Comics Review – New Avengers: The Illuminati

Recently I hit the end of several comic series and worlds I liked, and I have been exploring some other offerings. It’s a great time to be getting into comics right now, because apps making it easy to get comics, and the comics are restarting their series.

Better yet, we’re a little bit into that – there are a handful of a number of the new Marvel comics, enough to feel like I can get a sense of them. And you can too!

One that I found the initial links to, and which I found had returned in an interesting way, was the Marvel Illuminati. Who would the Illuminati be in the Marvel Universe? Well I’ll tell you! Spoilers ahead for the New Avengers!

New Avengers: Illuminati

The Illuminati was a 5-part series that was written a few years back (2007) that basically ret-conned the existence of a group of Illuminati heroes into the Marvel past. This group consisted of:

• Professor X
• Mr. Fantastic
• Dr. Strange
• Namor
• Black Bolt
• Iron Man

So, a storied group of heroes, some I knew better than others.  All pretty powerful and intelligent in their own right. Heavy leaders in the hero world. Then, they were involved in various important events, including the Skrull, the Infinity Gauntlet, the Beyonder, and finally, leading into the Secret Invasion – which the Illuminati kind of caused.

Whoops.

So, one of the interesting take-aways – especially with Thanos coming in the upcoming Marvel movies – was the Infinity Gauntlet. The Illuminati collected the gems, divided them between each other, and protected them so that villains couldn’t have them.

And that’s where I found the New Avengers.

New Avengers

What caught my eye, looking at new comics, was the bling of the Infinity Gems on the cover. The New Avengers is, entirely so far, an Illuminati comic.  The group has changed only slightly, adding the Black Panther, and with Professor X dead, the Beast.

So, after what happened in X-Treme X-Men and X-Termination, I am kind of expecting this comic to also be a short run – maybe a year or so. Because once again, there’s a big, universe-ending threat.

It’s interesting – this group was created to get together only for the biggest threats. So, to make an ongoing comic about these characters with a singular plot, there had to be something like the biggest threat ever. That is also ongoing.

So, they did that.

The multiverse is bumping into each other, exploding universe by universe, based around the Earth. So all of a sudden, saving the world is also part of saving the universe, which is also part of saving the multiverse.

There are folks working on doing this on the other Earths, which are bumping into Earth-616 (the main Marvel universe), including Galactus, and some new characters. They have an opportunity to pull in all the biggest villains, alternate versions of themselves, their current world villains who would try to capitalize on it, current world heroes who disapprove… Anything epic you want to.

So I’m excited to see where this goes. Oh, and you don’t have to have read the older Illuminati comic – yes, they had the Infinity Gems, but no, they weren’t much of a solution. Kind of a let-down, actually; though, if they had solved it all magically, it wouldn’t have been a very long comic!

Want to know more? Want to understand the mechanics of their problem? Well, they helped us out with a handy graphic! Thanks, Reed Richards!