EXCLUSIVE: Marvel Announces Avengers: Standoff!

From the Iron Man & The Avengers panel at New York Comic Con, Marvel Comics has announced Avengers: Standoff!, a new crossover celebrating Captain America's 75th anniversary.

From the outside it looks like any other remote small town. Only Pleasant Hill is anything but. This gated community holds a dark and sinister secret – one that keeps its residents locked away behind its walls. Now, the time has come for its townsfolk to finally escape. As their revolt begins - why then are the Avengers trying to keep them inside?! And what does it have to do with S.H.I.E.L.D.? Even Earth's Mightiest Heroes won't be prepared for the truth behind Pleasant Hill.

ComicBook.com had the chance to talk with Executive Editor Tom Brevoort and writer Nick Spencer about the event and what fans can expect.

The structure of this event seems very much like what you guys had done for say, Black Vortex. Have you guys found that the book end strategy for events to be something that fans really enjoy? Generally, Alpha and Omega issues serve as great spots for, say, Nick to really set the tone before you guys hit the ground running. Would you say that's accurate?

Tom: I think that's accurate although I don't think it's any one thing. To me it's always about every one of these events that we do big or small, changing it up and trying not to do just the same thing over again. That all having been said, partly just because of the way Avengers has been set up for the last 10 years or so, I've never actually gotten to do what amounts to a real Avengers family event in the style that the X-Men books would do every year or every other year.

Typically Avengers events have a tendency to grow and become Marvel Universe events because it's just the natural thing. They're the Avengers, they're the center of everything. Of course if you have a big story going on there, suddenly that becomes your big massive summer event. In this instance with the All-New, All-Different relaunch and the timing and with Cap's anniversary, I sort of took advantage of that to do something that was a little smaller in scale and a little more tightly focused on the core Avengers family of titles. Simply because I haven't really done one of those before.

I think the model is sound, I think people liked the structure of Black Vortex. What we're doing here isn't exactly that, but it's similar in that it has a beginning book and an end book and then the actual story narrative being carried within the issues of the individual titles that tie in and connect. Even there it's not as literally linear as Black Vortex was, where essentially, in that, there was a single story thread that ran one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight through all the issues.

In what we're doing in Standoff, the Alpha issue will set up a couple of different situations and threads that will all carry out into various titles and intersect and go back and forth before eventually everything returns to the Omega issue at the end.

So to clarify, the chapters won't be a straight line chronologically, but pick up events here and there and culminate in Omega?

Tom: Yeah. Individual books within that may cross over with one another, but the events in All-New, All-Different Avengers may lead you to what's going on in the next issue of Uncanny Avengers. We're sort of setting this up, assuming that we do it right, so that every week for the duration of this, there'll be at least one book dropping that's a part of this.

Hopefully that means too that the buy in isn't too heavy for people, but it also means you understand, "What do I read next?" You read the one that comes out this week. It doesn't necessarily pick up literally from exactly where the previous one did if it's following a different strand of the story into a different direction. It's all part of the octopus tentacles that are themselves all converging back down to the Omega book where it's all said and done.

This story is taking place incredibly soon after you guys are kicking the All-New, All-Different status quo into gear. Do you expect that you'll be carrying readers over from book to book at this point or are you guys assuming that people are already reading these titles and so they'll just follow along?

Nick: I would say that I think that people- it seems like everybody involved so far is crafting their stories in such a way that if you're just reading that book, you can just keep reading that and you'll be okay. There will be added incentive obviously for you to have checked out the book ends or for you to check out some of the other titles. I'd say with probably only one or two exceptions, you can go through this. If you're just reading Uncanny Avengers, I would hope that you can still read the issue and follow everything and understand what's going on. I think you'd get a lot more if you got the other pieces in the puzzle that obviously give you a more layered picture of what's happening here.

The series seems somewhat reminiscent of something like Twin Peaks or even the Stepford Wives. How would you describe Pleasant Hill at the start of the story?

Nick: We're going to keep some of the details of Pleasant Hill to ourselves for now. What I can say about it is a small town is a great setting for this kind of a story. Tom mentioned the old X-Men events and the X-Men line wide events before.

Actually when I was coming up with the ideas on this, I went back to things like Mutant Massacre a lot, which I don't know if I ever told him.

What was nice about Mutant Massacre was you put the various teams in a very claustrophobic tight space and you put them in very intense dangerous situations very quickly and you gave them real stakes. There were people down there who were in danger and they needed to be rescued.

A small town setting really gives you the same kind of vibe that those comics gave you back then, that it gives you a more condensed and smaller environment to tell more intimate stories and to make the danger more immediate. I think one of the things that we talk about a lot with this event is we're not blowing up states and planets aren't exploding. This is about danger that's six feet in front of you and you can see the lives that are in danger. To get to tell that kind of story, which we haven't seen that much of for awhile, that was a really cool challenge for me.

Given the recent current events with riots and civil unrest in parts of the country, and the militarized stance that the Marvel superheroes as they're working with S.H.I.E.L.D. have, do you think that a book like this has something to say that's a bit bigger than the superhero universe it exists in?

Nick: Yeah. This book definitely deals with some pretty heady concepts and some things that I think have some distinct real world comparisons. I think that the best Marvel stories always do. Whenever I'm writing a Marvel story I always think about what's the mirror into our lives.

There are definitely some issues here. Look, as folks can tell, it's a story that heavily involves S.H.I.E.L.D. and anytime that you're telling a S.H.I.E.L.D. series, there's a lot of opportunities to deal with the way that we handle security and how we keep our community safe and how we make those judgement calls. That's a lot of the fun of writing characters like Maria Hill.

There's definitely some meat to it in that sense. We've tried to be topical without being preachy or without being partisans. That definitely extends into this somewhat.

You guys mentioned that obviously this is sort of taking place for Steve Rogers's 75th anniversary. Can you guys elaborate a little bit on the role that Steve will play in the series?

Nick: He's going to die.

[laughs]

No look. Steve is a central part of this story. The story really was born out of wanting to tell a big story about Captain Americas, the present and former. Steve, Sam, and Bucky are all involved in this story, are all key parts of it. That it's really the organic growth of this whole event really came from those three characters.

That was really something for me to- obviously it's a big deal to be writing Captain America the year that he turns 75. We wanted to mark the occasion suitably. Obviously Steve is very much going to be at the forefront of this story.

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The event kicks off in Standoff!: Assault on Pleasant Hill Alpha, from writer Nick Spencer and artist Jesus Saiz, and will continue through Avengers family titles, including Sam Wilson, Captain America, All-New, All-Different Avengers, Uncanny Avengers, New Avengers, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and more.

Avengers: Standoff! kicks off in March 2016.