It was the spark that started the fire — a legend that grew in the telling.

Before the light. Before the war. And before the fall.

They were the last days of the great idea — an Avengers World. We were final options. We were last resorts. We were world builders and world breakers.

And in the last days of life, before a season of death…we were Avengers.

Jonathan Hickman, Avengers #17

I’ve read something like 900 pages of comic books in the last two weeks. Maybe it’s because WandaVision (my current theory before seeing the newest episode is over here go ahead and read it read all my things buy me presents!) jumpstarted my passion for superheroes once more, or maybe because this amazing article from the fine folks over at SKTCHD (they’re great go subscribe to them then read all their stuff and buy them presents!) made me realize I never did finish Hickman’s groundbreaking run from the early-to-mid 2010s.

So, here we are. Reading these gigantic tomes of roughly 17 issues each of Avengers goodness, accompanied by artistic greats like Jerome Opeña, Leinil Yu, Dustin Weaver, Mike Deodato, and a slew of other brilliant minds bringing the biggest Avengers story to life.

And it is the biggest story. Truly. I know where Hickman’s going with this run, what the plan is, but it doesn’t take away from the smaller moments, the character beats, hidden deep in the cracks of every page. When you only have one panel to get across who Spider-Man is and how he’d react in a given situation before turning the page to a gigantic two-page spread of alien spaceships colliding around a dying star, you NEED to know who these people are.

Hickman does, and it’s brilliant. You can learn from stories everywhere and they can, in turn, teach you to be a better storyteller.

(As for the other book in the Featured Image, the one written by Rena Barron, well, we’ll get to that one soon.)

Thanks for reading,

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