One could argue that the upcoming Marvel Comics event series Avengers vs. X-Men is like an epic playoff between the New York Yankees and the archrival Boston Red Sox.
Writer Matt Fraction, though, sees it more as a World Series throwdown between the Yankees and the Chicago Cubs: "The Avengers as the most storied franchise in baseball vs. the perennial underdog that commands ferocious loyalty.
"It's crazy to be a part of something this ridiculously 'hugeungus.' "
Yes, Avengers vs. X-Men is such a big deal that its creators have to come up with new words to describe its size.
Fittingly, this war between Marvel's two biggest super-teams has made the comic-book publisher up its game in the digital space. Each of the 12 Avengers vs. X-Menissues will be available in comics shops and digitally on the same day beginning in April, with each print issue including a free copy for download on the Marvel app.
In addition, Marvel.com will host a live news conference at 3 p.m. ET Wednesday for fans via Livestream featuring Fraction and fellow writers Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman, the five Marvel writers behind the series. Marvel will also use Google+ to allow its readers to interact withAvengers vs. X-Men creators and the hashtag "#AvX" for fans to converse about the event on Twitter and Facebook.
Avengers vs. X-Men is a social experiment for its creators, too. A departure from recent Marvel events such as Fear Itself,Secret Invasion and Civil War, the series is scripted by a different writer from issue to issue, and artists John Romita Jr., Olivier Coipel and Adam Kubert will each illustrate one four-issue "act."
"It's interesting to see each guy bringing his best to the table," Aaron says. "You don't want to be the weak link who lets the team down. Each issue, every guy's trying to throw down the gauntlet and one-up the guy who came before him."
The event is the "area of critical mass" that Marvel books have been building toward for a while, according to Marvel editor in chief Axel Alonso. And the prologue issue, drawn by Frank Cho, features stories starring two pivotal characters in Avengers vs. X-Men.
Bendis takes on the Scarlet Witch, and for good reason: He was the Avengers writer when the mutant heroine, after being driven insane and thinking that her fellow Avengers took her children, lost control of her magical powers. She became responsible for one of the group's darkest days, when Avengers Mansion fell to its doom along with some of her teammates.
She's been off the table for the last few years — "I'm primarily to blame for that," Bendis quips — but Scarlet Witch came back in a big way in the recent Avengers: The Children's Crusade miniseries.
"She's been on a road of almost impossible-to-perceive redemption over the last few years and now is going to come face-to-face with the Avengers," Bendis says.
Aaron pens the other story in the prologue focusing on Hope Summers, the first mutant born after the Scarlet Witch de-powered all but 198 members of the mutant population worldwide.
Fraction likens her to John Connor from The Terminator: Hope's been told her entire life that she's very important to the future by people who think she's more than just a little girl. "Some people treat her as though she's a messiah, some people treat her as though she's a monster, and really she's just like any 17-year-old kid."
The prevailing theory among mutants is that she will be the next host of the Phoenix Force when it comes, and the fact that she has green eyes and red hair like the most famous Phoenix of them all, the late X-Man Jean Grey, causes some to feel she may even be Jean Grey reincarnated.
Hope and the Scarlet Witch will finally cross paths, though, because the Phoenix Force is coming and it's what kicks off the conflict in the first issue of Avengers vs. X-Men.
"The Phoenix Force is the spirit of destruction and rebirth," Alonso says. "It razes worlds to create something new. It's bad news if you happen to be living on the world about to be razed. It's great news if you're what's going to be the outcome of that world."
The X-Men want to protect Hope, and the Avengers want to retrieve her before the Phoenix arrives, but neither group is in a great place when the series starts.
Aaron's Schism miniseries broke the X-Men in half, with Cyclops and his team in San Francisco preparing young mutants for battle, and Wolverine and his group setting up a school on the East Coast to educate kids about their powers.
The Avengers are not doing much better. They were beaten down in Fraction's Fear Itself event book, only saving the day when Thor sacrificed his life, and are still feeling the resonant damage. Now, Fraction says, they're facing a crisis of confidence.
Naturally, the groups' field generals — the X-Men's Cyclops and the Avengers' Captain America— are key to what will happen in the new comic. "Here are two leaders of men with a very specific world view who have been through an awful lot," Bendis says. "Now they find themselves face-to-face on a very earth-shattering issue that neither of them feels that they can back down from."
Cyclops has been on a pretty militant stance for a while because of humanity's hatred for mutants, Aaron says, and part of that is training Hope for the day when the Phoenix may come for her as its host. "If suddenly he's got Captain America and the Avengers butting their heads into what he considers X-Men business, he's not necessarily going to take kindly to that."
The situation also puts the head Avenger in a pickle, says Brubaker, writer of theCaptain America series. "How do you be the good guy while also getting into basically a war with a whole race of people?"
The scale of Avengers vs. X-Men also allows the writers to give meaty parts to non-marquee characters such as Black Widow, Nova and Iron Fist. And there are a lot of split allegiances among those who are both Avengers and X-Men, including Beast, Storm and the fan-favorite clawed antihero Wolverine, who — like Cyclops — had a strong emotional connection to Jean Grey. "And he loves beer, which is what I latched on to as a fellow connoisseur of the brew," Hickman says.
All that internal conflict and external strife is a home run for Avengers vs. X-Men's creative collective, Fraction says.
"You crush these characters again and again through various different crucibles, and you see what's left of them at the end. You see if they can still stand up when it's all said and done. That's drama."
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