Avengers Forever

Avengers Forever by Kurt Busiek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Immortus wants Rick Jones dead. The Kree Supreme Intelligence empowers Rick to summon an all-star team of Avengers from throughout time to stop them. But will even Hawkeye, Giant-Man, Wasp, Yellowjacket, Captain America, Captain Marvel, and Songbird be enough to stop Immortus, even with Kang on their side?

There are rumors that Avengers Forever will be the basis for the fourth Avengers movie so I snapped this up on the cheap when I stumbled upon it at MightyCon a few weeks ago. It was easily worth my ten bucks.

Avengers Forever feels a lot like one of the episodes of Doctor Who when multiple Doctors team up or a Michael Moorcock book when aspects of the Eternal Champion meet. In short, serious shit is brewing and it takes a specific crew to settle things. Yellowjacket is snatched before he marries the Wasp. Hawkeye is plucked from just after the Kree-Skrull War. Captain Marvel and Songbird are from points in the future. Captain America is from just after witnessing the Secret Empire head kill himself in the White House. Giant-Man and the Wasp are from a point after their divorce when Wasp is leading the team.

I thought it was weird having two versions of Hank Pym on the team but I was confident Kurt Busiek would show me the way. The scribe of Astro City has recently risen quite a bit in my esteem. Anyway, a lot of timey-wimey stuff goes down. The Avengers are scattered across three time periods and encounter Skrulls, Space Phantoms, and betrayal by one of their own before saving the day.

It turns out Immortus has been manipulating the Avengers quite a bit since their inception, which serves to iron out some weird loopholes and paradoxes in Avengers history, like Iron Man turning heel in the 1990s and being replaced by a teenage version of himself, and whether or not Vision was created from the original Human Torch's body. It also sorts out some of the continuity of Rama Tut, Kang, and Immortus' appearances in 50 years of Marvel history at that point.

The ending was pretty satisfying, a battle royal featuring thousands of Avengers. It also served to launch Peter David's Captain Marvel series and bring the 1950s Avengers into canon as the Agents of Atlas. My only real gripe is that it wound up being more of a Kang vs. Immortus story rather than an Avengers story. Still, it was a lot of fun and some of the better straight-up super hero comics of the time period. Four out of five stars.

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