The Skrulls replace people you trust, and the man who cleans up the mess gets handed the country. Norman Osborn spends a year running national security with a Green Goblin’s judgment. When he falls, the heroes get one good year. The X-Men spend the same period on a rock in the Pacific, down to a few hundred mutants, betting everything on one girl.
Why you are reading this era
This is the era where Marvel’s two halves run on different clocks, and you have to read them that way. On the Avengers side, one long political story: Secret Invasion breaks trust, Norman Osborn inherits SHIELD’s budget and calls it HAMMER, and Siege ends him. It is tight, it is plotted, and Bendis lands it. On the mutant side the population is still capped at 198, Cyclops has stopped pretending the X-Men are a school, and every decision comes from a man running a refugee camp with a kill squad he does not admit to.
What you gain here is two of the best runs Marvel has published this century, and both are setup. Hickman’s Fantastic Four and FF is one 65-issue story about Reed Richards trying to solve everything, and it is the front half of a machine whose back half is Hickman’s Avengers and then Secret Wars in 2015. Read it now or that ending is noise. Remender’s Uncanny X-Force is the other: eight people in the wrong genre, doing murder for a good reason, finding out what it costs. Both run underneath the events rather than through them.
Threads that pay off later: Hope Summers arrives and detonates the mutant population cap in 2012. Cyclops and Wolverine stop being colleagues in Schism and are enemies by Avengers vs X-Men. Bucky Barnes carries the shield, which matters when Steve Rogers comes back to a job somebody else is doing. And the Abnett and Lanning cosmic line builds the Guardians roster a film uses in 2014.
The reading list
Track A: Mutant
| Verdict | Book | Issues | Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Required | Uncanny X-Men | #500-503 | Fraction and Brubaker. The X-Men abandon the mansion for San Francisco. | |
| Optional | Cable | #1-25 | Swierczynski. Cable runs Hope through the future, one time jump ahead of Bishop. | |
| Required | Messiah War | Cable #13-15, X-Force #14-16 | Alternate: Cable #13, X-Force #14, Cable #14, X-Force #15, Cable #15, X-Force #16. | |
| Required | Utopia | See the interleave below | Fraction. Six chapters across two one-shots and two ongoings. | |
| Required | Uncanny X-Men | #515-522 | Nation X. The X-Men take Asteroid M off the sea floor and live on it. | |
| Optional | Dark X-Men | #1-5 | Osborn’s counterfeit team after Utopia. Nate Grey and Mimic get the good pages. | |
| Optional | Necrosha | X-Necrosha #1, X-Force #21-25, New Mutants #6-8, X-Men: Legacy #231-234 | Selene reanimates every dead mutant. Fun, self-contained, changes nothing. | |
| Required | X-Men: Second Coming | See the interleave below | Fourteen chapters. Bastion’s endgame. Read it in one run. | |
| Required | Uncanny X-Force | #1-35, plus #5.1 and #19.1 | Remender. The best X-book of its decade. See below. | |
| Required | Old Man Logan | Wolverine #66-72, Giant-Size Old Man Logan #1 | Millar and McNiven. Self-contained future dystopia. | |
| Optional | Wolverine: Weapon X | #1-16 | Jason Aaron. Anthology-shaped and better than the premise sounds. | |
| Optional | Wolverine (vol 4) | #1-20 | Aaron. Wolverine Goes to Hell, then Wolverine returns from hell angry. | |
| Optional | Uncanny X-Men | #531-544 | Gillen. Volume 1 ends at #544. Sharp, and almost nobody read it. | |
| Required | X-Men: Schism | #1-5 | Aaron. Cyclops and Wolverine split the mutant race in five issues. | |
| Optional | X-Men: Regenesis | #1 | One-shot. Who picked which side, in list form. Useful, not good. | |
| Skip | X-Men (vol 3) | #1-6 | Curse of the Mutants. Vampires attack San Francisco and the status quo survives intact. | |
| Skip | X-Men: Legacy | #226-230, #238-254 | Solid Rogue and Xavier material that no later book requires you to know. |
Uncanny X-Force #1-35 is the best X-book of its decade, and the case is short. In #1-4, The Apocalypse Solution, the team finds Apocalypse reincarnated as a child and has to decide whether killing a child counts as preventive medicine. Fantomex shoots him. The next thirty issues are the bill arriving. #8-18, The Dark Angel Saga, goes to the Age of Apocalypse to save Warren Worthington and comes back with the correct, unbearable answer. Other black-ops books let their teams feel professional about killing. This one does not. Opena, Ribic, Tan and Noto draw it, Dean White colors it, and it crosses over with almost nothing.
Track B: Avengers and cosmic
| Verdict | Book | Issues | Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Required | Secret Invasion | #1-8 | Bendis and Yu. Everything after it depends on the last page. | |
| Required | New Avengers | #38-47 | The flashback issues that show when each Skrull swap happened. | |
| Required | Mighty Avengers | #12-20 | The other half of the same story, told from the Initiative side. | |
| Skip | Secret Invasion tie-ins | The other 60-odd issues | Aftermath one-shots for characters who were not replaced. They end where they began. | |
| Required | Dark Avengers | #1-16 | Bendis and Deodato. Osborn’s fake Avengers. The whole point of the era. | |
| Required | Thunderbolts | #126-136 | Diggle. Osborn’s actual wet-work team, written as a spy comic. | |
| Optional | Dark Reign: The List | Nine one-shots, 2009 | Osborn works through his enemies. The Avengers and Daredevil chapters matter most. | |
| Skip | Other Dark Reign tie-ins | Roughly 50 issues | Branding, not story. Most only establish that a character dislikes Norman Osborn. | |
| Required | Siege | #1-4, plus Siege: The Cabal #1 | Bendis and Coipel. Four issues. Osborn attacks Asgard and loses everything. | |
| Optional | Siege: Embedded | #1-4 | The invasion from a reporter’s point of view. The one tie-in worth the money. | |
| Optional | Avengers (vol 4) | #1-12 | Bendis. The Heroic Age relaunch. Competent, and the tone reset is the point. | |
| Optional | Secret Avengers | #1-12 | Brubaker. Steve Rogers runs a black team. Better than the flagship. | |
| Required | Nova (vol 4) | #1-36 | Abnett and Lanning. Richard Rider carries the cosmic line. | |
| Required | Guardians of the Galaxy (vol 2) | #1-25 | Abnett and Lanning. This is the team the 2014 film uses. | |
| Required | War of Kings | #1-6 | Inhumans against the Shi’ar. Read with Guardians #13-19 and Nova #23-28. | |
| Optional | Realm of Kings | Realm of Kings #1, Imperial Guard #1-5, Inhumans #1-5 | The quiet middle chapter. The Fault opens. | |
| Required | The Thanos Imperative | Ignition #1, #1-6, Devastation #1 | The end of this cosmic line, and it earns the ending. |
Track E: Fantastic Four and the cosmic frontier
| Verdict | Book | Issues | Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Optional | Dark Reign: Fantastic Four | #1-5 | Hickman’s audition. Reads as a prologue once you know where the run goes. | |
| Required | Fantastic Four | #570-588 | Hickman and Eaglesham. Solve Everything, then Three. | |
| Required | FF | #1-11 | Same story, renumbered. Legacy numbering makes these Fantastic Four #589-599. | |
| Required | Fantastic Four and FF | F4 #600-611, FF #12-23 | Interleaved. See the exact order below, because the numbering hides it. | |
| Optional | S.H.I.E.L.D. | #1-6 | Hickman and Weaver. Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and a secret history. |
The two-title problem is the most common reason people bounce off
this run, so here it is flat. Read Fantastic Four #570-588.
Then FF #1-11, the same book with a new logo and a reset
number. Then alternate: F4 #600, FF #12,
F4 #601, FF #13, F4 #602,
FF #14, F4 #603, FF #15,
F4 #604, FF #16, F4 #605,
F4 #605.1, F4 #606, FF #17-18,
F4 #607-608, FF #19-21,
F4 #609-610, FF #22, F4 #611,
FF #23. F4 #611 and FF #23 are
two halves of one ending. Read them together.
Hickman’s Fantastic Four is one story about one idea. Reed Richards decides to solve everything, and 65 issues ask what that does to a family. It opens with Reed joining a council of other Reeds who already tried, and closes with the only answer he can live with. Read it because it is good, and read it now because it is load-bearing. The Council of Reeds, the incursion logic, the idea that a universe can be spent to save another one: all of it starts here. Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers pick these up directly, and the 2015 Secret Wars is the payoff. If you intend to read Secret Wars, this run is chapter one, not context.
Fantastic Four #583-587, the arc titled Three, kills the Human Torch. He dies holding a door in the Negative Zone in #587, which shipped in a black polybag. FF #1 opens with the survivors in white. He returns in #600, and the return is handled better than the death.
Track F: Solo and standalone
| Verdict | Book | Issues | Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Required | Invincible Iron Man | #1-19 | Fraction and Larroca. The Five Nightmares, then World’s Most Wanted. | |
| Optional | Invincible Iron Man | #20-33 | Stark Disassembled and Resilient. Good, but the pursuit is over. | |
| Required | Captain America | #600-601, Reborn #1-6, Who Will Wield the Shield? #1, #602-619 | Brubaker. Steve returns. Bucky keeps the shield. | |
| Optional | Thor | #1-12, #600-614 | Straczynski then Gillen. Asgard lands in Oklahoma, then Osborn knocks it down. | |
| Optional | Thor | #615-621, The Mighty Thor #1-12 | Fraction and Coipel. The art is the reason. | |
| Required | Journey Into Mystery | #622-645 | Gillen. Kid Loki. The best-written Marvel comic of 2011. | |
| Skip | Fear Itself | #1-7 and all tie-ins | Pinned Skip. See the note below. | |
| Skip | Ultimatum | #1-5 | Pinned reasoning below. It ends the Ultimate line’s usefulness. |
The firm call on Iron Man: read #1-19 and stop if you
want to. World’s Most Wanted, #8-19, is the best Iron Man
story of the modern era and the best Dark Reign tie-in, because it is
the only book that makes Osborn’s grip on the country feel like weather.
Tony holds every superhuman’s identity in his head, so he deletes his
own brain a piece at a time to keep Osborn out. #20-33 is
the rebuild: good work, not urgent.
Journey Into Mystery #622-645 is easy to miss, because it starts as a Fear Itself tie-in and Fear Itself is a Skip. Ignore that. Gillen takes a Loki reborn as a child with no memory of being a villain and writes twenty-four issues about whether anyone can outrun their own story. It is funny, it is shaped like a folk tale, and the ending is cruel in a way that earns itself.
Fear Itself #1-7 drops seven magic hammers on seven heroes, has them punch each other, and puts the toys back. Nothing after it requires it, and its tie-ins interrupt better books for a crossover none of them needed.
Ultimatum #1-5 kills roughly half the Ultimate universe on panel for shock. The damage is structural. The Ultimate line existed as a clean entry point for new readers, and after Ultimatum it is a graveyard with a continuity requirement, the one thing it was built not to be.
Cross-book checkpoints
The tracks run in parallel. Secret Invasion is 2008, Dark Reign and Utopia are 2009, Siege and Second Coming are early 2010, Uncanny X-Force and the Heroic Age fill the back half, and Fear Itself and Schism are 2011. Hickman’s Fantastic Four runs underneath all of it and touches the events almost never.
Secret Invasion. Read #1-8 straight
through, then New Avengers #38-47 and
Mighty Avengers #12-20. Those two are mostly flashbacks
showing when each replacement happened, and interleaving them stalls the
main book.
Utopia, in six chapters:
| Chapter | Issue |
|---|---|
| 1 | Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia #1 |
| 2 | Uncanny X-Men #513 |
| 3 | Dark Avengers #7 |
| 4 | Uncanny X-Men #514 |
| 5 | Dark Avengers #8 |
| 6 | Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus #1 |
X-Men: Legacy #226-227 sits between chapters 1 and 2 and
is skippable. Utopia is the only place the era’s two tracks collide.
Read it after Dark Avengers #6 and before
Dark Avengers #9.
X-Men: Second Coming, in fourteen chapters:
| Chapters | Issues |
|---|---|
| 1-2 | X-Men: Second Coming #1, Uncanny X-Men #523 |
| 3-5 | New Mutants #12, X-Men: Legacy #235, X-Force #26 |
| 6-8 | Uncanny X-Men #524, New Mutants #13, X-Men: Legacy #236 |
| 9-11 | X-Force #27, Uncanny X-Men #525, New Mutants #14 |
| 12-14 | X-Men: Legacy #237, X-Force #28, X-Men: Second Coming #2 |
Uncanny X-Men #526 is the aftermath issue. Read it
last.
Bastion returns in
Second Coming with an army and a plan that works.
Nightcrawler dies in X-Force #26, killed while teleporting
Hope to safety, and it sticks for four years. The story also answers the
Hope question the line has asked since 2007, and that answer is the door
Avengers vs X-Men walks through in 2012.
Siege and the Heroic Age.
Siege: The Cabal #1, then
Dark Avengers #13-16, then Siege #1-4. Do not
start the Heroic Age books until you have read Siege #4.
Bucky is still Captain America throughout.
Uncanny X-Force. Starts after
Second Coming and reads as a block. Do not sync it with
anything. All you need going in is that Angel is Archangel again.
Characters introduced
| Character | First appearance | Why they matter later |
|---|---|---|
| The Cabal | Secret Invasion: Dark Reign #1 | Osborn, Doom, Namor, Emma Frost, Loki, the Hood. The era’s engine. |
| Iron Patriot | Dark Avengers #1 | Osborn in a repainted Iron Man suit. Adapted almost intact into Iron Man 3. |
| The Dark Avengers | Dark Avengers #1 | Bullseye as Hawkeye, Gargan as Spider-Man, Daken as Wolverine, Moonstone as Ms. Marvel. |
| Old Man Logan’s world (Earth-807128) | Wolverine #66 | Recurs constantly, and its Logan joins the main line in 2015. |
| Star-Lord’s Guardians of the Galaxy | Guardians of the Galaxy #1 (2008) | The exact lineup the 2014 film uses. |
| The Council of Reeds | Fantastic Four #570 | The idea that breaks Reed, and the root of Hickman’s incursions. |
| The Future Foundation | Fantastic Four #579 | Reed’s school for the next species. Survives into the current line. |
| Idie Okonkwo, Oya | Uncanny X-Men #528 | The child whose actions cause Schism. Later renamed Temper. |
| Kid Loki | Thor #617 | Loki reborn without his history. The whole of Journey Into Mystery. |
| Ikol | Journey Into Mystery #622 | Old Loki as a magpie, sitting on the new one’s shoulder. |
| Genesis, Evan Sabahnur | Uncanny X-Force #7 | Fantomex’s cloned Apocalypse, raised to be good. The run’s moral test. |
Hope Summers is not new here. She first appears as an infant in
X-Men #205, in the previous era. She comes back aged during
Cable #1-25 and becomes the center of the mutant line. If
you skipped Cable, X-Men: Second Coming #1 catches you
up.
Retcon notes
Steve Rogers was shot dead in
Captain America #25 (2007) and stayed dead for two and a
half years, which was treated as permanent.
Captain America: Reborn #1-6 (2009) undoes it with a
mechanism rather than a resurrection. Sharon Carter’s second shot came
from a device of Arnim Zola’s that did not kill him. It knocked him
loose in his own timeline. Judge that how you like. What matters is that
Marvel does not press undo: Bucky keeps the shield in
Who Will Wield the Shield? #1, Steve takes Osborn’s job
after Siege #4, and two Captains America operate at
once.
The mutant population is still capped at
the 198 survivors of M-Day, set in House of M #7 (2005) and
enforced across every X-book since. No new mutants are born. This is why
Hope Summers matters: Messiah CompleX said the first mutant
born after M-Day is either the cure or the end, and this era spends four
years refusing to say which. Uncanny X-Men #526-534 adds
the Five Lights, the first new mutants to manifest, but the cap is not
lifted until Avengers vs X-Men #11-12. Every X-Men decision
here is made by people who believe their species has a countdown.
Adaptation notes
Logan (2017) takes tone, a hero’s
condition and a few images from Wolverine #66-72 and
Giant-Size Old Man Logan #1. It does not take the plot. The
comic is a road trip across a United States carved up between the
supervillains who won, built around why Logan will not use his claws.
The film keeps the poisoned Logan and a world that ended offscreen, then
tells a different story about Laura. Read the comic as background, not
as source.
Loki (Disney+, 2021 and 2023) draws far
more from Journey Into Mystery #622-645 than from any Thor
comic. The Loki stuck being the villain of someone else’s story, who
talks his way out of everything and is trapped by that skill, is
Gillen’s. The show’s ending is the Journey Into Mystery ending in a
different costume.
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) uses the
Abnett and Lanning team, not the 1969 one. Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax,
Rocket Raccoon and Groot as a bickering unit is assembled in
Guardians of the Galaxy #1 (2008). The film lifts Knowhere
and the shape of the setting but adapts no single storyline.
Secret Invasion (Disney+, 2023) departs
from Secret Invasion #1-8 almost completely. The comic is a
line-wide paranoia event ending in a public battle and a change of
government. The show is a six-episode Nick Fury spy story with no
superheroes to speak of, and it inverts the premise, because the MCU had
already made the Skrulls refugees in Captain Marvel (2019).
Checkpoint
You know why nobody in the Marvel Universe trusts a face. You watched a supervillain run national security for a year with the paperwork in order, and watched the heroes take it back in four issues. Steve Rogers is alive, Bucky has the shield, and the Avengers are an institution again for the first time since Civil War. The X-Men are no longer a school. They are a nation on a rock, and Cyclops and Wolverine have stopped speaking.
Safe to read next: Avengers vs X-Men, which needs Schism, Second Coming and the Hope thread and nothing else here. Also Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers from 2013, which assume you read his Fantastic Four.
Still a mystery on purpose: what the Phoenix Force wants with Hope, and what Reed Richards saw in the Council of Reeds and never told anyone.