Avengers NOW! Officially Begins With Thor #1

Avengers NOW! will see Iron Man, Captain America and Thor radically altered and give each of the three a new #1. It will also feature a renewed focus on Deathlok and the Winter Soldier, with more than ten new titles in the planning stages.

Besides a female Thor, Captain America has stepped aside, age having finally taken its toll, and Falcon will take on Cap’s costume, shield and responsibilities next month. Tony Stark, meanwhile, will move to San Francisco with a new suit of armor and a new set of priorities in Superior Iron Man.

Avengers NOW! also seems geared at bringing the TV, movie and comic universes into greater harmony, with popular characters and concepts from the Marvel Cinematic Universe finding their way to the comics page.

Besides those mentioned above, Mark Waid will launch a new S.H.I.E.L.D. monthly in December that’s much more similar to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. than it is to any previous iteration of the monthly comic.

“If we do our job effectively and all goes as planned, there’s some stage magic going on here: what looks to be one-and-done stories can actually feed into a larger plot thread that plays nicely off some of Marvel’s other upcoming plans,” Waid explained of the series in an interview around the time of Marvel’s announcement at Comic Con.

If that sounds more or less like what they hope to do with the TV series, that’s likely no accident…but Waid says that it’s a straight-up Marvel Universe S.H.I.E.L.D. book, with all the Jim Steranko-inspired madness that implies. That’s the hope of Avengers NOW!: to take the popular characters and properties of The Avengers and filter them back through the comics’sensibility so that it brings the comic book version of these characters to as wide an audience as possible.

Thor #1 is out the first week in October.