Avengers/New Avengers: Time Runs Out (with spoilers)

[JKtheMac]

I don't think that is accurate. <snip>

Just to add my reading to the mix because I only talked about this in the issue review threads. The idea of blue and red shift universes suggests relative movement. Hickman took great pains to highlight the two colours of incursions and Molecule Man referenced them on the page immediatley preceeding the image of the first red incursion.

So by my thinking: Molecule Man is a fixed point that anchors the multiversal timelines together. As long as there is a Molecule Man time remains stable across the Multiverse. If you kill a Molecule Man his remnant world is blue shifted. - Blue shifting implies motion towards the observer and most incursions are red shited which implies motion away from the observer.

By my way of thinking the multiverse is expanding in a simmilar way to the universe, and blue shift incursions represent a collapsing timeline.

Putting these two ideas together I think the blue shift worlds are contracting very slightly in their timeline after they have become uncoupled from the mutiverse. Once billions of these blue realities exist there is stress in the multiverse with the contracting timelines causing incursions. This in turn causes universes to totally collapse and has a further contracting effect on the timelines. This secondary contraction was what Reed noticed early on and is part of his diagram. He had no way of knowing at that stage that there was a primary reason for the contractions so he put it down to a single universe collapsing for unknown reasons.

[vitruvian]

So, based on that theory, The Beyonders started the incursions by destroying the universes where MM had already been killed because those univeres would not explode when MM became terminal? Which is why they used the Mapmakers to find all the worlds where MM was dead and destroy them as well as search for the Swans (who were killing MM)

That could work, but it requires the Beyonders to have noticed that a lot of Molecule Men were gone from universes at 7 years, not 10, otherwise they don't start causing the Incursions at 7 years. That also means they need to start the red Incursions three years before they set the Mapmakers loose and you get the blue ones. And why would the Incursions go beyond the tiny fraction of universes where the Molecule Man had been killed? Did they become self-sustaining rather than something the Beyonders were directly causing once a certain threshold had been reached? Because every universe destroyed in a completed Incursion (and remember, we're not just going on Black Swan's word for that part, the Illuminati observed it through the Bridge) is one more universe that can't go off at the end....

There's also the issue that the Mapmakers were hopping from universe to universe, destroying the dead Earths they were hopping from... which prevents the Incursion from completing and preserves the universe they just left, at least for a period of time. That would mean the Mapmakers' modus operandi was designed to leave universes without Molecule Men intact except for Earth, which doesn't really fit with your theory.

[ShaokhaN]

I thought I'd copy here a few remarks I made in another thread with regards to the flaws I see with Hickman's Avengers work. It still is an enjoyable read to an extent, but to me it's so much less than it could have been due to some of these issues.

1. Terrible dialog.

One of the issues I have is that Hickman is having a hard time writing intelligent characters. Indeed, a good number of his high-intellect characters often use extremely convoluted and obscure sentences, in order to give an impression of brilliance or deepness, when in reality what they're saying is very basic and could be expressed with simple sentences. Let's take two examples:

Avengers #39 (& #40): Reed Richard's cringeworthy "strategic lesson" to Valeria is full of sentences constructed to give an impression of deep insight, when in reality all they refer to is simple concepts like "stay focused", "remain calm" and "be flexible". As someone who actually works in security/strategic studies, his speech was painful to read. He begins by "I think it's important that we begin with the ideological underpinnings of executing proper game theory." - "Which is, I suppose, a cumbersome way of saying 'Know who you are, Valeria.' As your personality will define how you naturally construct a plan." The character himself acknowledges how unnecessarily cumbersome his initial phrasing was, but the funny thing is that his initial sentence does not exactly mean the same thing as his paraphrase, or at least "game theory" is referred to pretty improperly as synonymous to "strategic planning" (game theory is the study of strategic decisions, not the making of strategic decisions).

NA #30: Pym explains his journey through the multiverse. He starts with sentences like "I found something much worse. White lords of white spaces, questing for the last light. Do you understand it now?". Note that he could have said "I found immensely powerful beings who exist outside of normal universes and who want to destroy the multiverse" - who the hell would use the phrase "question for the last light"? Sure, you can blame it on him being disorientated after coming back to Earth-616, but let's face it, nobody speaks like that. It gets worse later, when in the middle of his explanations about jumping to the location of the ivory kings, he says "It's not madness to look at things hidden and believe they shouldn't be found". Braddock arrives, and continues: "He's saying that if you truly want to keep something a secret, you don't dig a shallow grave... You bury it deep. [...] He's saying it was a trap." The two ideas are first put forward in a completely unnecessarily complicated way, and the characters end up phrasing their point in a much simpler way immediately after, exactly like in Reed's case.

If you pay attention to the other issues, you'll see that this is constantly the case whenever Hickman is trying to pass off something as deep (whether in terms of technical complexity or of insight about one's self). His Avengers/NA story is full of exchanges between characters that are at their core pretty empty in terms of content, but still use considerable space because of how convoluted he makes the discussion. It's a really shallow way of attempting to feature "deepness", and during these moments many of his intelligent characters basically sound exactly like each other and nothing like their true selves.

2. Sub-par characterization.

Simply put, the characters just aren't themselves in this story. We've discussed at length Cap's descend into the incarnation of pettiness and self-absorption, but just as terrible is his treatment of Reed Richards, who's been portrayed as so incredibly stupid that he did not even think of building a bridge (something he came up with himself almost right before the events of Hickman's arc) before the Black Swan told him to, even though he already knew he was dealing with a multiversal catastrophe. Around the time of the confrontation with the Justice Society, Reed was portrayed as constantly sulking and depressed, with little justification as to why we did not see him working non-stop to find a solution. Him giving up for the supposedly final incursion (which ended up being resolved by the newly-formed Cabal) and visiting his children without telling his family anything was also very contrived (he does have a habit of keeping things to himself, but not exactly in such circumstances).

Don't get me wrong, there have been quite a few nice character moments, for example with Smasher, Canonball and their baby, but the huge number of (hero) characters involved in the story have made it difficult to be invested in those many secondary characters, and the latter's nice moments can be bittersweet: even when these secondary characters have well-written moments you still feel like you're reading non-essential stuff, with the actual storyline not progressing much at all, adding to the frustration. This brings me to my next point:

3. Utterly terrible pacing.

My god, I've been reading this since issue #1 of both Avengers and NA, and the pacing has just been outrageously terrible. I suspect interference from Marvel played quite a role in this flaw, but Hickman is clearly also to blame. Sometimes the plot takes ages to move forward, and suddenly in one issue huge events are covered. He inserts "character moments" right after a main story cliffhanger from the previous issue, meaning we're left frustrated that we still don't know what the hell happened. For a similar problem, see Avengers #36, dealing with the Thor & Hyperion team jumping through AIM's portal. We knew from Avengers #35 that they were going to go through (the final page is Thor & Hyperion discussing the upcoming journey). Avengers #36 then opens with a nice character moment for Canonball & Smasher, then moves to two almost pointless pages with Sunspot, and finally the words "Open the access door" are spoken, and they appear on the page while Thor, Hyperion & the others are walking towards the portal. This is less than halfway into the issue. Are they finally going to go through the portal and let us see what's on the other side? No! The entirety of the rest of the issue is basically Thor's group walking in slow motion towards the access door, while we see character flashbacks. By the time we reach the final page of the issue, they still haven't gotten through (or just barely). Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy seeing Thor and Hyperion interact as brothers, and seeing the characters have to make the difficult choice to jump into the unknown added to our desire to see them succeed. But it's paced horribly, and this over-reliance on the use of flashback builds a frustration of not seeing things progress in the present. Hickman should have shown us the characters making that difficult choice FIRST (perhaps even in the previous issue), and then moved on to the scene with them approaching the portal (and he could frankly have left us with a view of what appeared on the other side as a cliff hanger). Another typical example is the whole confrontation with the Justice Society. This dragged on for SIX issues, not even counting NA #22 and the post-destruction interaction between the Illuminati. Again, there is very valid justification for going slowly here, since the debate of whether or not to destroy an inhabited planet was at the core of the arc (and we witnessed passionated discussions on the topic on these forums issue after issue). Yet it was still handled very clumsily by Hickman, who again inserted several flashbacks and unnecessary scenes which stretched out the arc even further. NA #20 was a fantastic issue, full of tension, but I was expecting that fight to come earlier (as the covers seemed to indicate), and I distinctly remember a few other posters and myself were going crazy that nothing had yet happened by NA #19.

4. Exposition: the comic.

This brings me to one of the most important flaws in Hickman's storytelling: the omnipresent reliance on exposition through flashbacks and character explanations. This overabundance kills momentum and pace, and to a large extent also defuses much of the tension we could have felt by witnessing these events live. A good example of this is Pym's story of his journey through the multiverse. Can you imagine seeing him go through this journey without knowing that he was alive and well, explaining everything to Reed & co? Well, we had to rush through his summarized narration of the whole thing because Hickman wasted so much time elsewhere that he could not develop what would arguably have been one of the most effective way to build up a sentiment of utter hopelessness into the reader. Sure, by the time Pym is done narrating we know that the Beyonders are extremely powerful and that things are looking grim. It was still way less impressive than going through the whole Celestial genocide live. Sometimes, Hickman's reliance on flashback not only reduces the tension but also hurts the story itself: people rightly complained for a long time here that we hadn't seen the Illuminati try much to actually solve incursions. We saw them look through the bridge prior to the Justice Society incursion, and Reed mentioned during the Galactus incursion (if I'm not mistaken) that him and T'Challa had come up with possible plans, including one involving the Ultimate Nullifier (of which we never heard anything else again), but that was basically it until NA #38 and Reed explaining to Cap they had tried a few solutions. How about showing those when they happened instead of after the fact? This would have helped increase the tension and the threat looming over our heroes, but it would also have helped us root for them because they were actually trying. Instead, we had the whole ridiculous Rogers/SHIELD vs Illuminati travesty of a plot occupy us for several issues.

[ShaokhaN]

5. Underwhelming threats/villains.

I don't know about you guys, but when I saw Black Swan mention in NA #12 that the Builders were nothing compared to the Mapmakers and the Black Priests, I felt like these were going to be huge bad guys, multiversal threats beyond much of what our heroes had faced before. This was solidified in NA #13, in which we saw Black Priests take out an alt-Earth's heroes like they were nothing, including Magneto, Xavier, Cap. Mar-Vell and Black Bolt. Then came NA #14, in which we saw Mapmakers, who wiped the floor with another alt-Illuminati... yet weirdly enough an alt-Doom managed to take apart one of them through apparent brute force. Suddenly, Mapmakers were taken down a notch - a regular non-cosmic augmented Doom could take one of them out one-on-one without preparation (don't get me wrong, I love Doom, but that scene was an indication that Mapmakers weren't THAT much above the heroes in terms of power). Three issues later, in NA #17, four Mapmakers were handily defeated by the Justice Society - one by Boundless (Flash), the others by Sun God. I'm sorry, but at this point I simply no longer saw Mapmakers as particularly threatening - sure, they were tough, but nothing like some of the bad guys our heroes had faced in the past. Suddenly, Black Swan's warnings were not that intimidating anymore. Later on, we saw that Dr. Strange was somehow much more powerful than the Black Priests because he could "speak all the words" (even though he was still supposed to be less powerful than the entity which could have given him more power had he had a full soul to sell).

At this point, we still had the Great Destroyer and the Ivory Kings as perceived immensely dangerous threats. Well, now we know the Great Destroyer is Doom... ok, familiar and underwhelming reveal, and he's no longer an actual threat since he's working against the Beyonders. So now only they remain, and Pym's issue really showed us how powerful they were, taking down the Living Tribunal. Now that is a threat! ...except the next thing we see is Thor's group being able to take out two of them through what was, at the very least, profound stupidity from the Beyonders (completely underestimating the beings they were facing AND attacking them in their weakest state). Finally, we learn from Doom that they are "linear", "constrained to their own sequential timeline". We're not really sure what that means and how that's even possible (considering even the fact that the original Beyonder brought Doom to Battleworld from a different time than the others), but their main weakness has just been revealed to us and we're not even sure they're still there after Doom's time-machine assault.

The only thing that remains are incursions, which basically have huge plot armor because, let's face it, it's extremely contrived that the heroes did not find a solution to the incursion problem, or at least something better than a lifeboat.

6. Plot issues.

This may again in part be due to interference from Marvel, but beyond issues of pace and structure, the story Hickman is telling is suffering from pretty significant weaknesses. Back in Infinity, for example, the fact that the Builders basically invaded every single empire in the universe (and even stopped their fleet to do so) prior to reaching Earth was pretty ridiculous when Earth's destruction was supposed to be basically their single important objective. Probably the most important issue for me is the extremely convoluted (again) reveal that the Beyonders' entire plan was to create the Molecule Man as a multiversal constant, making him into a bomb that would explode twenty-five years (?) later in order to annihilate the multiverse. Seriously, how immensely stupid is this plan? First, why make him a time bomb? Why not simply blow up the multiverse when you want to? Second, I honestly have some trouble seeing Reece as a multiversal constant given some of the alternate universes we've seen in the past. Third, the relation between a given Reece's health and the state of his universe (and even incursions themselves) is still pretty obscure. If he's a time bomb, does taking him out of a universe mean that that universe is safe (at least from him, maybe not from incursions)? Should stars still be dying in the 616-universe after Reece left it? If so, why? What's the delay - and why is there a delay - between the death of a Reece and the destruction of his universe (we know it's not instantaneous due to Swans going to kill them and leaving their universes afterwards)? The same goes for the explanation between the existence of Mapmakers - according to Doom, they were created by the Beyonders in order to "chart worlds where Molecule Men had died. Marking the movements of [his] swans, seeding sacrifice worlds, and preserving future incursion worlds". This doesn't make much sense, at least at this point. It indicates that a MM's death does not lead to immediate destruction of that MM's universe, otherwise it wouldn't be possible for the Mapmakers to chart their worlds. What is "seeding sacrifice worlds" supposed to mean? How are they "preserving future incursion worlds"? Do the Beyonders not have the power to stop incursions? Did they at no point try to understand why their bombs were being murdered? Finally, Doom's motivations for murdering Molecule Men are still a mystery to me: if killing them results in universes dieing (and eventually incursions starting), how is that a positive outcome from Doom's point of view? This is alluded to in NA #33, when Strange asks Doom "How in any way is what you're doing better than them if the end result is the same?", to which Doom replies "Ask yourself, Doctor... Would it be worth it if we could avoid our certain doom? If we could save... something?" Uh, sure it would, but that doesn't explain why killing MM's and beginning incursions helped in any way. Why did Doom not simply study the Beyonders and build his time-machine weapon to destroy them without going through the trouble of destroying much of the multiverse prior to the date the Beyonders had fixed?

I suppose (I hope) this will be explained later, but I fear it's again going to be shoe-horned/explained to us by a character. So far, the foundations of the plot are pretty weak. What a letdown.

Also worth mentioning is the big Cap - Tony reveal that Tony "knew all along" that there was no hope. This is completely ludicrous considering there was no possible way for him to know that there was no hope, and the sentence itself is nonsensical, considering we know that Doom has been doing some stuff to oppose the Beyonders and that things are going to happen with Battleworld.

[vitruvian]

I don't think that is accurate. Someone just gave me a different perspective. Killing MM didn't directly cause the incursions. Killing MM caused the Beyonders to take notice that someone (or something) was screwing with their plans.

It's an interesting theory, but that's all it is. It is nowhere directly stated in this issue that the Beyonders are deliberately causing the Incursions in order to try to salvage their experiment. Also, if that's true, we need an answer for why they're using Incursions to destroy many more universes than Doom and the Swans have had a chance to kill; for example, why they've sent Incursions against realities like that of Earth-616, which still had a Molecule Man. That seems to go against their desire to have all the universes (that they can manage, anyway) die at one time at the end of the 25 years, doesn't it?

That's why MM said Doom would be sending a message and why he drew the symbol on the floor. The Beyonders realized something was working against them and destroyed the earth where MM had already died (because those universes would not be destroyed when MM went terminal). That is what started the incursions and the more MM Doom killed (using the Swans), the more earths the Beyonders (now using the Mapmakers) destroyed.

One, we're told that the Beyonders don't realize something is seriously wrong with their experiment until 10 years, while the Incursions start at 7 years. Two, as mentioned above, destroying universes that still have a Molecule Man, which is certainly happening if Incursions happen on worlds such as Earth-616, would be counterproductive to their goal. And finally, remember when the Earth is destroyed, the Incursion is halted and the rest of the universe remains (probably until Doom throws a big stack of whatevers against the Beyonders in this issue), so the Mapmakers' modus operandi would run counter to the goal of eliminating universes that don't have a Molecule Man 'bomb' any longer.

[Biclopcicle]

Just to add my reading to the mix because I only talked about this in the issue review threads. The idea of blue and red shift universes suggests relative movement. Hickman took great pains to highlight the two colours of incursions and Molecule Man referenced them on the page immediatley preceeding the image of the first red incursion.

So by my thinking: Molecule Man is a fixed point that anchors the multiversal timelines together. As long as there is a Molecule Man time remains stable across the Multiverse. If you kill a Molecule Man his remnant world is blue shifted. - Blue shifting implies motion towards the observer and most incursions are red shited which implies motion away from the observer.

By my way of thinking the multiverse is expanding in a simmilar way to the universe, and blue shift incursions represent a collapsing timeline.

Putting these two ideas together I think the blue shift worlds are contracting very slightly in their timeline after they have become uncoupled from the mutiverse. Once billions of these blue realities exist there is stress in the multiverse with the contracting timelines causing incursions. This in turn causes universes to totally collapse and has a further contracting effect on the timelines. This secondary contraction was what Reed noticed early on and is part of his diagram. He had no way of knowing at that stage that there was a primary reason for the contractions so he put it down to a single universe collapsing for unknown reasons.

I like your notion of why there are blue and red shifts, but we know that Doom was acting alone for seven years before incursions began. No way he killed billions before the incursions began. If he killed 1000 in five years, he likely killed about 1400 in seven years

Edit: I still believe that killing a MM takes away his universe, but I don't think that contradicts the notion of a dead MM universe being a blue incursion. In fact, we know that mapmakers were tracking MM killers via blue incursions.

I guess one caveat to your theory is that only one world has to be a dead MM world for a blue incursion to occur, since 616 experienced at least 2 blue incursions but their MM is currently alive

[vitruvian]

That wasn't my point. The nature of the Multiverse in Marvel is based on the branching consequences model which is analagous to their early approach to time travel. Their multiverse has always been described and discussed as analogous to time travel. As opposed to the DC approach which are often entirely different universes with less evidence of specific branching points. There are examples in both that break this disparity, but generally this holds true.

I don't really see What If? worlds where events just took a different path as analogous to meddling by time travelers much at all. It's more that the multiverse usually handles meddling by time travelers by taking advantage of its already branching nature. The fact that the time travel in Age of Ultron was actually changing the past of the same reality, rather than creating new legs in the trousers of time, was why it was breaking things rather than being handled just fine.

And we have seen other types of realities in the Marvel multiverse where any branch point is hard to define, even if there are analogues to the Earth-616 characters. E.g., there's no identifiable divergence point for, say, the steampunk world with its Madelyne Pryor analogue as the Queen seen in X-Man, from Earth-616's history.

[vitruvian]

Just to add my reading to the mix because I only talked about this in the issue review threads. The idea of blue and red shift universes suggests relative movement. Hickman took great pains to highlight the two colours of incursions and Molecule Man referenced them on the page immediatley preceeding the image of the first red incursion.

So by my thinking: Molecule Man is a fixed point that anchors the multiversal timelines together. As long as there is a Molecule Man time remains stable across the Multiverse. If you kill a Molecule Man his remnant world is blue shifted. - Blue shifting implies motion towards the observer and most incursions are red shited which implies motion away from the observer.

Of course, there's a big problem with that. In a red Incursion, if the two Earths are red shifted with respect to each other, then they're moving away from each other, never meet, and the Incursion by definition never completes. Since we know that's not the case, it's not actually a red shift in that sense.

By my way of thinking the multiverse is expanding in a simmilar way to the universe, and blue shift incursions represent a collapsing timeline.

Putting these two ideas together I think the blue shift worlds are contracting very slightly in their timeline after they have become uncoupled from the mutiverse. Once billions of these blue realities exist there is stress in the multiverse with the contracting timelines causing incursions. This in turn causes universes to totally collapse and has a further contracting effect on the timelines. This secondary contraction was what Reed noticed early on and is part of his diagram. He had no way of knowing at that stage that there was a primary reason for the contractions so he put it down to a single universe collapsing for unknown reasons.

Doom and the Swans did not directly kill billions of Molecule Men, however, and the Incursions started with the red ones, which are not really explained by this model.

[Biclopcicle]

I don't really see What If? worlds where events just took a different path as analogous to meddling by time travelers much at all. It's more that the multiverse usually handles meddling by time travelers by taking advantage of its already branching nature. The fact that the time travel in Age of Ultron was actually changing the past of the same reality, rather than creating new legs in the trousers of time, was why it was breaking things rather than being handled just fine.

And we have seen other types of realities in the Marvel multiverse where any branch point is hard to define, even if there are analogues to the Earth-616 characters. E.g., there's no identifiable divergence point for, say, the steampunk world with its Madelyne Pryor analogue as the Queen seen in X-Man, from Earth-616's history.

Looking at theoretical particle and astrophysics will, I think, explain the nature of alternate realities outside of time travel a little bit better.

In quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger wave equation explains the probabilities of a quantum particle's location and momentum. When the particle is observed, the wave equation "collapses" and the particle is no longer a wave probability, but a discrete particle.

Some scientists believe that each possibility that particle has is actually played out, but in different realities. I'm not sure if anyone has directly tied this in with the fact that the math in quantum mechanics also allows for self-contained universes to spontaneously arise.


...anyway, different choices along a given decision tree can account for alternate realities without time travel. That is essentially a "What If?" Story.

But I agree there doesn't really have to be an obvious branch point for alternate universes to arise. This could be analogous to evolutionary convergence, where two species evolved similar structures or functions but by different paths. Like bat wings and bird wings; steam punk iron man and 616 iron man

[Biclopcicle]

Of course, there's a big problem with that. In a red Incursion, if the two Earths are red shifted with respect to each other, then they're moving away from each other, never meet, and the Incursion by definition never completes. Since we know that's not the case, it's not actually a red shift in that sense.



Doom and the Swans did not directly kill billions of Molecule Men, however, and the Incursions started with the red ones, which are not really explained by this model.

I think what he's saying is that the blues and reds are with regards to dead Molecule Man as being the reference point for all incursions. A little tricky to work out the technicalities, but well, we just don't really have Hickman's actual explanation at this time and may never get it

[JKtheMac]

Of course, there's a big problem with that. In a red Incursion, if the two Earths are red shifted with respect to each other, then they're moving away from each other, never meet, and the Incursion by definition never completes. Since we know that's not the case, it's not actually a red shift in that sense.

Indeed you are correct. The shifting is an analogy only. If you try and work the model too closely it falls apart. But this isn't physics, this is just a storytelling technique.

Doom and the Swans did not directly kill billions of Molecule Men, however, and the Incursions started with the red ones, which are not really explained by this model.

I think they did kill billions. I don't doubt the words on the page. By the time they are used Molecule man is more like his jibbering self but we are talking a very large multiverse and if Molecule Man expects it to take billions and states it needs to be an order of magnitude higher than millions why doubt him just because it seems a lot.

I think the incursions starting with the red ones is deliberate. It implies the stress is applied all across the multiverse not just in the areas of contraction. The red shift first was in my opinion a signifier that the blue shift worlds won't immediately become incursions, and that the remaining majority of universes will still collapse even if the blue ones are somehow fixed or destroyed. I also think the map-makers would have asertained the patterns much more easily if that happened.

[JKtheMac]

I don't really see What If? worlds where events just took a different path as analogous to meddling by time travelers much at all. It's more that the multiverse usually handles meddling by time travelers by taking advantage of its already branching nature. The fact that the time travel in Age of Ultron was actually changing the past of the same reality, rather than creating new legs in the trousers of time, was why it was breaking things rather than being handled just fine.

And we have seen other types of realities in the Marvel multiverse where any branch point is hard to define, even if there are analogues to the Earth-616 characters. E.g., there's no identifiable divergence point for, say, the steampunk world with its Madelyne Pryor analogue as the Queen seen in X-Man, from Earth-616's history.

I wasn't using the world meddling. I am not directly saying that every Universe is the result of time travel. I am saying that every universe is theoretically a branching point in the marvel model. That is why there are a near infinite amount of them as oppesed to DCs dozens.

[Biclopcicle]

Indeed you are correct. The shifting is an analogy only. If you try and work the model too closely it falls apart. But this isn't physics, this is just a storytelling technique.




I think they did kill billions. I don't doubt the words on the page. By the time they are used Molecule man is more like his jibbering self but we are talking a very large multiverse and if Molecule Man expects it to take billions and states it needs to be an order of magnitude higher than millions why doubt him just because it seems a lot.

I think the incursions starting with the red ones is deliberate. It implies the stress is applied all across the multiverse not just in the areas of contraction. The red shift first was in my opinion a signifier that the blue shift worlds won't immediately become incursions, and that the remaining majority of universes will still collapse even if the blue ones are somehow fixed or destroyed. I also think the map-makers would have asertained the patterns much more easily if that happened.

If Doom can kill 1000 MMs in 5 years, that's 200/yr. He's been at it for 13 years. So that's 2600 MMs by himself. Let's say he has a legion of 10,000 swans. The first one didn't arrive until year 8. To maximize the model, let's say all 10,000 joined year 8, none died, and none left. 10,000x5x200=10,000,000. That's a ton, but its not billions. Its more likely the exponential increase of universes destroyed through incursions killed most of the molecule men.

[JKtheMac]

This gives me an excuse to link one of my favourite double page spreads. The Branching of the Multiverse in action from All-New X-Men Annual V2014:
Digital Annual All-New X-Men Annual V2014 #1 - The Secret Life of Eva Bell Part 2 (2015_2) - Pag.jpg

[Biclopcicle]

As an aside, I think its interesting the council of Reeds never discovered multiversal collapse. Incursions should have been well underway by then...