7 Great Marvel Comics Time-Travel Stories, Ranked

While it is mostly part of the X-Men franchise, Marvel Comics has a lot of time-travel stories spread throughout the company’s history. This all started with Days of Future Past, where the X-Men learned that there was no such thing as changing the past, and all the time-travel adventures resulted in different branches in the multiverse and different Earths. However, there were other ideas that Marvel played with before in the pages of The Fantastic Four, and then similar stories were told around the lives of the Avengers, Hulk, and more. For Marvel Comics, it isn’t just about the X-Men when it comes to great time travel stories.

Here is a look at seven of the best Marvel Comics time-travel stories, ranked. To keep it even, only one will be included for the X-Men.

7) Fantastic Four #291-292

Five years after X-Men made time travel popular with Days of Future Past, The Fantastic Four tried to do things a little differently in a two-issue story running in The Fantastic Four #291-292. At the end of issue #290, the Fantastic Four believed Reed Richards died in space, and after this ended and the FF returned home, they realized they were in New York City in 1936. There was a lot to love about this time-travel story, with Nick Fury also around, and the three surviving members of the Fantastic Four (Invisible Woman, She-Hulk, and the Human Torch) tried to figure out how to get back to their right time frame.

However, when Nick Fury went to Germany to kill Adolf Hitler, the Fantastic Four set out to stop him. For this story to work, Marvel readers have to forget about the fact that alternate Earths exist. Otherwise, there is no reason Nick shouldn’t have killed him to save this Earth. Instead, this was set up as a morality tale because, as Sue said, the people Hitler killed already died, and killing him here would cause untold problems. It was a different time-travel story, and one that plays with the idea of time paradoxes like few others do.

6) Hulk: Future Imperfect

The Maestro is one of the most powerful versions of the Hulk in history, living the same basic life as Earth-616’s Bruce Banner until an apocalyptic event destroyed most of humanity, and Hulk decided to take over the survivors in America. This ended up being a time-travel story involving this world’s Hulk going into the future and finding Maestro ruling with an iron fist.

This was also smart Hulk, which made him much weaker than Maestro, but he was able to use his brain to finally win the battle and send Maestro into the past to end the threat and get back home himself. It was such a popular storyline that Marvel returned to it a few years later, and then, in 2020, Maestro’s actual origin of his rise to power was shown.

5) Kang the Conqueror

Kang the Conqueror’s entire thing is time travel, but there was one series that really rose above the rest, and it was the 2021 series named after the villain. From the creative team of Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing, and Carlos Magno, this series sees an older, broken-down Kang sending his younger variant down a dark path to change his history.

There have been a lot of series with Kang trying to change the past, whether it is as Rama Tut, Immortus, or Iron Lad. However, this series did something similar to the Iron Lad story, where the younger Kang doesn’t want to be a villain like his future self and tries to find a way to alter his own history again. This might be one of the best Kang storylines ever written, and it shows that time means nothing to the Conqueror.

4) Avengers Forever

Avengers Forever is a storyline from 1998 that ran for 12 issues that also dealt with Kang. However, instead of this focusing on Kang as the main character, this was about the Avengers from different moments throughout history teaming up in a time-traveling adventure to stop a war between Kang the Conqueror and Immortus that threatens to break the timeline. This all started when Immortus tried to kill an elderly Rick Jones, only for Kang to show up and save him.

To stop the war, Rick has to pull in Avengers from the past, present, and future. This included a disillusioned Captain America from after the classic 1974 Secret Empire storyline, Hank Pym from when he was mentally unwell and didn’t know he was Hank Pym, Hawkeye after the Kree-Skrull War, Hank Pym and Wasp from the present day, Songbird from the future, and Captain Marvel from further in the future. The fight then raged across time in what was one of the most entertaining time-travel adventures in Marvel Comics.

3) Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine

One of the most entertaining team-ups in Marvel Comics is Wolverine and Spider-Man. The two have been in several team-ups, including a time-travel adventure that happened in a comic book called Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine. This was a six-issue miniseries that came out in 2010, which starts with Peter Parker and Wolverine living in the past, 65 million years ago, sent back in time after a battle with a villain named Orb.

What happens next was incredible, as Spider-Man and Wolverine end up being sent through time, including going into the future where an apocalyptic event has resulted in a Doctor Doom with the Phoenix Force destroying civilization, and in the Western era of the past, where Spider-Man fell in love with a woman named Sara before being forced back to the present day by the TVA. The partnership between Wolverine and Spider-Man was great, as always, but the creative story delivered on every level.

2) Age of Ultron

Age of Ultron is a polarizing time-travel storyline because only part of it really had anything to do with Ultron, which was supposed to be the selling point. However, if you can get past that fact, there is a lot to love about this time-travel storyline since it is a strong indication that trying to fix the future by changing the past never works. The apocalyptic future sees Ultron taking over and conquering the world.

However, when Wolverine heads back in time to stop this, he makes a disastrous decision. He decides he will stop Ultron by going back and killing Hank Pym, so he can’t create Ultron to start with. However, this caused Earth to fall during the Kree-Skrull War, and Pym’s death created an equally bad future, which caused Wolverine to head back to stop himself from killing Pym, creating a terrible paradox. The entire storyline was about how it is impossible to change the past without causing more problems, a recurring theme in Marvel Comics.

1) X-Men: Days of Future Past

The Marvel Comics time-travel storyline that started them all arrived in 1991 with Days of Future Past. This saw a shocking moment in The Uncanny X-Men #141 that opened with the mutants of the world either dead or captured and held in concentration camps. It soon showed that an assassination attempt by Mystique in the past led to the Sentinels being created for the government to stop the mutant threat.

This was only a two-issue storyline, but it set the template for what Marvel time travel storylines would look like for the next decades. Kitty Pryde was sent to the past to stop Mystique, and the future was averted, but this is also where the idea that alternate Earths formed out of these changes, which played into the future with Age of Apocalypse, building on the ideas created in this groundbreaking Marvel Comics event.

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