Marvel Comics’ Avengers will tackle a world where they never existed in May

This May, Marvel’s Avengers cartoon will take a strange turn: it will not contain Avengers at all. Author Jason Aaron and artist Ed McGuinness’s new arc will explore a Marvel universe where the Avengers never formed – but many of their villains did – according to a revealing form from Marvel Comics.

“Welcome to a world where Tony Stark never built an Iron Man armor,” says Marvel’s news release, “where Thor is a hard-drinking atheist who despises hammers. Where Wakanda is dismissed as a myth. And where Captain “America was never found in the ice because there were no Avengers to find him. Instead, this world has always been protected by Earth’s Most Powerful Heroes, the Squadron Supreme of America.”

Image: Iban Coello, Espen Grundetjern / Marvel Comics

The Squadron Supreme is … well, it’s a Justice League pastiche, usually led by the orphaned alien Hyperion, along with the nocturnal Nighthawk, Warrior Woman, and so on. In the current state of Marvel Comics, they are the state-sponsored super-team of the United States – coordinated by a disillusioned agent Phil Coulson – after the Avengers fell out of favor after the whole secret Empire debacle.

In this new Marvel universe, the squadron also has their own range of new supervillians, each of which apparently has a certain mashup quality. Dr. Juggernaut appears to be a version of Doctor Doom that claimed the Crimson Gem from Cyttorak and acquired the powers of Juggernaut. Thanos uses ‘Infinity Rings’ this time and points out some shared traits with the Iron Man villain the Mandarin. This is all very Infinity Warp-y.

The new arc – starring Blade as the only person in the Marvel universe to remember how things were before – will begin Avengers in May.