s Adaptoids into Mapmakers, who are programmed to seek out universes where Molecule Man have been killed to try to track down the root cause.
As time goes on Doom realises that if the Beyonders were capable of time travel as he is, they would have just gone back in time and prevented Doom from starting this plan. Thinking them vulnerable he decides to launch an all-out attack on the same time-space fracture where Thor and Hyperion sacrificed themselves, this action results in the death of thousands of universes at once, and the outcome for Doom, Strange and the Beyonders is left ambiguous.
The Final Confrontations
The Galactic Armada arrive at Earth and as a thank you for their help during Ininity, Gladiator gives humanity two hours to make their peace before they are destroyed. The Illuminati free Tony from his cage, and the Avengers use all the weapons they’ve developed or acquired during the ongoing story to destroy the Armada; the Planetkiller ship they captured from the Builders during Infinity, a thermal weapon AIM created, and the Rogue Planet combined with Sol’s Hammer (which takes a chunk out of the moon in the process).
Black Panther informs the White House that the world is going to end in six hours and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it. Meanwhile Ultimate Reed Richards has a similar meeting with Nick Fury. He introduced the Cabal, who tell him that if they are going to have any hope of surviving they need to destroy the greatest heroes in the world, so they gear up for war.
Reed, Val and the others finish their work on the lifeboat and there are some discussions over who will be getting a seat on it. Steve is adamant that Tony won’t be allowed to survive as he doesn’t deserve to after the things he’s done.
We finally get to see the sit-down between Tony and Steve that sent them down such different paths. They meet at a diner and their waitress is Tamara,, the alter-ego of Captain Universe. Tony found her daughter and helped her integrate back into society. As they argue Captain Universe takes over and blows them both through the wall in a rage, she’s still dying and frustrated that they aren’t doing anything about it.
In the present, Steve hunts down Tony for one final battle. This is a grudge match over Tony lying to everyone about the true purpose of the Avengers Machine they started in issue 1. Steve thought it was an idealogical decision, but Tony just wanted to use it to deal with the normal threats while the Illuminati dealt with the incursions in secret. As Tony admits the lie but says he wouldn’t do anything differently, the incursion begins and a helicarrier from the Ultimate universe crashes into a building over their heads.
Secret Wars begins at this point, opening with the war between the Ultimate and Regular Marvel universes in Manhattan. I’m sorry that this has been a much longer recap than normal, but there are lots of details coming together and no real filler in this story. It’s difficult to know exactly what is going to play into Secret Wars, but knowing Hickman it’ll probably be everything.
Thanks for reading this and hopefully the other posts in the series, I hope you’ve found them useful whether you’ve been reading Hickman’s Avengers or not. Please feel free to send me any comments, questions or feedback.
