YMMV / The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman)

• Arc Fatigue: It takes a very long time for exactly who's behind everything to be explained. It takes a while for the heroes to start taking Rabum Alal seriously as anything other than gibberish. Not to mention the reveal of just who this Rabum Alal even is doesn't happen until the very end of the storyline.
• Archive Panic: Hickman's storyline is very intricate and he tends to cast, pick up, and scatter Story Breadcrumbs to the tiniest grain. Seeds for his run were first placed in his run on Fantastic Four (more specifically, Dark Reign: Fantastic Four a tie-in to Dark Reign before his run on the FF) and only finally resolve itself in Secret Wars and to get the full experience you will need to read all 40 issues of his run on The Avengers, all 33 issues of his run on New Avengers, Infinity and its tie-ins. Eventually he includes the Maker from the Ultimate Marvel universe, so you should also be familiar with his run in Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates as well. At the very least, his run on New Avengers is far more central to the plot of his overall Myth Arc than the other stuff.
• Ass Pull: Namor and the Cabal have been trapped in a mapmaker world, which will soon blow up, and they have no way to escape it... but wait! there is a second incursion taking place in that planet at the same time! They can escape to the third earth by using it! A strange mechanic to the incursions that raises several questions, but which end up unanswered: it was never addressed or discussed before, neither at a later point. It was just a convenient way to keep the Cabal in the game.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: A lot of people are quick to turn away from New Avengers, mostly because of how morally reprehensible the main characters are. Not helping is that there are other groups being more productive about the problem. When Doctor Doom is doing a better job of doing that, well, so much for the smartest 'heroes' on the planet.
• Broken Base: The run in general. Either it's an epic storyline, or pointlessly dull and filled with needless amounts of Purple Prose. Either many consider it to be an all-time defining run, or something so drastically different in tone, genre, and theme from what many consider to be The Avengers that some believe it to be an In Name Only take on the mythos and characters. Incidentally the latter point is used by both defenders and detractors. Detractors use it to slag it as out-of-character while defenders commend on Hickman's ability to overturn familiarity with iconic characters and totally change the way people saw them.
• Continuity Lock-Out: The story started solid in New Avengers: incursions take place between earth and an alternate universe earth, and end with either of them destroyed. In each incursion, heroes have to do something to prevent the universe's destruction. Easy, right? But then the story starts branching in all directions and introducing many, many concepts. By the end of it, many are waiting for the final incursion to come at last and proceed to Secret Wars. Even then, you kind of do need to know something about the original Secret Wars (1984) event to understand the significance of the Ivory Kings being the Beyonders since the first crossover is essentially being reinterpreted and recast as an out-there Lovecraftian post-modernist science-fiction narrative.
• Creator's Pet: A criticism some have of Hickman is that he only focuses on characters he had extended plans for (Reed Richards and Black Panther), while others are fairly neglected overall (Beast in particular, though Iron Man and Black Bolt got it as well), due to Marvel having other plans for them.
• Designated Hero: The Avengers (except Captain America) don't come off terribly well in their initial dealings with Starbrand. He's a terrified person who's just been given superpowers without warning, in a way that has killed everyone in the college he attends and works at, leaving him surrounded by charred corpses. So aside from Cap trying to reassure him and calm him down in case he starts breaking things, the other Avengers attack him. Two issues later, he accidentally kills a living brain organism when it attacks him in a panicked rage, so the Avengers beat the living daylights out of him.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Ex Nihilo, for his generally bombastic nature. Not bad for someone who started off bombing cities.
  • Smasher.
  • The entire Great Society is a herd of dark horses. Consisting of Sun God, The Rider, The Norn, The Jovian, Boundless and Dr. Spectrum, they are another homage to the Justice League and the heroes of DC, they are presented as a moral team and badasses in their own right.
    • Sun God especially, in part for being an expy of Superman, and for standing out against the Grey-and-Gray Morality of New Avengers.
  • In the same vein, Sunspot got a bit of this by being the Only Sane Man and inadvertently solving the threat of AIM by simply buying them out. YMMV given his status as Creator's Pet.
• Funny Moments:
  • How Cap and Tony recruited Wolverine and Spider-Man:
    Tony: We have beer.
    Wolverine: Sold.
    Tony: We have money.
    Spider-Man [hugging him]: Oh, thank God.
  • The barbecue in Issue #24, cooked by Thor, no less.
    Thor: I have prepared steaks, hamburgers and veggie burgers. Furthermore, I have grilled the hot dog, though the quality of this meat seems ... questionable — this I cannot recommend. I also attempted a lobster, but the beast defeated me.
    Smasher: Yeah. I'll have a hot dog.
    Cannonball: Me too.
    Thor: [with a bemused expression] Such bravery. Two dogs. Each.
  • Maximus the Mad telling Thanos it's no wonder Nick Fury doesn't trust him. "You do look extremely suspicious."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Something that detractors of his run often said was that, while Hickman made the comic feel epic, Status Quo Is God and it would all amount to nothing in the end... Come 2015, and it turns out his run was the set-up to Secret Wars (2015), which is Marvel's biggest event in years, and did indeed have an impact on the Marvel Universe.
• Ho Yay:
  • Many have remarked on Hyperion and Thor's particularly bro-mantic interactions. To say nothing of their raising the zebra-kids together (and the kids call Hyperion "dad" anyway).
  • Sun God doesn't go berserk as his team is destroyed, but when the Rider, Wayne, dies. It helps that the two are very clearly Expies of Superman and Batman, respectively, who are the poster boys for the trope in comics.
• Inferred Holocaust:
  • Hickman loves using this trope, on various populated areas on Earth many innocents die due to A Million Is a Statistic, wether it's a an alien invasion, rebirth of new forms of life or arrival of Evil Counterpart of Avengers. But it's worst offender is destruction of college in The Last White Event storyline. Throught the whole issue we meet various people who may gain superpowers from White Event. Then we actually see hte person who got it was a individual that also appeared without a single line. The power Kevin Connor got unfortunatelly resulted in massive explosion. 3203 people lost their lives due to it, and the only Avenger who tries in any way to confront a single individual that survived it is Captain America, as mentioned above in Designated Hero. Not a single other Avenger seems to care to what just happened. The college gets a bit of mention in Starbrand's miniseries however.
  • And that's not even getting to TRILLIONS of lives lost during various incursions. Thankfully, these worlds gets restored later. Most of them, at least...
  • Averted in Infinity event, where millions suffered because of Thanos's invasion on Earth, which Avengers later help to rebuild buildings.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Illuminati wiping Steve's memory. Though it could also be Cruel to Be Kind.
  • Strange either already crossed it when he offered to sell his entire soul for power before finding out that it was already bound to another demon or at the latest when he slaughtered the Great Society with those dark powers.
  • While one could make an argument in favor of Namor for saving Earth 616 via destroying the homeworld of the Great Society, he most definitely crossed it after gloating right in T'Challa's face how he enjoyed destroying Wakanda twice and regrets that so many are left alive. Although he was mourning the death of his own people the second time, which Shuri is directly responsible for, so he may not have meant it.
    • IF the previous wasn't enough his releasing and founding of the Cabal, which leads to the complete destruction of Wakanda, Shuri's death and the cruel destruction of a number of other worlds pretty much seals it for him, particularly with the other characters.
• Narm:
  • It's a bit difficult to take Black Swam's proclamation that "everything dies" seriously when no-one actually manages to die for quite a long while in. The constant repetition, rephrasing, and variation of Reed Richards' opening "Everything dies" monologue complete with an all back rectangular panel with different characters and AU versions, starts becoming funny after a while.
  • 'One was life one was death' gets repeated a bit too often as well.
  • How long does it take Doctor Strange to reach the Despair Event Horizon? Three issues, and one screw-up, before he completely folds like a damp cloth.
  • The final fight between Old Man Captain America and Superior Iron Man is so over the top angsty and depressing that it becomes hilarious. By the time the Helicarrier drops, it moves into Tex Avery levels of absurdity.
    • Not helping is that the reason Old Man Rodgers has hunted Tony down and is literally beating him to death is because... Tony lied to him.
• Nightmare Fuel: Reed Richard's reveal in Time Runs Out that without any warning, almost all of the multiverse has just vanished overnight.
• Older Than They Think: Having a captive Bruce Banner and throwing him into a disaster area, so that he hulks out and deal with the threat (basically turing Hulk into a weapon), had already been done in the first miniseries of The Ultimates, and many other times in the Ultimate Marvel universe.
• Spiritual Licensee: A few fans have suggested that the character choices, style, and scale are quite reminiscent of Legion Of Superheroes. Given that Hickman's an avowed fan of the franchise, it's not surprising.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Smasher gets a whole issue introducing her, explaining her backstory and nature (Legacy character, member of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard). Then... she mostly just stands around in the background, gets an out-of-nowhere romance with Cannonball in Infinity, and during Time Runs Out is demoted to being a mom. That's it.
  • During Time Runs Out, Captain Britain is part of the Illuminati. His role is to just stand around in the background, then deliver one bit of exposition on how the Captain Britain Corps have had A Bridge Dropped On Them, before getting shuffled offstage.
  • Cyclops begins to take on an increasingly important role in the final art of the saga, with he and his Phoenix Egg supposedly set up as an important part of the resolution. In reality, the Phoenix-empowered Cyclops is brutally (and CASUALLY) killed by God Doom in Secret Wars #4, without ever contributing much to the overall story.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: As the story goes on, the sheer amount of Kick the Dog and Shoot the Dog moments the heroes perpetrate combined with a lot of Conflict Ball going around makes it hard for a lot of readers to invest in what's going on, especially since Secret Wars (2015) makes the death of the multiverse a Foregone Conclusion.

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