What a strange era of Avengers this was, and a strange era of the Marvel universe in general.
As usual, Hickman goes big with his version of the Avengers with a greatly expanded team up against the highest stakes possible, the fate of the entire multiverse, in a long and very complex epic cosmic saga that spans almost 100 issues altogether. I suppose the one downside is that with the cast and the scale of the conflict being so big, the story doesn’t take much time for character drama. Mostly it deals in massive battles and Hickman’s usual brand of heavily explained fantasy science.
What character focus we do see tends to revolve around the choices the Illuminati team wrestle with in the background. How far are superheroes willing to go to protect their Earth when the situation involves two dimensions colliding at the Earth point and both being completely destroyed if one of the Earths isn’t destroyed first? Some big name heroes end up getting involved in some uncharacteristically dark things and I suppose that could be off-putting to some, but in the end it doesn’t much matter when almost all of the plot is undone in the end, because of course they weren’t going to just leave it at “SORRY GUYS! WHOLE MARVEL EXISTENCE IS JUST DESTROYED!”.
Still, if you like big cosmic superhero shit involving alternate realities and tons of conflict and drama where just about everyone dies (but not really), it’s sure got plenty of that, and was done quite well if you ask me. Even the parts that got sucked into being big universe-wide events, Infinity and Secret Wars, were really good and had an amazingly low level of the usual company event type interference. It’s just too bad that Hickman seems to have had enough of Marvel after all this. I would have loved to have seen him on an Iron Man book.
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