New Avengers 30 *spoilers*

[emac1790]

Cyclops' Phoenix egg and Nation X are so far only shown in pages of Time Runs Out. Nothing happened in Uncanny X-Men or somewhere else.

Thanks. That's good to know.

[eaebiakuya]

True, but judging (from the massive power of the Beyonders) Hickman is most likely going to put him back in his pre-retcon levels of power or at least something close to it.

Context is needed about Sentry vs Molecule Man. Molecule man power level change because his mental state, since he first apparition. In the fight against Sentry he was in a very bad mental state and dont even showed planetary level of power.

[Bookem Danno]

I will say this: I don't mind an exposition heavy story here or there in a large serialized story. Battlestar Galactica had a few and it turned out ok. Typically every tv show heading into the finale has an exposition heavy episode right near the end. Nearly every comic that makes the all time best lists has an exposition heavy issue heading into the final arcs. That happens. The problem here is that this didn't need to be so exposition heavy. All of what happened was condensed to exposition to save a few key dramatic reveals.

Something was off. This lends to the gist of my disappointment here.

Also, I'm glad they un-retconned the retcon of the 1984 Beyonder being a mutant inhuman

Thank gosh, I had overlooked that trivia tidbit for 30 years. That would have bothered me if fact. What issue was that?

This is a Cosmic Horror story. Hickman said it was a horror story. We are only now finding out how big.

I would have preferred more "Avengers" centered stories in those Avengers titles over the 8 months.

If only it was actually scary and not so tedious or the action was just so boring (it's montage fighting. Show a quick shot of people fighting and that's all you need!). Like you said, everything should have been condense down. Did we really need a full issue just to show us how super duper dangerous these new Beyonders that came out of nowhere are and how they just worfed every other establish being in the universe with just dry and hollow dialogue? Was there no room for characterization or emotion to show how much this information affects our characters or anything else?

More of the gist of the problem.

Maybe Rabum Alal is trying to find the most powerful earth so he causes the incursions to root out the most powerful universe so he can ally with it against the beyonders. Or !maybe he's the beyonder just doing it for shits and giggles haha.

Let's just get to the final big reveal and Bill Foster this whole mess.

"Seems like Hickman's rushing to the conclusion instead of really savoring these moments of sheer terror."

You got it. He's on a schedule.

How can you rush what seems like forever?

And at this point, even having read Hickman's Avengers from the start, I'm a little fuzzy on all the players - Ivory Kings, Mapmakers, Beyonders, etc.. Still, this is the first issue since the big end run began that's left me cold and I'm still pumped to see how the grand finale leads into SW.

Ditto. And that AIN'T a good thing.

To get the full picture of what's going on, I'd say start collecting new avengers vol.3 and start from #1.

Or hope that someone is in a creative mood to post a webpage that summarizes, annotates, and thumbnails what we know. Like this for incubating example:
http://www.comicboards.com/php/show....15011419533114
I wonder if someone just posting every consecutive Page1 Recap for a linear reading would help...

[InformationGeek]

I bet anything you are not a close follower of this story. You could not be more wrong.

I've been reading this story since the very beginning and I actually went out of my way to reread the trade collections at points to refresh myself on what's going on. While I'm still shaky on the Ivory Kings part, I still get what is going on here.

Besides, that doesn't change the problems I see with the issue sir.

[Username taken]

Can anyone remind me of what happened to the two (correct?) alternate Reed Richards who ended up on 616-Earth during Hickman's FF run?

I think they were merged (or add) to the Supreme Intelligence.

If I remember correctly......

[JKtheMac]

Hickman lines up the Cosmology of the Marvel Universe / Multiverse and shoots it down again.

A few random thoughts:

Death of Abstracts

The abstracts such as Eternity, Infinity, Oblivion, Death are gone. This isn’t just a snapshot of one universe this is the entire multiverse. Admittedly Hank only sees it from a single universal perspective but the fact that the death of the abstracts caused the Living Tribunal to appear was a part of The Beyonders’ plan. They are literally killing the arbiter of the multiverse. That would have to be done in every universe concurrently.
Of course concurrently is a relative construct and it is entirely possible that our heroes just caught a glimpse of the future of their universe. Or maybe the abstracts are already dead and something is protecting the universe that survived. We know that time is contracting and heat death is occurring prematurely. Maybe these are symptoms of the death of Eternity and Infinity.

The Beyonder

Finally we wipe away the horrid interpretation of the Beyonder that was retconned. I am sure a future writer could tie it all together but his origin is no longer mundane. Maybe Hickman has plans to tie it all up here. Perhaps The Beyonder in as a kind of messiah figure: The Beyonders’ representative sent to earth and born on Earth.

Cosmic Cube

I originally thought Hickman had conveniently sidestepped the whole Cosmic Cube idea but now I wonder if The Beyonders’ visual design is supposed to echo the idea of the Cube and also the Infinity Gems. We have already seen a cube made of Forever Glass so maybe Hickman is tying these concepts together. They have very different origins but maybe they are related in a way we have yet to have explained to us.
(Maybe this one is stretching things a bit too far. There is nothing concrete in the design.)

The Beyonders’ Plan

I can see why Hickman hinted that he had been looking at the Tree of Life imagery now. He is viewing Marvel Cosmology through a Kabbalistic lens. It doesn’t necessarily all map one to one but the hierarchies mirror each other and are equally symbolic.

If the Marvel Cosmology was actually a Kabbalistic system then The Beyonders are navigating the Tree of Life and systematically killing off each Sephirot in order to reach the top of the tree (The Crown) and kill it.
It is possible that the Black Swans / Rabum Alal (possibly just Death as perceived by the black Swans) are doing the opposite and seeking to sacrifice the bottom of the Tree (Kingdom or Earth).
It makes me wonder if ‘The Beyonder’ could be responsible for the collapse and may be Rabum Alal. It would make things neater and more symmetrical but possibly too neat.

Manifold

We learn that the more advanced Manifold’s can take people where they need to be. I wonder if this ties into the wider picture, as we know Black Swan used the Reed Richards of her previous Earth to find that world’s Manifold and use him ‘as Rabum Alal intended’. That hint didn’t make a lot of sense at the time and it still doesn’t tell us a lot. But it sure highlights Manifold as being important to the main players in the story, and maybe she wanted Manifold to lead her on her path towards the final incursion. In other words she needed to know when to jump away from that Earth and which incursion to pick.

[JKtheMac]

There's someone very interesting who is absent from the group of Gardeners and Alephs aboard the Builders superstation. They still have no Abyss's. Not a single one. They are apparently forbidden. Yet 616 has one.

See Avengers #19 during Infinity.

abyssii_2.jpg

They were "Long Thought Lost".

[joebleau]

With all those cosmic being one "race" is missing.

The infinites

http://marvel.wikia.com/Infinites_(Cosmic_Beings)

[vitruvian]

I have not evidence. I'm speculating. The last time I saw something defeate all of the cosmic beings, it was Thanos with the Infinity Gaulent. It seems like the gems (or their equivelant) have been destroyed in all reality so maybe that has something to do with it.

The gems only have power within their home realities, though, and we haven't actually seen anything to suggest that they've been destroyed in all realities, just in the 616 and other universes where they've been busted by being used against Incursions.

[vitruvian]

I think this was done on purpose to show that the Beyonders exist in more than our 3 dimensional space. They are difficult to describe and impossible to completely observe. So Hanks perception of them would be constantly changing as parts of their bodies moved into and out of our 3 dimensions. IIRC there were panels where they had no heads as well.

They're probably 5th dimensional, with some of them having names like Mzyptlk...

[vitruvian]

The gems get used in trying to ward off an Incursion in many Universes, but they all disintegrate after and are never seen again. The only exception is the Time gem reappearing in OS Avengers.

Where are you getting that it's done in many universes? I believe we've only seen it done in one case, and otherwise told by Black Swan that some other universes have found that they're one use in this manner, but even she never said it was tried in many or all other universes under threat.

[vitruvian]

Can anyone remind me of what happened to the two (correct?) alternate Reed Richards who ended up on 616-Earth during Hickman's FF run?

Used to form the new Supreme Intelligence.

[JKtheMac]

With all those cosmic being one "race" is missing.

The infinites

http://marvel.wikia.com/Infinites_(Cosmic_Beings)

Yes, but Hickman is using the cosmology established in the Infinity stories, Quasar, and Fantastic Four. He isn't trying to add in everything cosmic that ever existed in the Marvel Universe that would be as messy as those fan made Marvel Cosmology diagrams.

He is keeping it simple by focusing on scale: Planetary < Stellar < Universal < Outer Void < Multiversal < Beyond.

The best reference would be the Fantastic Four Annual 23 story "The Beyond and Back" only tidied up a bit.

Of course that story takes us in a circle where transcending Beyond takes us to the Quantum level and we move up back to the planetary scale.

[JKtheMac]

Where are you getting that it's done in many universes? I believe we've only seen it done in one case, and otherwise told by Black Swan that some other universes have found that they're one use in this manner, but even she never said it was tried in many or all other universes under threat.

Well it is shown that it happens on at least one other earth with the Forever Glass Cube that the Great Society use in the same manner.

[Nyadnar17]

Re-reading the issue, yeah, I definitely see the Lovecraft influence. I'm not that much of a fan of Lovecraft, even ignoring the bigotries, but it definitely gives me more appreciation for the issue.

It probably won't change your opinions of his works, but you might be interested to know that as Lovecraft got older he his xenophobia faded. As you read the letters he wrote over the course of his life (yeah exposed as a nerd) you can see the change happen gradually to the point where it totally absent in his latter private and professional writings. It doesn't excuse the earlier racist stuff he penned, but it is nice to occasionally see a racist actually become a changed person.