New Avengers has really just been a book about the latest iteration of the Illuminati, which currently includes Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, the Sub-Mariner, Black Bolt, Beast, Black Panther and Dr. Strange. They had to kick out Captain America for being too idealistic, because they have to deal with a really ugly crisis in horrible ways in order to save their world. The destruction of an alternate universe before its time has created a cascading interdimensional incursion effect that is forcing them to destroy alternate Earths before they destroy our Earth. This is a task that self-styled heroes have found ugly but necessary. I’m not entirely sure if this officially means that Earth’s greatest heroes have been committing genocide on a planetary scale repeatedly ever since this storyline began 14 issues ago, or if the Earths they’ve had to destroy before now have all been unpopulated, sparing the Avengers the moniker of mass-murderers billions of times over. But the fact that T’Challa had to pause before destroying one Incursion Earth to remember the man he used to be would seem to imply that all these men have become the killers of living worlds.
The mantra that’s been repeated through several issues of Jonathan Hickman’s series has been “Everything dies. You. Me. Everyone on this planet. Our sun, our galaxy and, eventually, the universe itself. This is simply how things are. It’s inevitable and I accept it. What I will not tolerate – and what I find unacceptable – is the unnatural acceleration of that end.” These are words coming out of Reed Richards’ mouth on our world and various others, as New Avengers #14 continues the observation of incursions happening in other dimensions and the various alternate Avengers’ attempts to stop them. This particular iteration involves both Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom on the same team, but the world setting seems to be nothing more than flavor. What we learn here is more of the process of the creatures behind these incursions.
There are a wave of robots called the Sidera Maris who show up to prepare a world for the arrival of the Mapmakers, mechanical life forms who look an awful lot like Shockwave. Their purpose seems to be to catalog a planet and then destroy it in a Brainiac kind of way, but rather than collecting chunks of it, they are “harvesting” each planet over a period of weeks, for purposes as yet unclear, although it will likely have something to do with the mysterious Black Priests. Regardless, although the Doom of that world was powerful enough to destroy one of the Mapmakers, only one was all he managed before falling himself. All of this was observed by the Illuminati of our world, and the notion of “everything dies” is repeated, this time applying to “the idea of who you are and what you stood for” as much as anything else.
These are ugly developments for superheroes not often known for dealing with ugly matters. This is not a Fantastic Four kind of adventure. This is not an Avengers triumph or an X-Men episode. This is a group of men – not a woman among them – who have appointed themselves the secret engineers of what will and will not become of humanity being shown that their hubris will amount to nothing.
Which means that Dr. Strange selling his soul for the power of a god may yield the same futile, hopeless result. The other story weaving its way around the Mapmakers follows the Sorcerer Supreme as he decides that the scientists of the Illuminati won’t be the only ones sacrificing their core values for the sake of preserving the Earth, and that he must take every possible measure in he effort to stop these incursions, even if that includes the destruction of who he is in search for the power to move planets. This will not end well for anyone, but no one can say he did not try everything within and beyond his power to end this threat.
Hickman’s writing remains enigmatic and learned, and what it lacks in entertaining dialogue it makes up for with aspiration and heady thought. Simone Bianchi does an admirable job of translating these ideas into a vacillating tone of hope bookeneded with despair. New Avengers is by no means a fun book, but it is darkly compelling, and it makes us fret about what the lasting impact of these soul-staining events will have on our iconic heroes.
