Written by Jason Aaron
Art by Ed McGuinness
Published by Marvel Comics
I do very much enjoy alternate realities in my superhero comics.
Given that so much of this genre revolves around lore, origin stories and assembled facts, much fun can be had when you mess with it.
DC has both a multiverse and the Elseworlds imprint of reimagining heroes under different circumstances.
Marvel had the What If … ? comic book anthology series back in the day. Then we got other universes such as Marvel Zombies and the acclaimed Ultimate stories that gave us characters such as Miles Morales and a Nick Fury modeled after Samuel L. Jackson.
Oh, and in 1996 Marvel unleashed something called Heroes Reborn.
Sit ‘round, kids, and lemme tell you a tale …
Heroes Reborn in 1996 was the byproduct of a crossover event during which Onslaught killed the Avengers, Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom. (Onslaught, of course, was a psionic entity amalgamated from the melded minds of Professor X and Magneto’s body. Whew, ’90s comics was wild.)
Except those characters didn’t die! They were ported to a pocket dimension and given new, updated titles. And those books were farmed out to creative teams involving Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld, who became famous at Marvel and then left to create Image Comics.
And now here we are, 25 years later, bringing that name back for a whole new take on a rebuilt universe.
This time, though, they’ve taken a couple pages from DC’s playbook. One part The Nail, where one change (a nail causes a flat tire on the Kents’ truck, so no Superman) ripples out to the entire world because the world’s greatest hero never emerges. For Marvel, that’s Captain America.
And then add another part Flashpoint, where one character is aware of an altered universe that’s all gone awry somehow.
But how do you Marvel-fy this up? You make your lead character convinced that some great villain has done a time crime and changed the universe in the process.
In this Heroes Reborn, it’s a world where the Avengers never happened, and Captain America was never found after disappearing in World War Two. And the only person who remembers the old reality is Blade, who’s still a daywalker but suddenly finds himself as the last living vampire.
Tony Stark never gets hit with shrapnel. Bruce Banner is banished to the Negative Zone after his first Hulk incident. Thor never regains his hammer Mjolnir after his father, Odin, banished him to live on Earth as a mortal human.
So what is a Marvel Universe without the Avengers? Basically, it’s DC.
The Squadron Supreme of America are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes instead. Hyperion, Marvel’s solar-powered take on Superman, is the world’s most regarded hero. Nighthawk is their Batman, Dr. Spectrum a Green Lantern sort, Blur their Flash-like speedster, Power Princess their own Wonder Woman.
The supervillains get more room to play around so far.
Doctor Doom is here, but he finds the gem of Cyttorak and is transformed into Dr. Juggernaut. (Doom’s armor turned into a Juggernaut look is rad.)
The Venom symbiote has bound itself to Hydra leader Johann Shmidt, creating the Black Skull. (His look is even more rad.)
Wanda Maximoff is never reformed, absorbs her brother Pietro’s powers, and becomes the super-speed chaos conjurer, the Silver Witch. (Her new look? Also rad.)
These are all just plain fun, and longtime DC and Marvel artist Ed McGuiness draws the Squadron Supreme action bits with some real Justice League energy.
It’s cool to see Blade as a central character in this story, as the one Black hero out and about. Wakanda has not emerged, Blade tells us, so there’s no Black Panther. (Might Wakandan agents be uncovered later?)
Don’t get me wrong, though; all the descriptions of this altered reality are fun, but Blade narrates it all rather than we get to see the changes play out dramatically. It’s more tell than show, even though it’s all quite enjoyable.
Of course, Blade goes on a quest to find Captain America’s body, still encased in ice. Once Steve Rogers is freed, Blade reasons, perhaps it’ll be easier to put things right again.
I do hope the story continues along this route rather than the twist that Blade somehow caused this altered reality. Don’t steal too much from sad Barry Allen in Flashpoint, OK?
