New Avengers #30

Last Sunday I hit a stride and read somewhere around ten issues of Jonathan Hickman's New Avengers. For almost two years now Hickman has been plotting the story of the extinction of all life, not just in our universe but in universes throughout all dimensions, the multiverse. This multidimensional pan-universal extinction is triggered when one Earth from one dimension collides with another Earth from another dimension at an incursion point.

Most of the action in the title to date has been superheroes, the Illuminati,  rushing around weighted down with the moral quandary of having to commit genocide by destroying the intruding, non-Earth-616 planet before it collapses both.

On this day, the day that Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy for President of the United States, collapse is an appropriate topic. The Democrats are in a state of denial so extreme it approaches brain death. Most deep-blue Democrats when pushed will acknowledge that Hillary is not the best candidate -- Elizabeth Warren is most often sited as a preference -- but they don't see a way around Hillary's name recognition and deep pockets. So Democrats plan to sit tight and hope for the best. In the meantime, the tune that is being whistled as the Democratic Party drives past the graveyard is that Hillary will be able to mobilize and deliver to the polls the "Obama coalition" -- blacks, youth, Latinos.

That's not going to happen. The only thing that might save Hillary's bacon, assuming a dark horse like Jim Webb doesn't get traction and trounce her in the primaries, as Barack Hussein did in 2008, is if the Republican primary is so chaotic and vicious with billionaire funders engaged in mutually assured destruction that it deliveries up a terminally wounded standard bearer, a la Mitt Romney in 2012.

Right now let's assume that both the Ted Cruz clown car and the Marco Rubio daydream don't survive long after Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- granted, this is a large assumption -- and the race for the GOP nomination boils down to Scott Walker vs. Jeb Bush. I think either one beats Hillary.

Then what are we looking at? I think if it is Walker we'll see the repeal of Davis-Bacon. And with the loss of federal prevailing wage, there will be an even more pronounced spike in income inequality. Labor unions will become an almost non-factor in national politics. Union density is already so low, around 11%, one has to go all the way back to before the U.S. entered World War One to find a similar level.

Historians will tell you: When inequality spikes, societies fracture and collapse. That is what Hillary's candidacy augurs.

And we haven't even discussed the rapid disappearance of the Earth's ice. The April Harper's had a terrific and terrifying story by Gretel Ehrlich, "Rotten Ice: Traveling by dogsled in the melting Arctic." The Greenland Inuit are finding it increasingly difficult to hunt because so much of the ice is weak and in retreat. Many subsistence hunters are committing suicide.

So Hickman's New Avengers tale of collapse, genocide and extinction is timely and should find a receptive audience. What I particularly like about issue #30 is the art of Dalibor Talajic. (You will find eight scans below. Alan Davis is the cover artist, found in the scan at the top of the post.)

Talajic's work reminds me of the great Wally Wood and the work he did on the early Daredevil, with its heavy inks of the horror comics of the 1950s but in a superhero setting -- very appropriate for Hickman's epic of the death of the multiverse.