Avengers (2012) #24-34

Avengers #24-34

Originally released in 2013

Written by Jonathan Hickman

Art by Esad Ribic (#24), Salvador Larroca (#25-28), Leinil Francis Yu (#29-34)

The Avengers and New Avengers series have largely stayed separate from each other, but this is where those two plotlines start to intersect.  Issue 24 is an isolated story - someone or something has thrown a planet at the Earth, and it's up to the Avengers to stop it after an ominous warning from the future.  Tony Stark's granddaughter helps the team to solve the problem in a different way from how they originally solved it, as a gift.

She warns him that soon, all of his friends will be after him, and her solution to this problem will improve his chances.  Tony's work with the Illuminati was never going to end well, but this makes it clear that secrets are going to get out, and sooner than he thinks.

In issue 25, A.I.M. is using a newly-created group of Super-Adaptoids to mine the multiverse, and their first experiment brings a group of Avengers that resembles the Silver Age line-up of the team.  However, it's clear early on that a few things are wrong - the line-up that appears never happened in the original comics (Hulk left the team by issue 2, so he wasn't on the same team as Captain America back then), and Iron Man's glowing red eyes seem rather ominous given that they didn't glow back in the early days.

As it turns out, these Avengers aren't heroic like their main universe counterparts - Captain (or rather, General) America is a fascist, Thor (or rather Thorr) puts himself above all mortals, and the Hulk is their lobotomized servant.  A.I.M. tries to contain the situation, but in the process, their Super-Adaptoids develop sentience and set off to explore the multiverse.  It took three hours for the Adaptoids to rebel against their creators, so that seems like a surprisingly long time for A.I.M. to keep them under control.

Thorr's hammer also specifically states that it can only be worded by the unworthy, which seems like it will come in handy after the Original Sin event.  Bruce Banner also discovers the existence of the Illuminati, and using the lobotomized alternate universe counterpart as a fall guy, Tony fakes Bruce going berserk and being captured so the main Bruce can go with the Illuminati.

Bruce isn't the only one who finds out the truth about Tony's group.  During the Original Sin event, secrets that the Watcher had discovered are revealed, which includes Steve finding out about what the Illuminati were doing and how they wiped his memory.  He doesn't take it well, leading to the black eye that Tony has in New Avengers.

In the fighting that follows, the Time Stone appears, long after its disappearance when Steve was part of the Illuminati.  It shatters upon appearing, catapulting the assembled Avengers further and further into the future.  There, they run into versions of the Avengers from 50 or 500 years in the future.  On one hand, their presence (and the presence of any life in the future) would seem to indicate that Tony was right in doing what he did since the universe survived.

On the other hand, the version of the Avengers from 50 years in the future bears a grudge against Tony for what he did, and the Avengers from 500 years in the future have their own problems, so it could go either way.  Fortunately, 5000 years in the future, Franklin Richards is there to explain what he can in the short time that they have.

The team dwindles as they jump forward, with one or two members being tossed back to the present until only Steve Rogers is left.  Naturally, with time travel and the Avengers involved, Kang the Conqueror steps in at the end (along with his past self Iron Lad and his future self Immortus), though even he/they is/are stumped on how to stop the Incursions.

Their decision is to keep Captain America at the end of time so that he can't interfere with the Illuminati's plans.  Naturally, Cap disagrees, and manages to escape the clutches of the Kangs and return to the present.  Now, he intends to hunt down the Illuminati and bring them to justice if they've destroyed worlds or stop them from doing so if they haven't.

It's a lot to take in.  There's also Avengers issues 34.1 and 34.2, which seem to focus on Hyperion and Starbrand respectively, but those are written by different authors and seem like stand-alone stories, so I'm tempted to just skip those.  On top of all of this, these issues also give us the origins of the Mapmakers as Super-Adaptoids that made it into the space between universes.

Everything's getting a little complicated, though hopefully the Time Runs Out storyline will simplify the focus to some extent.  It feels hard to believe how close I'm getting to Secret Wars, given how intimidating the reading list of comics that build up to it seemed at first glance.