Avengers: Jed MacKay Teases a New Era for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (Exclusive)

The Tribulation Events are coming for the Avengers. This year marks the 60th anniversary of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, which means it’s time for a new volume of Avengers. Writer Jed MacKay and Marvel’s Stormbreakers artist C.F. Villa are relaunching Avengers in May, and fans got an idea of the sort of threats the heroes will face in December’s Timeless #1. The Kang-centric one-shot introduced concepts such as the “missing moment” and Tribulation Events, along with new characters like Myrrdin and his Twilight Court. All of these threats will continue to build in Avengers, and MacKay is the one orchestrating it all.

ComicBook.com spoke to Jed MacKay to find out what fans can expect from Avengers this year. MacKay’s Marvel resume includes street-level books like Black Cat and Moon Knight, killing and resurrecting Doctor Strange, and crafting a new status quo for the Infinity Stones in Infinite Destinies. MacKay goes into what lessons he’s taking into writing Avengers, the process that went into selecting the team members, Captain Marvel’s role as the leader, the mysterious Tribulation Events, and more. ComicBook.com can also exclusively reveal the first look at pages from Avengers #1 by C.F. Villa and Federico Blee, featuring Earth’s Mightiest Heroes squaring off against the oversized Terminus.

New Era of Avengers

ComicBook.com: It’s been fun to watch your Marvel resume continue to grow each year, with Avengers being the biggest gig so far to date. You’ve written many of these characters already in titles like Infinite Destinies, which dealt with big-scale threats. What lessons are you bringing with you as you start a new era for the Avengers, especially after getting to set up your run with the latest Timeless one-shot?

Jed MacKay: For me it’s about a question of scale – the bulk of my work has been on the scrappy, weirdo, street-level end where a guy with a mask and some goons is a major problem. With Avengers, we’re looking at not one, but seven people who work at a much larger scale than Black Cat, Taskmaster or Moon Knight do, and in a much bigger and louder way than Doctor Strange and Clea. So, going into Avengers, I’ve been restructuring how I look at a comic book- the stakes are higher, the threats are bigger, and the heroes are Earth’s Mightiest.

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Team Roster

How much feedback did you get to have in selecting the team members? Having Scarlet Witch and Vision back together was a surprise, along with Sam Wilson instead of Steve Rogers. And why is now the right time to give the leadership role over to Captain Marvel?

[Editor] Tom Brevoort and I went back and forth on a lineup, but settled pretty early on with what I would call an iconic lineup of Avengers, something I wanted to reflect the classic stories of the Avengers while acknowledging the modern conception of what the Avengers are and should be. While, of course, maintaining a manageable roster size – with too many characters, you’re going to get into issues where some members aren’t getting enough spotlight, that kind of thing. Would I like to have Hawkeye, an Ant-Man or the Wasp? Sure, but I also really wanted to focus down on a group where I could do each of them justice. 

Wanda and Vision on the team very much hearkens back to the Avengers comics I grew up reading, which were my dad’s old issue from the 70s (which does lead me to wish I could have Beast on the team, haha), when those two were core Avengers characters. They’re both characters I like a lot, and with the added attention from other media, I think the time is perfect to have them on the Avengers. In the other direction, Sam Wilson as the Captain America of the Avengers reflects the modern landscape of comics- and Sam fulfills an important role on our team. In a team of gods, kings, synthetics, and the like, Sam Wilson, inner-city social worker, is the most grounded perspective they have. Sam’s as close to a normal person as we have on our roster, in a way that Steve Rogers, living legend of WWII is not.

As far as Carol as leader goes, it’s just something that makes sense- Carol’s ascent over the last decade makes her a perfect candidate to run the Avengers, and I’m looking forward to people seeing her tenure in that chair.

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Twilight Court

I can’t help but notice that the press release for Avengers #1 refers to The Star. The Icon. The Witch, etc., representing the seven members of the Avengers. However, these are also the terms used for the Twilight Court in Timeless #1. Are there any more parallels between the Avengers and Twilight Court we should be looking out for?

I don’t think it’s escaped peoples’ notice that the Twilight Court fulfill the same archetypes as the Avengers… but to what end, we’ll have to leave to the future!

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Tribulation Events

If I’m reading this right, we have four Tribulation Events, and four Marvel villains on Myrddin’s chess board at the end of Timeless. Should we expect those villains to factor into the causes of the Tribulation Events, or is it more complicated than that?

No, there’s no connection there – and there are certainly more than four Tribulation Events! We have a cascading sequence of disasters and crises that will keep the Avengers pretty busy for the foreseeable future- the kinds of things only Earth Mightiest Heroes can stand against. That said, we’ll see plenty of familiar villains popping up, either involved in the Events or opportunistically taking advantage of them.

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Future of Avengers

Is there anything you can tease about what’s next for the Avengers after the Tribulation Events have concluded?

That question assumes that there will be any Avengers left standing in the wake of the Tribulation Events!

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