Marvel NOW to Secret Wars

Marvel relaunches nearly everything, gives its best books to its best creators, and lets one writer spend three years building a machine that destroys the universe. Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers is the spine of this era. Everything around it is the last and brightest run of the old Marvel Universe before it stops existing.

Why you are reading this era

Three things happen at once here, and they barely touch.

The first is a quality spike. After the relaunch branded Marvel NOW!, Marvel put one creative team on one book and left them there for years. Mark Waid on Daredevil. Matt Fraction and David Aja on Hawkeye. Jason Aaron on Thor. G. Willow Wilson on Ms. Marvel. These are not event comics. They are the best-drawn superhero books Marvel published in a decade, and most of them work for a reader who has read nothing else. If you only take four books out of this chapter, take those four.

The second is the movies catching up. Carol Danvers becomes Captain Marvel here. Kamala Khan is created here. Kate Bishop and a one-eyed dog become a television series. Gorr and Jane Foster become a film. This era is the single richest quarry the MCU has mined, and reading it changes how the films look.

The third is Hickman. Beginning in Avengers vol 5 #1 and New Avengers vol 3 #1 in 2012, he runs two monthly books as one story for three years. Universes are colliding. Every collision destroys both unless somebody destroys one Earth first. Six of Marvel’s smartest heroes form a secret committee to decide who lives. That question is never resolved, only postponed, until the postponement runs out and the Marvel Universe dies in Secret Wars #1 in 2015.

Payoff schedule: Avengers vs X-Men #12 sets up the X-line for four years, Hickman’s incursions pay off in 2015 and are still being cited by Marvel films a decade later, and Kamala Khan pays off immediately and never stops.

The reading list

The tracks barely interleave in this era, which is unusual and convenient. Read Avengers vs X-Men first, then run Track A and Track B in parallel, and drop into Track C whenever you want a break. Everything converges on Secret Wars.

Track A: Mutant

Avengers vs X-Men is an uneven comic. Five writers share it, you can feel the seams, the middle stalls, and the tie-in machinery around it is enormous and mostly worthless. Read it anyway. Almost nothing else in this book has consequences this large: Xavier dead, Cyclops a mutant terrorist with public support, the two teams permanently unable to trust each other, and in #12 the mutant species repowered after six years of the post-House of M extinction.

The All-New X-Men premise runs for six years, so learn it once. In All-New X-Men #1-5, Beast is dying of a new mutation and decides that the only person who can stop the adult Cyclops is the teenage Cyclops. He travels to the earliest days of the X-Men and brings the original five, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Beast and Angel, forward in time to shame their older selves. It does not work. The five then refuse to go home, and stay in the present. These are the actual originals, not copies, which should shred the timeline. Marvel simply let the paradox sit there for six years. See the retcon notes for how it ends.

Both Bendis books are Required because they are one book published under two titles. All-New X-Men carries the time-displaced five, Uncanny X-Men carries Cyclops and the new mutants he recruits, and neither half makes sense alone.

Track B: Avengers and cosmic

Read Original Sin #5.1-5.5 only, and only if you are reading Thor. Those five issues introduce Angela as Thor’s sister. The main series matters for exactly two things: Nick Fury becomes the Unseen and is written out, and someone whispers something to Thor that makes him unworthy of Mjolnir in Original Sin #8. That second one is why Thor vol 4 exists.

The Hickman interleave, in order

This is the single most common place readers go wrong. Avengers vol 5 and New Avengers vol 3 are not two series with crossovers. They are one story cut in half, and reading either book front to back ruins it. Avengers is the loud half, about the Earth being terraformed and the team expanding to thirty people. New Avengers is the quiet half, about six men in a room deciding whether to blow up a populated planet. Read them together.

Hickman’s Fantastic Four #570-588 and #600-611 and FF #1-23 from Era 9 are the prologue. The Council of Reeds, the Future Foundation, and Reed Richards’s conviction that he can solve everything are all set up there and cashed in here. You can read this era without them. It is much better with them.

Time Runs Out opens with an eight month time jump that is not explained on the page. This is intentional. Do not go looking for the missing issues; there are none.

Secret Wars itself is Doctor Doom’s book. When the multiverse collapses, Doom takes the power that caused it, assembles the surviving fragments of dead Earths into one patchwork planet, and rules it as a god with Doctor Strange as his sheriff. The story is about whether Doom, given actual omnipotence, can be better than Reed Richards. Hickman’s answer is the best thing he wrote at Marvel.

Secret Wars tie-ins

There were dozens. Most are one-note pitches (“what if Civil War, but forever”) that end where they began and do not survive the event. Skip them by default. Four earn their place.

Track C: Street level and Spider-Man

Hawkeye matters beyond being excellent. Aja and colorist Matt Hollingsworth built it out of flat color, negative space and diagrammatic panel grids, and it looks like design work rather than a superhero comic. It is about what Clint Barton does on the days he is not an Avenger, at ground level, badly. #11 is told entirely from the dog’s point of view using icons instead of dialogue. After Hawkeye, an editor could no longer say a Marvel book had to look like a Marvel book, and Vision, Moon Knight, She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel all walk through the door it opened.

Superior Spider-Man is the premise that sounds terrible. In Amazing Spider-Man #698-700, Doctor Octopus swaps minds with Peter Parker and Peter dies in Otto’s failing body. Otto then decides to be Spider-Man, and to be better at it than Peter was. He is more effective, more brutal, and unbearable, and the book knows it. It is a villain being slowly educated by somebody else’s life.

Cross-book checkpoints

Death of Wolverine #1-4, by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven, is Optional and short. Logan loses his healing factor and drowns in molten adamantium. The four years after matter more: he is genuinely absent until 2018, Laura Kinney takes the name, and an alternate-future Logan walks out of Secret Wars to fill the gap.

Characters introduced

Retcon notes

Adaptation notes

Checkpoint