Joining Marvel's "Secret Wars," Kieron Gillen's "Siege" is slated to enter "Warzones," Marvel.com announced. Gillen will team up with Filipe Andrade as well as various other guest artists who will add double page spreads to the book.

A "spiritual sequel" to Gillen's "S.W.O.R.D." series, "Siege" will follow team leader Abigail Brand, Leah of Hel, Illyanna Rasputin, Lady Katherine Bishop, Miss America, Vitruvian Man, Ben Grimm (known here as simply Grimm), Kang, the Endless Summers (about 1000 rejected clones from the realm of Baron Sinister) and a couple of UNITs trapped deep beneath the wall. The story picks up with Brand as commander on the Shield, a post she inherited after Nick Fury was killed in the Deadlands. She and her team must protect the Shield, which faces the threat of destruction from the entire southern region of Battleworld. Brand must survive her new post and personality clashes with her team members.

"The Shield's purpose is to stop everything that's south of that point going north of that point," Gillen explained. "It's because everything south of the Shield is entirely ungovernable. They don't pay taxes. They jaywalk. They want to eat you. Being deposited on the Shield is a punishment for a mixture of people who are entirely too battle-hungry or entirely too heroic. It's deliberately a Sisyphean task, for reasons that I can't really go into yet. As the series tagline says, 'They can't ever win -- they can't afford to lose.'"

"I took [the series] as an opportunity to cast my net widely and grab several -- for want of a better phrase -- 'Signature Gillen Characters' and throw them alongside some more characters I've loved but never written before, at least significantly. This is very much my 'Alan-Moore-does-Captain-Britain-Corps' approach to the multiverse. I could have populated it with known characters from the various timelines but I've generally preferred to make up a brand new idea. This is in many ways my hymn to the glory of the Marvel Universe, and that has to be putting a new spin on things rather than simple recapitulation. We all riff on each other, and this is me riffing on everything."

"Siege" arrives at retailers this May.