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

[vitruvian]

There is no drawing board. Since it is obvious what you think is wrong. :-)

I'm wrong to think the universe and multiverse existed stably for billions of years prior to FF #20 introducing the Molecule Men into the mix? Okay, what's the correct story, then? Was everything created at that moment by the Beyonders, with everybody's memories being false and every journey into the past using time travel past that point faked by them?

That is a very long shot. In QM there are Feynman's path integrals which are essentially a way of accounting for all the possible paths of a particle when doing calculations. The interpretation that the many different paths refer to different universes is just that, an interpretation, I would not say it naturally arises from the maths. In the context of String Theory, which I know next to nothing about, I heard that somebody interpreted the fact that you have tonnes of possible solutions as many different universes, all with its own tiny variations of the physical laws.

Yes, the Everett-Wheeler many worlds interpretation is just one interpretation, but one that the mathematics of quantum mechanics certainly allow for. Without a way of diving into the other legs of the trousers of time, or at least sneaking a peek at them, of course, it can't really be tested against the wave function collapse interpretation, but in the MU that's been amply tested by folks doing a lot of exactly that, particularly Uatu being a voyeur of these other worlds using the Time-Keeper device in the pages of What If?

Right. People have taken the many paths as a "many universes" perspective. But on top of that, there is a mathematical reasoning behind a multiverse. I have a manuscript that I saved, can't remember which journal it was published in. I'm not a theoretical physicist, so if anyone would like to clarify further, feel free.

My only point was that you could see how a SciFi or comics writer may get an idea fro branching realities without the use of time travel

The idea of branching realities and alternate histories goes back way before quantum physics in literature. In fact, invocation of some variation of modern physics including quantum physics to explain them goes back at least to De Camp's Wheels of If (1940), well before Everett formulated many worlds as a formal interpretation of quantum physics.

Well, I am an experimental particle physicist, so I do know some theory but of course not at that level,. Though, one thing I can say is that, given the lack of experimental constraints for these kind of theories (e.g. at the moment no one has really proposed anything that can be verified in an experiment on that front), there are tonnes of different interpretations/crazy theories. So, while somebody might have found a mathematical reasoning behind the existence of the Multiverse and published a paper about it, that doesn't mean that its true or even accepted by the rest of the theoretical community. Truly, if you search for theory papers online, you can find tonnes of WTF stuff.

About the 2nd point, yeah, sure, definitely agree with that.

Of course, this is precisely where the MU has the real world beat, in that they have multiple means of experimental confirmation of the many worlds interpretation.

[Biclopcicle]

The idea of branching realities and alternate histories goes back way before quantum physics in literature. In fact, invocation of some variation of modern physics including quantum physics to explain them goes back at least to De Camp's Wheels of If (1940), well before Everett formulated many worlds as a formal interpretation of quantum physics.

Thanks for the input. Not surprising that writers' imagination got them to that point without a scientific basis

[exiled]

you are wrong for thinking killing a MM means killing a universe.

[jackolover]

If you want to think that is the case, go ahead. Seeing Infinite futures there does not make me relate that to anything I see in Hickman's avengers run, much less the end of the Marvel 616 universe. What I see there has more to do with the plot point about the timestream being broken which he brought about in AoU. Besides, the story in which the wall appears is the one where the Avengers travelled to the future to see their kids fight against Ultron, with Kang interfering to defeat Ultron and nearly destroying the timestream already at that time, so it seems to me that it's simpler to relate it to that than to anything else.

I would also argue that Avengers #5, the comic in which that wall appears, was published around September-October 2010. Bendis would still write the Avengers regular series for a couple more years and then publish AoU in 2013. I really doubt Bendis would be aware (or anybody else for that matter) of what would be happening in 5 years. The only thing I can say is that originally AoU was supposed to release at a different time, and that this screwed with plans Bendis had, leaving the event to be the mess we all remember.

I saw a lot of collaboration between HICKMAN and Bendis in particular if you remember Secret Warriors was co written at the start, so I can easily believe Bendis pushing for Hickmans version of the future.

[jackolover]

Definitely agree with above, good summary of Hickman's F4/FF run.

However, when they "crushed" a Beyonder, they say he was from universe (xxx)." That makes me think that a) they didn't know Beyonders were multiversal beings b) it was a child Beyonder unique to that reality or c) Hickman had not yet invented the Ivory Kings

It could just simply be a Beyonder dabbling inside a Universe, like the one the Illuminati found in our Asteroid Belt.

[vitruvian]

It could just simply be a Beyonder dabbling inside a Universe, like the one the Illuminati found in our Asteroid Belt.

Do you mean the one that destroyed a galaxy to make the first Battleworld, summoned almost all the heroes and villains to fight there, then showed up on Earth wandering around in a Steve Rogers body with geri-curled Hasselhoff hair and a white gym suit pulling stunts like turning an office building into gold? That one?

Because referring to that Beyonder as the one found in the asteroid belt is kind of burying the lede...

[Sangreal12]

It could just simply be a Beyonder dabbling inside a Universe, like the one the Illuminati found in our Asteroid Belt.

Do you mean the one that destroyed a galaxy to make the first Battleworld, summoned almost all the heroes and villains to fight there, then showed up on Earth wandering around in a Steve Rogers body with geri-curled Hasselhoff hair and a white gym suit pulling stunts like turning an office building into gold? That one?

The mental image of a Beyonder dabbling inside a universe seems conspicuously similar to the Franklin scene at the end of Fantastic Four #574. "And even later that evening... All alone in his room... A little boy creates a baby universe." Skip ahead to FF v1 #33 and Franklin has this universe behind his closet door where he creates all these different lands and stories. Vegetarian Werewolves. Non-Pacifist Dragons. Super Heroes. Space Chickens. Herb-I-Pocalypse. Future Franklin then narrates, "This door... Is more than it appears to be."

Putting all these pieces together I think maybe Hickman has been writing the definitive comic on Franklin Richards. Franklin might just be one of these "child" Beyonders that we are hearing about. After all, his birth was complicated by the cosmic radiation in Sue's blood, and required Negative Zone shenanigans with Annihilus for a successful birth. Who knows what kind of being that might create.

So now you have Beyonders experimenting with life, and a child Beyonder that has been raised as human who understands the value of life. In Secret Wars #1 Franklin vanishes with the chunk of the life raft that got blown off. The next coherent image we see is the life raft crash landed on a chunk of land that is presumably Battleworld. I think in response to the end of everything, Franklin creates a reality to preserve life. This new reality is a reflection of his age and contains high adventure with myriad stories. This of course directly mirrors what Franklin did during the Onslaught event with the Heroes Reborn universe, which seems to me to be just the kind of thing Hickman likes to write. If I'm right about this, this whole storyline is really a perfect send-off to the history of the Marvel multiverse. Beautifully crafted Mr. Hickman. From a metafiction standpoint where Franklin represents the comic reader this is a story worthy of Grant Morrison.

P.S. Crisis on Infinite Earths just got owned.

P.S.S. I hope there is a Space Chicken land in Battleworld.

[jackolover]

The mental image of a Beyonder dabbling inside a universe seems conspicuously similar to the Franklin scene at the end of Fantastic Four #574. "And even later that evening... All alone in his room... A little boy creates a baby universe." Skip ahead to FF v1 #33 and Franklin has this universe behind his closet door where he creates all these different lands and stories. Vegetarian Werewolves. Non-Pacifist Dragons. Super Heroes. Space Chickens. Herb-I-Pocalypse. Future Franklin then narrates, "This door... Is more than it appears to be."

Putting all these pieces together I think maybe Hickman has been writing the definitive comic on Franklin Richards. Franklin might just be one of these "child" Beyonders that we are hearing about. After all, his birth was complicated by the cosmic radiation in Sue's blood, and required Negative Zone shenanigans with Annihilus for a successful birth. Who knows what kind of being that might create.

So now you have Beyonders experimenting with life, and a child Beyonder that has been raised as human who understands the value of life. In Secret Wars #1 Franklin vanishes with the chunk of the life raft that got blown off. The next coherent image we see is the life raft crash landed on a chunk of land that is presumably Battleworld. I think in response to the end of everything, Franklin creates a reality to preserve life. This new reality is a reflection of his age and contains high adventure with myriad stories. This of course directly mirrors what Franklin did during the Onslaught event with the Heroes Reborn universe, which seems to me to be just the kind of thing Hickman likes to write. If I'm right about this, this whole storyline is really a perfect send-off to the history of the Marvel multiverse. Beautifully crafted Mr. Hickman. From a metafiction standpoint where Franklin represents the comic reader this is a story worthy of Grant Morrison.

P.S. Crisis on Infinite Earths just got owned.

P.S.S. I hope there is a Space Chicken land in Battleworld.

It's not a bad theory. We'll see.

It's strange, if Franklin is a child Beyonder, why he hasn't been in contact with his elders, and why he didn't communicate with Battleworld Beyonder in the first Secret Wars?

[Rosebunse]

Did anyone else pick up on the cover of Secret Wars #3 showing the survivors of the Incursion?

[exiled]

Its amazing. The more I read this the more I learn. I just noticed that the Illuminati was prepared to destroy worlds right before they had noticed that they only less than two dozen Universes left. The Black Panther tried to steal or scuttle the Bombs so the illuminati could blackmail the UN to get Wakanda back and take the Cabal's place. This is also why they wanted Tony's files. This happens in the first 2 issues of TRO. We also know they were prepared to do this because they told us later they exhausted every option. So they were going to do exactly what Steve said...kill worlds. Granted Steve had no better answer. But they were going to do it until they realized there was no time left and it was pointless.

[exiled]

This is a great interview. Seems our questions from issue 33 will be answered! http://m.ign.com/articles/2015/05/12...arvel-universe

[jackolover]

I was more interested that the lead up Events changed Hickmans plot, because he had to replace Prof X with Beast, because Remender surprisingly killed Charles off. It is interesting that Hickman could address where the Phoenix egg comes from.

Then Hickman was shocked to realize Marvel ARE destroying the MU, as Marvel are so cautious. The big unanswered questioned is why did Marvel pick now to destroy the MU?

[Danny Wall]

So am I off base by writing it all out in a more linear way like this:
(originally posted at http://weeklycomicbookreview.com/201...-plot-summary/

Once Upon a Time in some universe Beyond us, some all-powerful beings existed as nothing but giant white light.

For some reason, these Beyonders looked upon the universes of universes and wanted to do an experiment. They wanted to cause the simultaneous death of everything in the multiverse.

So they constructed a singular being across all of space and time by using a small man named Owen. Everyone thought that Owen’s science experiment blew up in his face and gave him phenomenal power, but really it was the Beyonders “charging” him, all of the hims— simultaneously and across every reality, with a single consciousness shared throughout his infinite selves. They would be a bomb. When all the Owens died at once, all the universes would die, too.

No one really knew this, of course, because a future Owen traveled to a different Owen at the time of this origin and killed him, claiming a different story would grow out of it and become accepted as real.

Then, at some point, somewhere, one of the infinite Owens died early. This caused all the Owens to become unreliable and fractured. It also caused one universe to be destroyed. In whatever vacuum that resulted for such a thing, it caused a neighboring universe to collide with another— one Earth crashing into another Earth, an Incursion, destroying both universes. Like a domino effect, this caused yet more Incursions and hastened the death of everything.

The Beyonders realized that their experiment was going wrong but did not know why. So, in order to investigate they created beings called Mapmakers by first creating a virus that would attack robots. More specifically, this virus would take over artificial intelligences, or more specifically still, artificial intelligences that were capable of transuniversal travel. It just so happened that the Super-Adaptoids were such intelligences, and they all became Mapmakers. Their task was to chart worlds where Owens had died.

The Mapmakers started by making some robots for themselves, called the Sidera Maris or Bridge-Builders, in order to travel from world to world at the point of Incursions, even though the Mapmakers were robots specifically capable of transuniversal travel in the first place. When an Incursion would begin, the Sidera Maris would travel there making the Incursion event appear blue instead of its usual red, and would proceed to basically rip up and harvest all the stuff they could before allowing the Incursion to happen.

One of these Incursions happened over the land of Latveria, ruled by Dr. Doom, and the Mapmakers/Sidera Maris came to Earth, even though the Owen here didn’t die yet, and they wanted to do their chart-harvest thing. The Incursion was thwarted by the Avengers (really the Illuminati of the Avengers) and a some Mapmakers were destroyed. Dr. Doom managed to capture a beacon used by the Mapmakers, and with science discovered it matched the energies used by Owen, the Molecule Man. Doom used Owen to further investigate other Incursions, and Owen’s true nature asserted itself in a moment of lucidity.

Dr. Doom used his time machine to take this Owen to an origin of an alternate Owen, and thus that guy became the Owen from the future who killed him. Owen somehow knew everything about the Beyonders and Mapmakers and revealed it all to Doom at this point. He also guided Doom to a place called the Library of Worlds, which apparently is a place out of range from the Beyonders somehow or otherwise imperceptible to them.

Doom was told to continue killing Owens in order to stop the whole Beyonder-experiment thing from happening, even though the Incursions were already happening at this point anyway, and Owen inspired Doom to create a persona called Rabam Alal, the Great Destroyer. Doom as the Destroyer even created a religion and myth about this murderous process, gathering acolytes he called the Black Swans and equipping them to kill more Owens. Owen even helped in this process somehow, perhaps because of the time traveling, by creating superpowered teleporters called Manifolds that would instinctively know how to find Owens on their respective Earths. Thus, the Black Swans would travel to worlds, finding an Owen by way of a Manifold, and kill him, all while trying to flee or avoid the Mapmakers.

They also tried to avoid the Black Priests, strange men who all appear to be analogues/counterparts to our Earth’s Doctor Strange, formerly the Sorcerer Supreme. These guys somehow knew about all the Incursion stuff but not the truth about the Great Destroyer. They claimed to seek to destroy alter-Earths regardless of Incursion-times since any Incursion was a feature of unnatural imbalance to the normal course of multiverses. The Black Priests also were determined to seek out the Library of Worlds and the Black Swans for some reason, too.

However, one Black Swan that came to Earth actually wanted to destroy the Earth in order to prevent both Earths from annihilating each other. She claimed she was worshipping Rabam Alal even though this seemed to not follow any of what the “Great Destroyer” actually wanted to do, and Doom later referred to her and her kind as a schism/sect from his religion.

The Avengers/Illuminati first encountered this Black Swan as she tried to destroy our Earth, and thus learned of the Incursions but not much else. They kept trying to find ways to stop Incursions and to cut through the cryptic stuff the Black Swan kept saying, but everything they would try would always lead back to the conclusion that “Everything Dies.” It doesn’t matter asking “but what about X or Y” because just everything they would try would fail. It came to the point that they had to blow up a different Earth in order to save their own, and Captain America didn’t like that so his friends had his memories erased about the Illuminati and the Incursions. Eventually, the Illuminengers just allowed some powerful villains like Black Swan and Thanos and others in a Cabal to raze and destroy any worlds that began to Incursion our Earth so they wouldn’t have to.

Then, Captain America regained his memory when the secrets of the world were released because of some psychic explosion that happened when the cosmic Watcher was assassinated. Soon after this time, Sunspot used his family fortune to outright purchase AIM and turn their resources into trying to solve the Incursion problems. So Captain America took some Avengers and joined SHIELD and started chasing down the Illuminati-Avengers (and specifically Tony Stark) in order to beat him up, and Sunspot and some other Avengers gathered to fight both sides in order to calm everyone down.

At one point, Dr. Strange gave up his soul in exchange for great magical power, enough to destroy a world and prevent an Incursion, even though he never used it as such, and his soul-lessness made him appear like a Black Priest, whereupon at some point he somehow joined up with them all as their leader. Dr. Strange eventually found the Library and thus found Dr. Doom and the Molecule Man. Doom revealed all the information to Strange, as well as the fact that he had found the Beyonders, for all their power, could not time travel. Doom used this fact to create a giant box of something and shoot it at a rift in space where he could encounter the Beyonders directly, the result of which exploded everything into whiteness and collapsed the remaining number of universes in the infinite multiverse to just two.

The Reed Richards on the other, penultimate Earth referred to himself as the Maker, and since he was basically evil, he had been blowing up Incursion-worlds all this time with impunity. He of course tried to do that with our Earth, too, along with the Cabal who had ended up being trapped on that Earth after being betrayed by the Illuminati a couple of Incursions ago. The Avengers fought the Maker and his forces, but those who weren’t fighting were desperately trying to assemble people from around the world to make a “lifeboat”-slash-ark that could survive the inevitable destruction of everything.

During the smashing of the two final universes, the lifeboat was damaged and only several of the heroes on board remained to crash-land on whatever exists after all universes are destroyed.

Which turns out to be some kind of Battleworld… to be continued in Secret Wars.

[Moose100]

So am I off base by writing it all out in a more linear way like this:
(originally posted at http://weeklycomicbookreview.com/201...-plot-summary/

Once Upon a Time in some universe Beyond us, some all-powerful beings existed as nothing but giant white light.

For some reason, these Beyonders looked upon the universes of universes and wanted to do an experiment. They wanted to cause the simultaneous death of everything in the multiverse.

So they constructed a singular being across all of space and time by using a small man named Owen. Everyone thought that Owen’s science experiment blew up in his face and gave him phenomenal power, but really it was the Beyonders “charging” him, all of the hims— simultaneously and across every reality, with a single consciousness shared throughout his infinite selves. They would be a bomb. When all the Owens died at once, all the universes would die, too.

No one really knew this, of course, because a future Owen traveled to a different Owen at the time of this origin and killed him, claiming a different story would grow out of it and become accepted as real.

Then, at some point, somewhere, one of the infinite Owens died early. This caused all the Owens to become unreliable and fractured. It also caused one universe to be destroyed. In whatever vacuum that resulted for such a thing, it caused a neighboring universe to collide with another— one Earth crashing into another Earth, an Incursion, destroying both universes. Like a domino effect, this caused yet more Incursions and hastened the death of everything.

The Beyonders realized that their experiment was going wrong but did not know why. So, in order to investigate they created beings called Mapmakers by first creating a virus that would attack robots. More specifically, this virus would take over artificial intelligences, or more specifically still, artificial intelligences that were capable of transuniversal travel. It just so happened that the Super-Adaptoids were such intelligences, and they all became Mapmakers. Their task was to chart worlds where Owens had died.

The Mapmakers started by making some robots for themselves, called the Sidera Maris or Bridge-Builders, in order to travel from world to world at the point of Incursions, even though the Mapmakers were robots specifically capable of transuniversal travel in the first place. When an Incursion would begin, the Sidera Maris would travel there making the Incursion event appear blue instead of its usual red, and would proceed to basically rip up and harvest all the stuff they could before allowing the Incursion to happen.

One of these Incursions happened over the land of Latveria, ruled by Dr. Doom, and the Mapmakers/Sidera Maris came to Earth, even though the Owen here didn’t die yet, and they wanted to do their chart-harvest thing. The Incursion was thwarted by the Avengers (really the Illuminati of the Avengers) and a some Mapmakers were destroyed. Dr. Doom managed to capture a beacon used by the Mapmakers, and with science discovered it matched the energies used by Owen, the Molecule Man. Doom used Owen to further investigate other Incursions, and Owen’s true nature asserted itself in a moment of lucidity.

Dr. Doom used his time machine to take this Owen to an origin of an alternate Owen, and thus that guy became the Owen from the future who killed him. Owen somehow knew everything about the Beyonders and Mapmakers and revealed it all to Doom at this point. He also guided Doom to a place called the Library of Worlds, which apparently is a place out of range from the Beyonders somehow or otherwise imperceptible to them.

Doom was told to continue killing Owens in order to stop the whole Beyonder-experiment thing from happening, even though the Incursions were already happening at this point anyway, and Owen inspired Doom to create a persona called Rabam Alal, the Great Destroyer. Doom as the Destroyer even created a religion and myth about this murderous process, gathering acolytes he called the Black Swans and equipping them to kill more Owens. Owen even helped in this process somehow, perhaps because of the time traveling, by creating superpowered teleporters called Manifolds that would instinctively know how to find Owens on their respective Earths. Thus, the Black Swans would travel to worlds, finding an Owen by way of a Manifold, and kill him, all while trying to flee or avoid the Mapmakers.

They also tried to avoid the Black Priests, strange men who all appear to be analogues/counterparts to our Earth’s Doctor Strange, formerly the Sorcerer Supreme. These guys somehow knew about all the Incursion stuff but not the truth about the Great Destroyer. They claimed to seek to destroy alter-Earths regardless of Incursion-times since any Incursion was a feature of unnatural imbalance to the normal course of multiverses. The Black Priests also were determined to seek out the Library of Worlds and the Black Swans for some reason, too.

However, one Black Swan that came to Earth actually wanted to destroy the Earth in order to prevent both Earths from annihilating each other. She claimed she was worshipping Rabam Alal even though this seemed to not follow any of what the “Great Destroyer” actually wanted to do, and Doom later referred to her and her kind as a schism/sect from his religion.

The Avengers/Illuminati first encountered this Black Swan as she tried to destroy our Earth, and thus learned of the Incursions but not much else. They kept trying to find ways to stop Incursions and to cut through the cryptic stuff the Black Swan kept saying, but everything they would try would always lead back to the conclusion that “Everything Dies.” It doesn’t matter asking “but what about X or Y” because just everything they would try would fail. It came to the point that they had to blow up a different Earth in order to save their own, and Captain America didn’t like that so his friends had his memories erased about the Illuminati and the Incursions. Eventually, the Illuminengers just allowed some powerful villains like Black Swan and Thanos and others in a Cabal to raze and destroy any worlds that began to Incursion our Earth so they wouldn’t have to.

Then, Captain America regained his memory when the secrets of the world were released because of some psychic explosion that happened when the cosmic Watcher was assassinated. Soon after this time, Sunspot used his family fortune to outright purchase AIM and turn their resources into trying to solve the Incursion problems. So Captain America took some Avengers and joined SHIELD and started chasing down the Illuminati-Avengers (and specifically Tony Stark) in order to beat him up, and Sunspot and some other Avengers gathered to fight both sides in order to calm everyone down.

At one point, Dr. Strange gave up his soul in exchange for great magical power, enough to destroy a world and prevent an Incursion, even though he never used it as such, and his soul-lessness made him appear like a Black Priest, whereupon at some point he somehow joined up with them all as their leader. Dr. Strange eventually found the Library and thus found Dr. Doom and the Molecule Man. Doom revealed all the information to Strange, as well as the fact that he had found the Beyonders, for all their power, could not time travel. Doom used this fact to create a giant box of something and shoot it at a rift in space where he could encounter the Beyonders directly, the result of which exploded everything into whiteness and collapsed the remaining number of universes in the infinite multiverse to just two.

The Reed Richards on the other, penultimate Earth referred to himself as the Maker, and since he was basically evil, he had been blowing up Incursion-worlds all this time with impunity. He of course tried to do that with our Earth, too, along with the Cabal who had ended up being trapped on that Earth after being betrayed by the Illuminati a couple of Incursions ago. The Avengers fought the Maker and his forces, but those who weren’t fighting were desperately trying to assemble people from around the world to make a “lifeboat”-slash-ark that could survive the inevitable destruction of everything.

During the smashing of the two final universes, the lifeboat was damaged and only several of the heroes on board remained to crash-land on whatever exists after all universes are destroyed.

Which turns out to be some kind of Battleworld… to be continued in Secret Wars.

How do you think Fantastic Four, Future Foundation and his SHIELD series factor in? Secret Warriors as well.

[Triniking1234]

Did anyone else pick up on the cover of Secret Wars #3 showing the survivors of the Incursion?

I know. I think the panel with Miles surviving was in SW #1. Not sure how Teen Jean got through.