Re: So, What comics did you buy this week?
Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2026 6:16 am
So. I started reading last week’s books. But I only got three issues into the pile, because the end of Batman 163(which is the end of HToosh, which is also the end of the previous Batman ongoing, even though the current ongoing is on issue 10 already) infuriated me SOOO much that I literally stopped reading this weeks comics. I will eventually get back to them before the end of the week, and this week’s books come out today, so I’ll have two weeks worth of reading to do. But in the meantime, here is Jed MacKay’s Avengers run, which I finished instead of reading last week’s books.
Avengers 1-2. Carol becomes Chairman and puts together a new team. While fighting Terminus, Carol gets knocked into a time-fractal where she finds a mortally wounded Kang(who was attacked in the Timeless oneshot from that year by a new “villain” Myrrdin and his Twilight Court. Kang offers Carol insight on future calamities called “Tribulation Events” in exchange for the Avengers helping him find a ‘missing moment’ in time that can’t be accessed by time travel before Myrddin finds it and does something diabolical with the knowledge.
3-6. The first Tribulation Event is the attack of team of incredibly powered individuals called the Ashen Combine. From their space station called the Impossible City, each of the Combine attacks a specific city on Earth. T’Challa and Sam Wilson head to their Impossible City to sabotage it, but they realize it’s sentient and convince it to aid the Avengers in defeating the Combine and City becomes the Avengers new HQ for the duration of the series. They are keeping the Ashen Combine is stasis aboard the City.
7-10. Myrddin and his Twilight Court(their designs are roughly analogous to Arthur and Round Table Knights) arrive and battle the Avengers and their new sentient base while their leader sneaks into Kang’s medical room, and steals his knowledge of the missing moment and the upcoming Tribulation Events from his mind. Kang is furious that the Avengers allowed the one thing he had asked them to prevent happening and departs once again as their sworn enemy.
11. A one off issue where Jarvis arrives on the Impossible City to help it acclimate to assisting the Avengers. He helps foil a plot by the Mad Thinker to infiltrate the City, but before he’s ejected, he finds the Combine is stasis.
12-13. Fall of the House of X tie-in. The Avengers finally join the fray against Orchis with a series of strategic strikes on Orchis facilities around the world. Orchis, controlled by former Avengers 3D Man, sends an armada of StarkTech Sentinels towards the Impossible City. The twist is T’Challa sent a hypnotized 3D Man into Orchis undercover, and they wake him up with the trigger words to stop the Sentinel Attack. Issue 13 also marked Tom Brevoort’s final issue as editor. He’d been editing the Avengers for the last 26 years, since the first issue of the Heroes Return series by Busiek and Perez back in 1998.
14-16. Blood Hunt tie in. While the main Avengers team were fighting Blade and his vampire army in the main BloodHunt book, Steve Rogers put together an adhoc team of Hercules, Quicksilver, Hazmat, and Kate Bishop to fight Baron Blood and a helicarrier full of Nazi Vampires who were kidnapping citizens.
17-18. Storm joins the team and Thor leaves(because of what was happening in his solo series). The Hyperion from the Heroes Reborn event returns. He realizes he’s a fictional construct of Mephisto and begins a suicide run at Earth from the orbit of Pluto. The Avengers are contemplating having to kill him before he destroys Earth, but Vision teleports him to an alt-Earth that the Ashen Combine had destroyed and tells Hyperion this world needs a hero since their’s were all destroyed. He accepts.
19-20. The new Sorcerer Supreme Doom confronts the Avengers about how best to protect Earth. And T’Challa goes on a mission into the Ashen Combine stasis to free thousands of souls one of the Combine had trapped while he was attacking Earth.
21. Softball game between the Avengers and X-Men. MacKay was writing both series at the time. Plenty of character moments for both teams.
22-24. A lead on Kang’s back up key being stored on a space casino run by the Grandmaster sends the Avengers on a heist mission. But Kang has recruited Black Cat and her time displaced father to beat the Avengers to the key(MacKay had previously written a Black Cat series, so this was a nice little coda to that series as well). Myrddin has placed a wager with Grandmaster on whether Kang or the Avengers will be successful. When the Avengers get back home, they find out Doom has taken over…
25-28. One World Under Doom tie in. While the main team is fighting Doom in Latveria, Sam is recuperating on the City alone. Mad Thinker recruits a new team of Masters of Evil to invade the Impossible City and use the Ashen Combine as basically a nuclear deterrent threat. Sam and the City fight alone to neutralize the Masters one by one. Then T’Challa emerges from his months long mission and together he and Sam take down the Thinker himself.
29. The ‘missing moment’ is revealed as ‘glitch’ Reed Richards purposefully left while the FF were recreating the cosmos after Secret Wars. The Avengers travel into a sub-dimension that is the leftover remnants of Battleworld.
30-32. Myrddin shows up and releases hordes of Marvel Zombies on the heroes, and ultimately reveals that he is a future version of Kang that was using his own team of heroes(the Twilight Court) to find the missing moment. But realized they were ineffective, so he had to manipulate his past self into goading the Avengers into helping him track it down. He’s going to use the missing moment to reset the universe again, but at the last minute the Impossible City shows up and reveals it was originally the Twilight Court’s base all along and it was called Camelot!
33. The origin of the Twilight Court and Impossible City/Camelot was originally the Damocles Space Station from, holy shit, waaaaay back in Kurt Busiek’s massive Kang invasion storyline from the 1998 Avengers run.
34-36. The series wrapped up with a massive tryptich cover featuring every Avenger ever. Kang/Myrddin triggers the missing moment and the Avengers don’t know how to stop it. They open a portal and Camelot releases the Ashen Combine from stasis. They greedily grab the moment and jump thru the portal which ends up being the point in time before the first cosmos(the Zeroth Cosmos if you will) so when the moment detonates it creates the original
first cosmos. (For context, Galan was the last survivor of the Sixth Cosmos, and became Galactus in the Seventh. Secret Wars ended the Seventh, and the current iteration that Franklin Richards and the Molecule Man created after Secret Wars is the Eighth iteration). So basically, the Avengers created…everything.
There were also two Annuals. But they both had a “1” on them. One was the final part of the Contest of Chaos where Agatha Harkness had a bunch of heroes fighting each other, and ends up recreating the Darkhold book, but instead of a book, it’s a little kid.
The other annual was the finale of the of the new Infinity Watch saga where Thanos is trying to gather the new Infinity Stones and the new stone bearers all work together to stop him.
Hmmm. So, this wasn’t a bad series. But it closed its own loop and will probably not be remembered in the great scheme of Avengers runs. I also think maybe MacKay was forced to wrap it up earlier than he wanted. They had made a big deal of all these “Tribulation Events” at the start of the series, giving them names. But after the “Endless Night” one(which ended up being Blood Hunt) they discarded the rest in favor of the Myrddin/Kang reveal. So perhaps declining sales forced him to pivot towards his endgame sooner than he wanted. It also wasn’t nearly as epic as Jason Aaron’s run.
There are more Avengers books. There were short ongoing West Coast Avengers and New Avengers series that also recently concluded, as well as several minis like Avengers Twilight and Aliens vs Avengers. That will get me current on all things Avengers, just in time for the Armageddon Event starting next month.
But first I’ll catch up on last week and this week’s books.
Avengers 1-2. Carol becomes Chairman and puts together a new team. While fighting Terminus, Carol gets knocked into a time-fractal where she finds a mortally wounded Kang(who was attacked in the Timeless oneshot from that year by a new “villain” Myrrdin and his Twilight Court. Kang offers Carol insight on future calamities called “Tribulation Events” in exchange for the Avengers helping him find a ‘missing moment’ in time that can’t be accessed by time travel before Myrddin finds it and does something diabolical with the knowledge.
3-6. The first Tribulation Event is the attack of team of incredibly powered individuals called the Ashen Combine. From their space station called the Impossible City, each of the Combine attacks a specific city on Earth. T’Challa and Sam Wilson head to their Impossible City to sabotage it, but they realize it’s sentient and convince it to aid the Avengers in defeating the Combine and City becomes the Avengers new HQ for the duration of the series. They are keeping the Ashen Combine is stasis aboard the City.
7-10. Myrddin and his Twilight Court(their designs are roughly analogous to Arthur and Round Table Knights) arrive and battle the Avengers and their new sentient base while their leader sneaks into Kang’s medical room, and steals his knowledge of the missing moment and the upcoming Tribulation Events from his mind. Kang is furious that the Avengers allowed the one thing he had asked them to prevent happening and departs once again as their sworn enemy.
11. A one off issue where Jarvis arrives on the Impossible City to help it acclimate to assisting the Avengers. He helps foil a plot by the Mad Thinker to infiltrate the City, but before he’s ejected, he finds the Combine is stasis.
12-13. Fall of the House of X tie-in. The Avengers finally join the fray against Orchis with a series of strategic strikes on Orchis facilities around the world. Orchis, controlled by former Avengers 3D Man, sends an armada of StarkTech Sentinels towards the Impossible City. The twist is T’Challa sent a hypnotized 3D Man into Orchis undercover, and they wake him up with the trigger words to stop the Sentinel Attack. Issue 13 also marked Tom Brevoort’s final issue as editor. He’d been editing the Avengers for the last 26 years, since the first issue of the Heroes Return series by Busiek and Perez back in 1998.
14-16. Blood Hunt tie in. While the main Avengers team were fighting Blade and his vampire army in the main BloodHunt book, Steve Rogers put together an adhoc team of Hercules, Quicksilver, Hazmat, and Kate Bishop to fight Baron Blood and a helicarrier full of Nazi Vampires who were kidnapping citizens.
17-18. Storm joins the team and Thor leaves(because of what was happening in his solo series). The Hyperion from the Heroes Reborn event returns. He realizes he’s a fictional construct of Mephisto and begins a suicide run at Earth from the orbit of Pluto. The Avengers are contemplating having to kill him before he destroys Earth, but Vision teleports him to an alt-Earth that the Ashen Combine had destroyed and tells Hyperion this world needs a hero since their’s were all destroyed. He accepts.
19-20. The new Sorcerer Supreme Doom confronts the Avengers about how best to protect Earth. And T’Challa goes on a mission into the Ashen Combine stasis to free thousands of souls one of the Combine had trapped while he was attacking Earth.
21. Softball game between the Avengers and X-Men. MacKay was writing both series at the time. Plenty of character moments for both teams.
22-24. A lead on Kang’s back up key being stored on a space casino run by the Grandmaster sends the Avengers on a heist mission. But Kang has recruited Black Cat and her time displaced father to beat the Avengers to the key(MacKay had previously written a Black Cat series, so this was a nice little coda to that series as well). Myrddin has placed a wager with Grandmaster on whether Kang or the Avengers will be successful. When the Avengers get back home, they find out Doom has taken over…
25-28. One World Under Doom tie in. While the main team is fighting Doom in Latveria, Sam is recuperating on the City alone. Mad Thinker recruits a new team of Masters of Evil to invade the Impossible City and use the Ashen Combine as basically a nuclear deterrent threat. Sam and the City fight alone to neutralize the Masters one by one. Then T’Challa emerges from his months long mission and together he and Sam take down the Thinker himself.
29. The ‘missing moment’ is revealed as ‘glitch’ Reed Richards purposefully left while the FF were recreating the cosmos after Secret Wars. The Avengers travel into a sub-dimension that is the leftover remnants of Battleworld.
30-32. Myrddin shows up and releases hordes of Marvel Zombies on the heroes, and ultimately reveals that he is a future version of Kang that was using his own team of heroes(the Twilight Court) to find the missing moment. But realized they were ineffective, so he had to manipulate his past self into goading the Avengers into helping him track it down. He’s going to use the missing moment to reset the universe again, but at the last minute the Impossible City shows up and reveals it was originally the Twilight Court’s base all along and it was called Camelot!
33. The origin of the Twilight Court and Impossible City/Camelot was originally the Damocles Space Station from, holy shit, waaaaay back in Kurt Busiek’s massive Kang invasion storyline from the 1998 Avengers run.
34-36. The series wrapped up with a massive tryptich cover featuring every Avenger ever. Kang/Myrddin triggers the missing moment and the Avengers don’t know how to stop it. They open a portal and Camelot releases the Ashen Combine from stasis. They greedily grab the moment and jump thru the portal which ends up being the point in time before the first cosmos(the Zeroth Cosmos if you will) so when the moment detonates it creates the original
first cosmos. (For context, Galan was the last survivor of the Sixth Cosmos, and became Galactus in the Seventh. Secret Wars ended the Seventh, and the current iteration that Franklin Richards and the Molecule Man created after Secret Wars is the Eighth iteration). So basically, the Avengers created…everything.
There were also two Annuals. But they both had a “1” on them. One was the final part of the Contest of Chaos where Agatha Harkness had a bunch of heroes fighting each other, and ends up recreating the Darkhold book, but instead of a book, it’s a little kid.
The other annual was the finale of the of the new Infinity Watch saga where Thanos is trying to gather the new Infinity Stones and the new stone bearers all work together to stop him.
Hmmm. So, this wasn’t a bad series. But it closed its own loop and will probably not be remembered in the great scheme of Avengers runs. I also think maybe MacKay was forced to wrap it up earlier than he wanted. They had made a big deal of all these “Tribulation Events” at the start of the series, giving them names. But after the “Endless Night” one(which ended up being Blood Hunt) they discarded the rest in favor of the Myrddin/Kang reveal. So perhaps declining sales forced him to pivot towards his endgame sooner than he wanted. It also wasn’t nearly as epic as Jason Aaron’s run.
There are more Avengers books. There were short ongoing West Coast Avengers and New Avengers series that also recently concluded, as well as several minis like Avengers Twilight and Aliens vs Avengers. That will get me current on all things Avengers, just in time for the Armageddon Event starting next month.
But first I’ll catch up on last week and this week’s books.