Jonathan Hickman wants to Destroy the World

Anyone who knows anything about American comic books knows that the industry is largely divided between the two companies Marvel and DC. For both companies, most of its titles are set in two shared universes, largely populated by superheroes of both stripes. One of the more interesting differences between how these companies have chosen to handle their shared universes is in their attitude towards continuity.

The peculiarities of DC’s corporate history meant that it had already developed a range of popular superheroes during the course of the late 1930s and 1940s. This included such staples as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, as well as earlier versions of Green Lantern, the Flash and the Atom. Many of these would be cancelled when audience interest shifted away from superheroes in the late 1940s before being revived in the late 1950s either with new creative teams or entirely new characters using old names. The existence of multiple versions of Superman, the Flash and so forth led DC to create what they called their Multiverse until an attempted reorganisation of the continuity in ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ (1985–86) led to both an amalgamation and a series of retcons more confusing than the Schleswig-Holstein Question.

Leaving all that aside, one of the main upshots of this approach is that DC have been able to return to the origins of their characters repeatedly, rebooting them for new generations. The most famous example of this was ‘Batman: Year One’ (1987) and ‘Man of Steel’ (1986), which launched Batman’s and Superman’s post-Crisis continuity which would last until the relaunch of the entire line with ‘New 52’ in 2011. (‘Man of Steel’ would actually be retconned twice in relatively minor ways in 2003 and 2009 but leaving that aside for the moment.) Similar relaunches occurred to other DC characters, creating a single continuity that lasted for 25 years, allowing readers to feel like the stories were taking place in real time.

Marvel has consistently pursued a different tack, owing largely to the fact that the vast majority of its staple characters were produced in a decade by Stan Lee and his various collaborators (a creative burst surely amongst the most intense and successful of any 20th century Western artist). As a result, the entire main continuity of Marvel Comics, published over nearly six decades from 1961, is compressed into a single time period variously stated to be somewhere between 10 and 20 years. Certain characters age at different rates — it took Peter Parker three years to age from 15 to 18, before then taking 13 to age from 18 to 22 — while others reach a certain point and then stop — Franklin Richards reached the age of about 10 after his birth in 1968 before dramatically stopping. After a while, this gets increasingly absurd (how many times per year does New York have to experience a 9/11 event?) and the suspension of disbelief becomes more and more fragile.

All of that, it is, until Jonathan Hickman took charge of the various Avengers titles in 2012.

The first issue of Hickman’s run, ‘New Avengers’ # 1, begins with Reed Richards standing seemingly alone in a dark room addressing the reader. “Everything dies,” he says. “You. Me. Everyone on this planet. Our sun. Our galaxy. And, eventually, the universe itself. This simply is how things are. It’s inevitable. And I accept it.”

It’s a punchy opening, to say the least.

Hickman’s run was divided into ‘New Avengers’ and ‘The Avengers’, with the ‘Infinity’ crossover event about halfway through and then the climactic ‘Time Runs Out’ and ‘Secret Wars’ series, the later of which culminated in a full scale relaunch of the Marvel universe. In ‘New Avengers’, Hickman reintroduces the Illuminati, a group of heroes who meet in secret to decide the fate of the world, a group previously seen during Brian Michael Bendis’ uneven tenure on the title in 2004–2012.

With a slightly different makeup from Bendis’ run, the group — now made up of Mister Fantastic, Iron Man, Beast, Black Bolt, Dr Strange, Black Panther and the Beast — has gathered with a single purpose. Black Panther has discovered that Earths from parallel universes are colliding with one another, leading to a cascading event that destroys both universes unless one Earth is destroyed in time. It’s a tight, claustrophobic book about existential terror.

Over in ‘The Avengers’ meanwhile, Iron Man and Captain America team up to “get bigger,” hiring over a dozen members, including old characters like Hawkeye and Captain Marvel and new ones like Sunspot and Hyperion. While the stated aim of this expansion is to combat the ever greater threats they face, it is gradually revealed that it is in fact a plan by Iron Man to ensure the world is protected while he and his fellow Illuminati members concentrate on the imminent end of the multiverse and the death of all reality.

Hickman came to the Avengers following a three-year run on the Fantastic Four (2009–2012) that was well- thought of at the time as one of the seminal runs with those characters and only holds up better in retrospect. His affinity for certain members of his cast is obvious and they are, in a way, the most un-Marvel of characters: gods and monsters rather than hard-up photographers trying to get by and save the day on the side. Despite the vast cast, the main characters effectively boil down to the pentagram of Captain America, Iron Man, Mister Fantastic, Black Panther and Namor, all characters with responsibilities and ideologies that draw sharp conflicts between their desires and duties.

Namor and Black Panther are particular examples of this: allying behind the scenes while their two nations wage explicitly genocidal wars against one another. T’Challa’s speech to Namor in the first issue is indicative:

“You have the blood of my people on your hands. So when this is done — when my wants have replaced my needs — I’m going to kill you.”

It’s cool, if that isn’t too mundane a word to use. But one of the pitfalls of being able to write cool, dramatic speeches is that the temptation arises to sprinkle it everywhere. And if that puts you off then you will definitely be put off by these comics. Although they are funnier, on a second or third read, than they initially appear, there is no doubt that there is a Shakespearean tendency to much of the dialogue.

It is a besetting feature of the comics. Many of the characters speak in the same way: grandly, ponderously and in booming tones (which you can hear even when they’re written down). It is not always helped that many of the characters have names which are nouns. Here is the character Ex Nihilo, characteristically explaining the origins of intelligent life during a lull in the fighting:

“At the dawn of everything were the Builders. They were the first race. The oldest living things in the cosmos. They were a perfect people — and for a great while they worshipped the mother-maker herself. The Universe. Eventually they grew beyond this — abandoning the old ways of reverence for the new path of relevance. As expansion and evolution occurred, the Builders created aggressive systems to direct, shape and control the very structure of space and time.”

This, sounding rather familiar, is Dr Strange pondering the decisions he has had to take recently:

“Monsters, Namor? Haven’t we always been? Men lording over the lives of their lessers? I wonder now, if the road I have traveled always led me here, were the choices along the way still all mine? I think they were. I’m not a victim. I’m not a pawn. I chose this. For they have always been the dark arts.”

Which, again, are all well and good but they both sound suspiciously like the narrator’s voice. Take this ending to ‘Avengers’ #4, which serves as a useful thematic summary of much of the narrative:

“It was the spark that started the fire. A legend that grew in the telling. The great idea was expansion. And it started with two men. One was life. And one was death.”

But this is really no more than a reflection of the way that literal existential hopelessness hangs over the books in a way not common for the genre. Indeed, the themes soon become so unspeakably vast — indeed, the plot of the ‘Infinity’ crossover revolves around the intergalactic Builders attempting to wipe out intelligent life, which is only a sideline to the real story of the early death of the multiverse — that the books themselves cannot contain it. Instead our characters become increasingly concerned about the personal choices each of them have made. By the final panel of ‘Avengers’ #44, Captain America and Iron Man are so busy arguing with one another over which of them lied to the other that they don’t do anything about the collapse and destruction of the final two universes in all of reality.

Too often, though, this gains the upper hand and it seems like Hickman has turned to these petty conflicts almost too much and beyond the level of plausibility. It seems that a great talent is wasting itself on setting up enormous stakes and having characters make sonorous speeches.

But I shouldn’t carp. Good comic writing, without the crass commercialism of a Mark Millar, the endless Aaron Sorkin-copying of Brian Michael Bendis or the needless gorey ‘edginess’ of Garth Ennis, is rare enough and we must take it as we find it. Needless to say, any comic which includes a moment where Doctor Doom stares down God and steals His power is worth a read. And the climactic ‘Secret Wars’ crossover is truly worth the price of admission. In a thrilling and satisfactory fashion, Hickman’s whole narrative amplifies the heroism and strangeness of his characters, emphasising what makes them fundamentally different from ‘ordinary’ people while never letting us forget what makes us find them heroic in the first place.