Avengers Forever

What in the world was this story? I mean that in all the right ways.

Immortus is sad. Immortus is tired. Immortus is the middle manager of time, directed to muck about to prevent humanity from progressing into space by the Time-Keepers, an alien race with a rather vested interest in seeing humans stuck planetside. Immortus also thinks he's hot (time) shit, when in actuality he does more groveling to his Time-Keeper overlords than anything else. He also kinda looks like Will Riker in a helmet drawn by this artist.Anyway, tired of being hounded by the Time-Keepers for not doing his job right, Immortus finally decides to kill Rick Jones, evidently a catalyst for human's flight into space, but doesn't even do that right and Rick Jones is whisked away to safety by a variety of Avengers, past, present, and future, drawn together by Libra to balance the scales of something-or-other. The group splits up into smaller teams for reasons, they end up in different time periods, we get some delightful period-specific side stories, character drama from different periods, and some wibbly wobbly timeywimey stuff as they try to fix time problems.

So I'm not normally a huge fan of time travel in books or graphic novels, just because of how problematic it can be and how confusing things can get. This was really no exception, because things start a bit slow and confusingly while the Avengers try and figure out exactly wtf is going on. It really isn't until we start getting infodumps (and boy are they infodumps) about halfway through that I finally started to really catch onto what was going on. I also wouldn't recommend this to someone new to Marvel comics, because I spent an inordinate amount of time looking up unfamiliar characters.

But I mean, this was still great fun. The reveal of the Supreme-Cycle made me let out an audible “what the fuck lol”, because I mean who wouldn't when you see The Supreme Intelligence plugged into the back of an amped up dune buggy Mad Max style. There was also a lot of character interplay across the generations that I really liked.