The Avengers assemble to battle the threats that individual heroes can’t face alone. In 2018, writer Jason Aaron kicked off a new volume of their series that saw an iconic team of Marvel characters: Captain America, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, the Black Panther, She-Hulk, Thor, Doctor Strange, and the newest Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes). Unfortunately for them, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes aren’t the only forces that have been assembling. The demon king Mephisto has united an army of his counterparts from across the multiverse, and they’ve assembled a multiversal incarnation of the Avengers, the Masters of Evil. To combat this growing tide of malevolence, a mysterious figure known as Avenger Prime and Robbie Reyes have been recruiting their own multiversal army. In the currently unfolding Avengers Assemble crossover, which runs between Avengers and Avengers Forever and features two bookend issues, Aaron and artists Bryan Hitch, Javier Garrón, and Aaron Kuder are chronicling the clash between those two opposing armies.
That war kicked off in Avengers Assemble Alpha by Aaron and Hitch, which saw the titular team fighting a two-front battle. In the prehistoric past, the Avengers of Earth 616 battled both their primeval counterparts, the Avengers of 1,000,000 BC, and the Multiversal Masters of Evil. In the present day, Avenger Prime and his forces found themselves under assault by the legion of Mephistos, who were looking to claim that ultimate source of cosmic creation: the God Quarry. CBR spoke with Aaron about all of these events and his plans for the remaining issues of the crossover, which will serve as the finale of his Avengers run.
CBR: One thing I’ve noticed about your writing on Avengers over the years is this is a series that takes the biggest, craziest ideas, like the 1,000,000 BC Avengers and vampires in Chernobyl, and makes them a reality. Was that sort of the mission statement for the book? Was the plan always to end your run with this final, epic battle against the Mephistos?
Jason Aaron: We had two missions going into the series from the beginning. One was to make each arc feel important and world-shaking. The other was to take us on a tour of the Marvel Universe -- the different wondrous corners and spots, out into space, and into other dimensions and realms. So, if this was the only Marvel comic that you read, you’d get to see a lot of parts and pieces of the universe in just this one series. Those have been the two guiding principles from the beginning but in terms of the Mephisto stuff? I can’t say I had that planned from Issue #1. In the beginning, I was looking to not do an overarching story that I was building towards. I just wanted to bring in different bad guys arc after arc and leave things standing in some cases.
In the old days of the Marvel Universe, you always knew that if you got to Latveria, you can fight against Doctor Doom. If you went to the Savage Land, you had Ka-Zar. You could bring your book to those spots and others and know who would be the bad guy standing there and what the status quo was. I wanted to set up more spots and villains like that. That was the big reason for doing the vampire stuff. I wanted to leave it there as a place other people could go to. That’s also why we brought back the Russian Winter Guard and used Squadron Supreme. It was all about setting up pieces that I would leave on the board for the foreseeable future. It was more about that than building towards a big story. Then, I realized I wanted to use Mephisto in a big way, and he was already a part of different stories I was telling. I also realized I wanted to do some multiversal stuff in Avengers Forever. Then, I knew it was all going to be building towards slamming those different pieces together in one cataclysmic fight.
That grand finale kicked off in Avengers Assemble Alpha, where we finally met the enigmatic Avenger Prime. He’s still a character shrouded in mystery, though. How much more will we find out about him as the story unfolds?
We definitely offered some teases in Avengers Assemble Alpha. Before this story is done, we will tell the full origin of Avenger Prime. We’ll see him without his mask and understand exactly who he is. So, all of that is coming.
Another significant character in this story, and really from the start of your Avengers run, is Robbie Reyes, who has become the Omniversal Spirit of Vengeance known as the All-Rider. What inspired this story for Robbie, and what have you enjoyed most about writing him?
Robbie was fun from the get-go in that he was sort of the fresh face in the group. He’d always been a sort of street-level hero. He’d never been involved in events on this scale. So, I liked him coming in as the fresh-faced kid who is incredibly powerful and also with the idea that he’s only started to tap into his true potential. I also really loved the idea of an Avenger who drives a car. [laughs] We’ll have a spaceship fight, and he shows up in a Dodge Charger.
Plus, I have been building, teasing, and showing what Robbie can do beyond even the powers that Ghost Riders usually have for a long time. We saw that come to a head in the most recent issue of Avengers Forever, where we saw him embracing this idea of being the All-Rider, someone who has powers on the cosmic level. That leads right into Avengers Assemble Alpha, where we see that if you thought the All-Rider was going to be the quick and easy answer to saving the day and winning, that it might not be that simple. Robbie’s journey is clearly one of the major threads of my overall run, going back to the Marvel Legacy one-shot, and it will go all the way through to the big finale of Avengers Assemble.
Who are some of the other Avengers that you’re especially enjoying writing in this final storyline?
There are so many I have to jot down lists to keep up with how many characters we’re talking about in all the different groups. One of the things that’s most fun about this Avengers Assemble Alpha issue was bringing the 616 Avengers and the prehistoric Avengers face to face for the first time. We’ve danced around that for nearly five years. We’ve seen those characters interact in limited ways, but now we have them all face-to-face. Of course, that leads to the typical Marvel setup of they start out by fighting each other before they have to come together to fight the bad guys in the form of Doom and the Multiversal Masters of Evil.
Also, as we go forward, we’ll see more of King Thor’s granddaughters from the far future, the Goddesses of Thunder, who I introduced in my Thor run. They come back along with Old Man Phoenix, the future version of Wolverine. We get the whole Avengers Forever crew in there, too -- all those characters we introduced, like the different versions of Steve Rogers and Carol Danvers, Thor the God of Fists, our cosmic version of Black Panther, Tony Stark, Ant-Man, and more! We’ll also have a few that show up as surprises at certain points.
That huge cast of characters suggests to me that, in terms of action and plot, Avengers Assemble is meant to be an epic tale of cosmic war. Is that an apt description of what you’re aiming for?
Yeah, we kicked off with a big prehistoric battle in kind of the genesis point for the Marvel Universe in our Alpha issue. This is where everything begins for the heroes of the Earth and where the first great legacy powers rose and spawned generations of heroes to come. That’s where one battle begins, and the end of the Alpha issue also takes us to this strange, otherworldly location called the God Quarry, which we’ve seen in books like Jeff Lemire’s Thanos and Gerry Duggan’s Infinity Wars. It’s a very central to all of the time and space in the Marvel Multiverse. As the story goes on, we’ll learn more about what makes this place so special.
So, at this point in Avengers Assemble, there are two different battles going on: The Battle of 1,000,000 BC and The Siege of the God Quarry at Infinity’s End. We have two different groups of Avengers fighting those battles. The Avengers Forever parts of our story that deal with the Siege at Infinity’s End [are] very much a war story. We’ve assembled a full-on army and even an air force of Avengers for the battle at the God Quarry. So, for the first few issues of Avengers Assemble, there will be two different wars going on. Then we’ll hit a point where those two conflicts crash together, and all those good guys and bad guys are thrown into one location.
Avengers Assemble is an event of massive scope and scale, but it’s also one where you and your art team of Bryan Hitch, Javier Garrón, and Aaron Kuder get to be wildly creative because you’re designing the looks of many of your characters whole-cloth. So, what’s it been like building and telling this final story with your team of artists?
It’s been a blast. I’ve been lucky in terms of artists on Avengers for a while now. We’ve had Javier on Avengers and Aaron on Avengers Forever. Aaron has been getting to design a bunch of multiversal characters, and with the “History’s Mightiest Heroes” arc of Avengers, Javier got to design a whole host of legacy characters from Earth’s past that we’ve never seen before. I think both of those guys have been doing incredible work on their series, and they’re handling the bulk of Avengers Assemble going forward.
It’s a huge honor and thrill for me to get to work with Bryan Hitch for the first time with this. He’s obviously a legend who I’ve been a huge fan of for years. It was a challenging spot for him to kind of come into this run at the end of it when we had so many different characters we were throwing at him, but he absolutely killed it. I tried to help him out a little bit by setting the story in a snowy landscape, so he didn’t have to worry about drawing any big Manhattan cityscapes. He could just focus on these characters beating the hell out of each other, and he did! The fight scenes he put together for the Alpha issue are jaw-dropping. Going forward, we’re really lucky to continue to have Javier and Aaron on the board.
How many issues make up Avengers Assemble? Is it contained in just Avengers, Avengers Forever, and the bookends, or are there tie-ins as well?
No, this is very much a self-contained Avengers event. It will run through four issues each of the two books and wrap up the same way that it launched -- with an oversized grand finale issue for everything that I’ve done on Avengers and really of a lot of the books I’ve been working on at Marvel going back 15 years now. So, it’s 10 issues total.
Finally, how does it feel to be wrapping your time on Avengers, a book that allowed you to be wildly creative, and blow those ideas up to a massive scale?
It feels good. It’s definitely the right time to bring this all crashing together and finish some of the character arcs that I’ve been building for years now. We talked about what a big, epic war story this is. It’s got a lot of different characters punching each other and a lot of different versions of Avengers from throughout time and space. In the midst of all that, though, we have all the character moments, beats, and arcs that have been part of my run since Issue #1. So, one of the goals is to make sure we don’t lose all of that among all the fighting and crazy moments.
There are some huge character beats to come at the end of this, and a lot of these characters are ones I’ve been working on in some form or another for more than a decade now. It does feel like the right time to wrap all of that up. I look at this, for me, as a chance to step away from ongoing comics for a bit. I’ve been riding that train now for a long time, so it’s a good opportunity to jump off that and focus on a lot of different new projects that are all more limited in terms of the number of issues. I’m definitely keeping just as busy as I was before, though, in terms of how much stuff I’m doing.
Avengers Assemble Alpha #1 is on sale now.