Where I left off had something to do with Kang and the Apocalypse Twins, Uriel and Eimin, reanimating dead super-villains Grim Reaper, Daken and Banshee in a plot to have Wonder Man and the Scarlet Witch rapture all mutants to a new home world, Planet X, in order to subvert plans for a global hate war that a Red Skull augmented by the brain of a dead Professor X has in store.
Complicated, and I have provided only the lightest of glosses, which is what threw me off this Uriel and Eimin story arc. There is a lot of stuff happening -- too much for me to keep track of.
But in Uncanny Avengers #14 writer Rick Remender brings everything into focus; he, penciller Steve McNiven and inker John Dell treat us to a classic super-powered clash of heroes that is operatic, or at least as melodramatic as a Hollywood blockbuster.
Remender is doffing his cap here to the early Bronze Age Celestial Madonna Saga found in the pages of the Avengers, complete with Kang reanimated super-villains.
The Celestial Madonna Saga features the death of the Swordsman, which had a big impact on me reading it as a kid right around the time Nixon vacated the White House and Ford got started patching up any holes that had appeared in the U.S. Deep State. The early Bronze Age is when Marvel figures out the "crossover event," now the main organizing principle of the corporate comic book behemoth. Granted, the late Silver Age saw Marvel's first crossovers, e.g., the Skrull-Kree War. But it took the Bronze Age and the relaxing of the Comics Code Authority to allow for the introduction of pathos-inducing, crowd-pleasing superhero death.
In Uncanny Avengers #14, as you can see in the 11 scans below beginning with the cover page, the reader is treated to not one but three superhero deaths.
