Avengers #30: Return to Battleworld

The Avengers must boldly go where no man has gone before, leaving their orbital headquarters and the Earth in the care of their friends the X-Men. It is very charming anytime Jed MacKay flexes his authority as the scribe of both of Marvel’s flagship superhero teams. Whenever he has them casually appear in each others comics to lend a hand, he singlehandedly proves that these casts can be more to each other than just rivals to butt heads with.

MacKay and artist Farid Karami continue to be the dream team when it comes to innovating upon the Avenger’s tactics, building off of each others skills and abilities as a true unit. Putting their heads together, the heroes conjure up a way to fly through a black hole and survive, perhaps their greatest feat of teamwork yet. What they find on the other side is some sort of underverse containing the scattered ruins of Battleworld, the planet where Doctor Doom once ruled as an all-powerful god of the multiverse. Only King T’Challa is capable of remembering the events of Secret Wars, putting him in the perfect role to provide exposition to his teammates and, through them, the readers.

This trip down memory lane is not purely nostalgic, but also fixes the biggest problem with Secret Wars and other crossover events like it. When every alternate universe/timeline story ends with its events being erased, they can feel extremely inconsequential. Knowing that physical remnants of Battleworld lie somewhere in the cosmos to preserve that history feels so satisfying from a lore perspective.

The Avengers find that they are too late to stop Myrddin, who has obtained the Grail and uses it to summon the Marvel Zombies horde against them. If there is one shortcoming to the issue’s art, its that these undead corpses do not achieve the same memorable level of grotesqueness they have in previous comics. In the end, Myrddin reveals the truth: that he has been some future variant of Kang dead set on besting even himself in the hunt for this ultimate treasure. What this means for the Avengers is unknown, but it’s certainly a twist no one could have seen coming.