This issue opens with a framing device that tells us exactly what we’re in for: two boys, on two different paths, whose lives were destined to collide. One was born to a poor nomad and an ill-fated witch, and used sorcery and science to conquer a nation. The other was a brilliant scientist who would brave the cosmos and come home wearing incredible power for good. This is the story of how their legendary rivalry began.

VICTOR VON DOOM

Son of a healer and a witch. Orphaned by cruelty and bureaucracy. Brilliant beyond measure, and utterly convinced of it.

REED RICHARDS

A scholarship student at State University. Curious, generous, and just as gifted — but humble about it, to Victor’s disgust.

Act One: The Fire That Never Goes Out

The story actually begins near its own ending — a flash-forward to a hooded figure standing before a massive, demonic-faced furnace, screaming for his acolytes to stoke “the secret fire” hotter, hotter, hotter, because the flames must be “as hot as the Devil’s own.” This is Victor, already deep into his transformation, presiding over red-robed monks as they forge the first piece of his armor. He tells them that in this temple they’ve studied dark alchemy for centuries, yet he — their student turned master — has taught them alchemies they never dreamed of. Science and sorcery are united in his blood, inherited from a father who knew medicine and a mother who knew the forces of nature. “Today,” he declares, “I create myself anew.” When a monk worries the hot metal might cause him pain, Victor simply says: “Pain? That is for lesser men.” It’s a chilling cold open — we know where this story ends before we even know how it started.

Act Two: The Boy Who Buried His Father

The story rewinds further, to “years earlier” in Latveria. A young Victor, dressed in a flat cap and modest clothes, is grieving with his adoptive sister Valeria over the death of his father, Werner Von Doom. Victor’s mother, we learn, died when he was very young — “my heart already died with her,” he says — and now his father is gone too. Werner was a humble village healer, a genuinely good man who was dragged like a slave to Baron Fortunov’s castle to save the Baron’s dying wife. He arrived too late to save her, and for that failure, the Baron’s men hunted him to death, leaving him buried in rags while his murderers wore fine silks.

Sorting through his father’s meager belongings, Victor finds an old wooden box marked with strange symbols he half-remembers — it belonged to his mother, Cynthia Von Doom. Inside are relics of witchcraft: jars, sigils, and remnants of a life dedicated to the old, dark arts. This box is the seed of everything that follows.

“Like an animal! That is what kindness brings — buried in tatters and rags, while his murderers wear the finest…”

First Blood: The Grenade of Science and Sorcery

Not long after, we see Victor already putting his mother’s grimoire to violent use. He confronts one of Baron Fortunov’s military patrols in the woods, invoking his mother’s name and her spell — “summoning of water and banishing of fire,” in his words, “the simplest of elemental manipulations” — to entomb soldiers in solid ice. What’s most unsettling isn’t the magic itself, but how casually Victor has already begun industrializing it: he’s automated the spell into a handheld device, a magical grenade he can simply toss. “Science and sorcery, gentlemen,” he says, almost bored. Before finishing the job, he tells a terrified, freezing soldier to relay a message to his mother, wherever the ice sends him: that Victor hasn’t forgotten her, and he’s sorry it’s taking so long to avenge her.

Back at the Romani camp where he lives with Valeria and their people, Victor explains his impossible situation — Baron Fortunov believes his father let the Baron’s wife die on purpose, and won’t rest until the entire Von Doom bloodline is extinguished. Victor is the last of that line. Just as he wonders where he could possibly flee to, a visitor arrives: an American government agent, who’s heard remarkable things about the young man’s scientific gifts. He offers Victor something no one else has: an escape, a doctorate, and a future — courtesy of the United States government.

Act Three: Enter Reed Richards

The story jumps to New York, where Victor arrives at State University — a school the agent claims rivals MIT and Caltech. Before leaving him to his studies, the agent jokes that Victor should meet “Uncle Sam’s other scholarship boy,” a fellow prodigy who’s “into everything but weapons.” His name, we’re told with weighty foreshadowing, is Richards.

Victor tracks him down to a cluttered dorm room covered in chalkboards full of equations, and the two brilliant young men size each other up instantly. Reed is warm, curious, and immediately fascinated by the rumors surrounding Victor’s work — “it’s almost like the laws of physics don’t even apply,” he says, hoping they might collaborate. Victor is standoffish but can’t resist showing off: glancing at Reed’s ionic-propulsion engine blueprint, he identifies a flaw in seconds, eliminating unnecessary variables that had been causing Reed’s mental simulations to end in explosions. Reed is thrilled — genuinely, humbly grateful — and even offers to room together. Victor, unable to accept the idea of needing anyone, coldly rebuffs him and walks out.

Cheeseburgers and Self-Actualization

Their next encounter, in the university cafeteria, is the philosophical heart of the issue. Over a “cheeseburger” (a novelty to Victor), Reed brings up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — food, safety, belonging, esteem, and finally self-actualization, the search for one’s authentic self. Victor scoffs at the idea of needing friendship or belonging at all, insisting he has no need for anyone; he’s survived starvation and danger without help before. When Reed mentions his football-playing, astronaut-hopeful roommate Ben Grimm with genuine affection, Victor sneers that to minds “like ours,” an ordinary smart person is just “a primate swinging a rock.” Reed pushes back hard — for the first time in the issue, someone challenges Victor to his face, arguing that treating other people as beneath him is a trap that will keep Victor from ever achieving true greatness. Victor, stung, throws Reed’s sandwich and nearly storms off — but stays, intrigued despite himself.

“You’re going to spend your life limiting yourself so that your lessers find you amenable, until all greatness in you dies from lack of use. Walking on eggshells when you could be sprinting.”

The conversation deepens over dinner at a Romanian restaurant, where the two swap real theories about dimensional travel and non-Euclidean space — Victor dreams of a “junction to everywhere,” doorways to realities beyond their own, “for us all, not just for the few.” For a moment, it looks like the beginning of a genuine friendship: two orphaned, brilliant young men, drawn together by loss and ambition, finally speaking to someone on their level. Victor even opens up about his mother’s death and his father’s disappearance — a rare crack in his armor of superiority.

Act Four: The Séance That Broke Everything

That fragile friendship shatters the moment Reed sees what Victor has actually been building in his dorm room: a candlelit ritual chamber, ringed with occult sigils and centered on a bizarre machine mounted with a strange helmet. Victor admits he’s been secretly experimenting with what he calls an “older technology” — older than Latveria, older than Earth itself — a device meant to let him mentally project into another dimensional plane and speak to his dead mother once more.

Reed, horrified, calls it madness — and for once, points out a genuine, verifiable flaw: a misplaced decimal point in Victor’s calculations, a small mathematical error that could prove catastrophic given the amount of energy involved. Victor’s pride cannot bear this. He explodes with rage, dismissing Reed’s correction as pure jealousy, and violently throws him out of the dorm — insisting he doesn’t make mistakes, except in ever letting Reed inside in the first place.

The Machine Ignites

Alone, and utterly certain of his own genius, Victor straps himself into the device anyway. “I’m coming, Mother,” he says softly, activating it — and the “netherworld” answers. A monstrous, horned, fire-wreathed entity fills the sky, greeting him by name: “Hello, Victor.” It’s not his mother. Whatever this being is, it’s malevolent, and the machine detonates in a catastrophic burst of green energy, hurling Reed across the room and engulfing Victor in flame and electricity as he screams.

Act Five: The Face No One Will Ever See Again

Victor survives — barely. He wakes in a hospital, bandaged head to toe, and is bluntly told by the dean that Reed Richards’ quick thinking is the only reason he’s alive. Rather than gratitude, Victor receives expulsion: the dean, furious and unmoved by government backing, bans him from the school and vows to ruin his academic reputation. Alone that night, Victor unwraps his bandages to see his face for the first time since the accident — and the horror of what he finds sends him smashing through a mirror in anguish, screaming Reed’s name and demanding to know what was done to him.

Broken, scarred, and consumed by blame, Victor treks alone across the world and up a “nameless mountain,” searching for legends of an order of healers who can repair any wound. What he finds instead are the Vengeful Ones — red-robed monks devoted to healing the wounds of the spirit through vengeance. Impressed by his will to survive the climb with nothing to guide him, they accept him, and his training begins.

Act Six: The Mask

The story returns full circle to its opening image: Victor, now the temple’s master rather than its student, commands the forging of his armor piece by piece. When the mask itself is finally ready — still glowing, not yet cooled — Victor refuses to wait even a moment longer. He presses the white-hot metal to his own scarred face, hissing in agony, and declares that no mortal eyes will ever again gaze upon the “hideous countenance” of Victor Von Doom. From this moment on, there is no Victor Von Doom — only what he has become. Asked what the world should call him now, he answers with total, unshakable certainty: what has been earned through fire and blood should be flaunted. There is only one title he will accept.

Call Me... Doctor.
In the issue's final, iconic image, the fully armored figure — green cloak, silver gauntlets glowing with power, the cold mask now permanently fused to his face — rises before his kneeling acolytes in the ruins of the temple. The transformation is complete. The scientist who once shared cheeseburgers and dreams of interdimensional travel with Reed Richards is gone. In his place stands a monarch of science and sorcery who blames his rival, and the whole world beneath him, for the fire that remade him. "The Beginning..." reads the final caption box — because for Doctor Doom, this isn't an ending.

The post Challenges of Doom: Mr. Fantastic #1 (2026) – How Victor von Doom Became Doctor Doom appeared first on GoBookMart.

Which Is the Greater Evil?

The actual story begins not with Spider-Man, not with a jungle explosion, but inside a confessional booth in what appears to be a small Latin American mountain town. Adam Kubert’s panels here are vertical and tight, almost suffocating — the latticed grille of the confessional bisecting faces, the interior dark and intimate. An elderly priest leads a stranger through the traditional Catholic opening prayers in Spanish. “El Señor esté en tu corazón.” “Bendíceme, Padre, porque he pecado.”

The man on the other side of the screen wears a worn brown jacket and a pair of distinctive green-tinted circular goggles. The priest notices something quickly: the man’s accent. He’s American — “of a sort,” as the man coolly answers. The priest has had Americans in his confessional before. Intelligence officers. Military contractors. Men whose sins, he says, are “spread a mile wide and stacked a mile deep.” He dares to hope this one might be different.

The man removes his green goggles slowly. “No, Father. Not different.”

“Dare I hope you are something different?”
“…No, Father. Not different…”
“…much, much worse. …a moral man who ignores his conscience… or a monster who has none?”
— The Priest & The Stranger

The final panel of the scene zooms in on the man’s eye — and it is not a normal human eye. It is green, slit-pupilled, reptilian. Whether this is metaphorical, a visual representation of the “monster within,” or something far more literal remains one of the issue’s deliberate mysteries. What’s certain is the thematic framework it establishes: this question of the greater evil — conscience ignored versus conscience absent — will echo through every scene that follows.

The Team That Never Existed

Hickman cuts directly from the confessional into a flashback. The narration — dry, military, delivered without sentiment — sets the stage. After the Berlin Wall fell but before the next formal war began, a handler named Sheppard recruited a team of soldiers and set them loose on the world. Over a hundred missions, erased, denied, or forgotten. Their team was honed to a razor sharpness. And at some point, they stopped caring about the whys and the reasons. What mattered was the job. What mattered was coming home.

We meet them all inside a cramped military helicopter, lit in that deep red cockpit glow that signals night operations and poor odds. Arthur Hesli’s colors here are superb — all blood-red interiors cutting to that vast, moon-bathed blue-black jungle outside.

Mission Roster — Callsigns and Ranks

Major
Donald Duke “Wallet”

Lieutenant
Frank Castle “Punisher”

Sergeant
Dexter Hollings “Farmhouse”

Corporal
Tomas Dukes “Jowls”

Corporal
Devlin Wayne “Doorknob”

Sergeant
Jack Ward “Sweetgrass”

Frank Castle is here. Before the skull. Before the war on crime. His callsign on the team is already “Punisher” — written right there on his label, which immediately raises the question of what this mission will cost him and how it might shape the man he eventually becomes. He takes the overwatch position, watching the treeline through the scope while the rest of the team drops into the jungle. His internal narration is bone-dry, fatalistic, and utterly Frank Castle.

As they rappel into the jungle on a fat full moon, the team banter flows freely. “Farmhouse” admits he has a bad feeling about this one — he always does, they’d all be worried if he didn’t. “Doorknob” isn’t wrong but concedes there are too many moving pieces for his comfort. “Sweetgrass” just wants to get in, do the job, and get to the border. “Jowls” teases him about his blind girlfriend. It’s that kind of easy, warm team chemistry that great war stories use to make you care about people before putting them in danger.

Into the Hive — A.I.M., Hydra, and the Box

The mission parameters, as Castle narrates from his overwatch position, are deceptively simple: surround and scout an Advanced Ideas Mechanics base hidden in the jungle; infiltrate; neutralize any A.I.M. agents encountered; and retrieve “the device.” That’s all. No description of the device. No further context. Just: retrieve it. As Castle notes grimly, the mission objective was “clear as mud.”

Complicating the approach was the known probability of Hydra interference — a variable that, from the smoke already rising on the horizon at the drop site, had very clearly become a certainty. Castle scans the burning perimeter from the trees and thinks to himself: “God, do I hate bein’ right.”

Hydra has beaten them to the punch. Green-uniformed soldiers are already assaulting the A.I.M. perimeter as the team enters through the southeast, using the chaos as cover. The interior of the base is a hive structure — long conduits, subterranean labs, the A.I.M. yellow suits already taking casualties as Hydra pushes in. Wallet directs the team deeper while Punisher holds overwatch outside.

And then, at the centre of the base’s critical lab, suspended in cables from the ceiling: the wreckage of a Super Adaptoid. Someone — or something — has torn it apart for spare parts. It should be unnerving enough on its own. But the real discovery is the base’s lead scientist, a wild-eyed, round-goggled man who has apparently been waiting for this moment.

He announces what all of this hardware was designed to create. Twenty billion dollars of equipment, sacrificed for one singular purpose. The result — sitting in its containment housing, glowing faintly — is a Cosmic Cube.

The Cosmic Cube is one of Marvel’s most dangerous objects: a reality-warping artifact capable of granting wishes to its wielder. Its effective power has no defined ceiling. Its critical variable is stability — an unstable Cosmic Cube is as dangerous as an active one, perhaps more so, because its effects are unpredictable and uncontrollable.

The scientist is practically vibrating as he offers to unlock the cube and carry it himself if the team will take him along. Before anyone can process that offer, Hydra soldiers crash through the wall — “HAIL HYDRA!” — and the lab explodes into firefight chaos. Bullets fly. The cube is loose in the confusion. And then the entire upper section of the base shakes with a catastrophic impact. Something has come in from above.

Peter Parker Gets the Call

Hickman cuts away from the jungle — a deliberate structural move that threads present-day New York between the flashback sequences. It’s night in the city. An alarm goes off. Peter Parker stirs in bed, phone ringing.

He tries the standard deflection. “Hello? Wrong number.” The voice doesn’t play along. “Cut the crap, Parker. Do you know who this is?” The caller knows his name — knows who he is and how to reach him. Peter recognises the voice and sits up: “Spider-Man?” A brief exchange follows. There’s an agent waiting at the S.H.I.E.L.D. Intrepid substation. Five minutes.

“Cut the crap, Parker. Do you know who this is?”
“…Spider-Man?”
“…yeah.”
— Unknown Caller & Peter Parker

The phone clicks off. Peter sighs, pulls on the suit, and leaps out the window into the New York night with a muttered “Fantastic.” The quiet domesticity of his apartment — the messy bed, the pale light of the phone — makes the transition to what awaits him all the more jarring.

The Green Rage Problem

Back in the jungle. In the lab, before the full chaos erupts, a voice cuts in from somewhere above — a face visible in a small circular screen. The question it poses hangs in the air like a lit fuse: “Tell me, gentlemen, have you ever wanted to play god?” Then the ceiling comes down.

Something massive crashes through the top of the facility — the explosion visible from outside, where Punisher tracks the fire through his scope. Inside, the team is dealing with the simultaneous collapse of the Hydra assault and whatever just breached the upper structure. Through a shattered viewport, between the smoke and the screaming, something enormous fills the frame.

The Hulk.

A full double-width spread shows him as the Hydra soldiers see him: filling the entire back wall, fists up, eyes blazing with blue-white energy, a wall of green muscle that makes the room feel like a toy box. Dozens of Hydra soldiers raise their weapons at him in a neat line. One of the team members says quietly from the back of the room: “Uh, guys… little problem here.”

It’s a brilliant comic beat. The understatement of the decade. The team barely survived a Hydra assault inside an A.I.M. base. And now the Hulk is in the room. With them. Next to the Cosmic Cube.

What follows is the most chaotic sequence of the issue. The team tears through the facility corridors in full retreat, guns blazing in every direction. Hydra soldiers go down. A.I.M. agents are already dead. Ariana Maher’s lettering goes operatic — “DAKKA-DAKKA-DAKKA RAT-A-TAT-TAT” fills pages edge to edge, the visual noise of a full firefight barely covering the deeper, more ominous sounds of the Hulk moving through walls behind them.

Jowls, and the Weight of Every Empty Click

From his scope, Punisher tracks the team emerging from the base, guides them clear, and then pauses. Something in the sight picture changes. “You— Wait. I see it.” His eye pulls to something massive following the team through the brush. “My god… What is that?”

Even Frank Castle — a man defined by his refusal to flinch — is shaken by what he sees in that scope.

In the jungle, Doorknob explains what the cube means in practical terms as they run: if it’s a genuine Cosmic Cube and if it’s stable, it’s essentially a genie’s lamp. Make a wish. See it come true. Wallet asks what “stable” means and — mid-sentence — the question is answered for him. A scream rips through the jungle:

“AAAAAAA”
“Jowls?”
— The Team

No lingering. No mourning on the page. The narration doesn’t have time for it, and neither does the team. Jowls — easy grin, teasing Sweetgrass about his señorita thirty pages ago — is gone. A minigun lying in the dirt. Blood on the ground. They run.

The team opens up with everything they have. Multiple full-width panels of sustained gunfire — “RAT-A-TAT-TAT DAKKA-DAKKA-DAKKA” repeating in an almost hypnotic rhythm, the sound of an entire team emptying every magazine they carry into a single target. Page after page of muzzle flash and sound effects, until the final panel strips away all colour and sound and leaves only four things: “CLICK. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.”

Smoke. Fire. Silence. And then movement in the flames.

“You didn’t miss… All you did was make me angry.”
— The Hulk

Full page. The Hulk walks out of the inferno. Scorched. Still holding a team member in one massive fist. Not particularly winded. The horror of the image is in its casualness — he has absorbed everything they had and it cost him nothing except his patience.

Someone Has to Stay

Grenades. The team throws everything that’s left. Three pages of BOOMs and close-ups of the Hulk’s burning, bleeding face — a terrifying mask of green rage — and then he delivers a line that reads more like a dare than a threat:

“Well? You gonna stand there? Or you gonna run?”
— The Hulk

They run. Through the jungle at night, over uneven ground, until they hit a rope suspension bridge — one of those thin, swaying things that hangs over a dark gorge with nothing below but darkness. One of the team turns back. Fires a burst of energy from a weapon glowing hot. The others stop. The team member is already in position, holding the bridge side:

“Get across the bridge and collapse it… I’ll hold ’em off!”

Protest. “You don’t have to—”

“I SAID GO!”

They cross. The bridge comes down behind them. The sound that follows — a long, trailing YAAAAAAAAAA — says everything the page doesn’t need to write. Another member of the team, gone. The Hulk doesn’t need the bridge. He leaps the gap. He always does.

“Give It to Me” — The Hulk’s Real Objective

The last confrontation comes in a clearing, lit by the ambient green of the cube and the distant glow of the burning base behind them. The Hulk closes in — not rampaging, but purposeful. And his demand is specific in a way that stops the surviving team members cold:

“Give it to…me. Give me…the cube.”
— The Hulk

Doorknob stares at him. “That’s what this is over? That doesn’t make any sense… How’d you know it was there? Who hired you?” These are exactly the right questions — and the Hulk does not answer them. The cube is not a prize he stumbled upon. The Hulk came here for it. Someone sent him. Someone told him where to look. The implications of that are left entirely unresolved in issue one, and deliberately so.

The Hulk’s final demand — “GIVE IT TO ME!” — fills an entire close-up panel. Teeth. Green. Rage. An open mouth big enough to swallow a car.

Doorknob looks at the glowing cube in his hands. Looks at the Hulk. And makes the only move left.

“You want it… fine. Here you go.”

He fires the Cosmic Cube. Or fires it at the Hulk. The result is the same — a massive FWASSHHHHH of released energy that lights the jungle blue-white and sends something enormous arcing away through the night sky. The genie’s lamp, as it turns out, is not stable. But as the lone survivor standing in the aftermath quietly notes: that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.

“Over a hundred missions — a team honed to a razor sharpness, experienced… proven… the best there was… but this time, only one of us was comin’ home.”
— Survivor (Narration)

Page 23 is a full-page splash: a lone figure in tactical gear walking away through dense blue-black jungle, an owl watching from a branch above, the broken fragments of the Cosmic Cube glowing faintly in the mud at his feet. He speaks to no one. “What’s the world comin’ to?” It’s one of the best images in the issue — the scale of what’s been lost compressed into a single quiet tableau.

Spider-Man at the Aftermath

Time has passed. S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarriers hang in the air above what remains of the A.I.M. base. Spider-Man swings in to find a war zone — dead A.I.M. agents, dead Hydra soldiers, and some casualties so thoroughly destroyed that the two factions are indistinguishable from each other. Peter surveys all of this through his white lenses with a line that is pure Parker: “Gotta say… I’m glad I skipped breakfast.”

He turns to Agent Quartermain with the eminently reasonable question of why he’s there. Quartermain explains, with the brisk efficiency of someone who does not have time for his reaction:

S.H.I.E.L.D. was operating under international agreements that required a third-party intermediary rather than direct agent involvement. Someone in leadership decided a superhero would serve that role nicely. The situation — which was supposed to be a controlled three-way dance monitoring Hydra’s planned assault on the A.I.M. facility — has instead become a catastrophe of sufficient scale that they now need help of the superhero variety specifically. Quartermain has helicarriers, thousands of agents, and several million rounds of ammunition. But what’s down in that jungle is the kind of problem you don’t get to refuse.

“You are here because that ain’t no where near the kind you don’t get to refuse. So welcome aboard, Spider-Man.”
— Agent Quartermain

Spider-Man’s response — unspoken, internal — is the same sigh that opened his night.

Great.

The issue closes on the page shown in the screenshot. Spider-Man stands at the edge of the cleared battlefield, looking down. On the jungle floor below him is a shattered piece of equipment — a screen, a glass panel from the destroyed A.I.M. base — lying face-up in the dirt. It’s acting as a mirror.

In its reflection: the jungle below, and the Hulk — crouched, dishevelled, snarling — and the unconscious body of another figure slumped beside him. Spider-Man’s own masked face stares back from the glass surface, framing the image. Somewhere above the scene, a single speech bubble:

“Great.”
— Spider-Man

One word. It carries the entire issue’s weight on its back. The Hulk is still here, still connected to whatever happened during that mission — the Cosmic Cube, the dead team, the unanswered question of who sent him and what he wanted to wish for. The cube is shattered somewhere in the jungle. One soldier from a ghost team came out alive. A mystery man with green reptilian eyes is confessing sins he hasn’t named yet. And Peter Parker, who agreed to be a third-party intermediary for a spy operation he didn’t ask to join, is now standing at the intersection of all of it.

Great.

The post Spider-Man: Long Way Home #1 — A Jungle War, a Cosmic Cube, and a Hero Dragged Across the End of the World appeared first on GoBookMart.

Into this chaos, Vandal built Supermax: a brutalist island prison seeded with his own agents. Inside, former prosecutors, police officers, and city officials — people who served Gotham faithfully — were thrown together with the very criminals they once prosecuted. And they were dying. One by one, loudly labeled suicides, quietly murdered. Jennifer Peck, a prosecutor Jim Gordon admired. Daniel Rascott, a former police captain. The pattern was clear to anyone who cared to look.

Barbara Gordon cared. So she arranged to be caught “sabotaging” Bat-servers she had already remotely destroyed days earlier, stood trial in Vandal’s rigged courtroom, and walked into Supermax as Inmate 682281 — alias K. Kilter — by choice. Batman told her it was a bad idea. She smiled and told him it was the only idea that mattered: they help people who have no one else. That’s what they do. Even now. Even here.

Day One in Supermax was brutal. Barbara survived yard brawls and a cafeteria riot, traded menacing small talk with Die — a prisoner who claims to be Two-Face’s daughter — and was warned by a hostile TUCO guard who remembered being put behind bars by her father, Jim Gordon. By night, alone in her cell, she heard a strange mechanical ticking and a soft, ominous shushing from the darkness. Issue #1 ended on a full-page close-up of her wide-open eyes. Then the lights went out.

Alive. Barely. One Day In.

Issue #2 opens not with action but with a face. Three stacked horizontal panels fill the page — each one a close-up of the same face, beaten and bandaged, framed by a wash of bruised yellow-green. A voice offscreen says, “Barbara?” Her eyes stay shut. The internal caption box — that yellow rectangle that has been Tamaki’s visual signature for Barbara’s internal voice since Issue #1 — offers four words: I am upside down. The voice asks again, more urgent now: “Can you hear me?” Her lips press together in pain. A hand enters the frame and cups her cheek, checking her. “Barbara? How did this happen?”

She wakes with a scream — a loud, involuntary “AH!” — and a nurse or medic calls out: “Doctor, #682281 is awake.” The next caption box is equally terse: Alive. Nahuelpan holds on her face for three panels — the shock, the blinking adjustment, then the slow sag of someone who has just remembered exactly where they are and what that means. A guard and another figure stand over her hospital bed. One of them says drily, “Guess you’re made of steel, huh?” Her wrist is fractured, two ribs broken, a serious crack to the head. Eleven stitches. A concussion. Bruised vocal cords. And she’s been inside for less than a day.

"Less than 24 hours in Max, someone tries to kill me."

The title card arrives at the bottom of the infirmary page, rendered in Nahuelpan’s jagged, hand-etched lettering: BLACK OUT. It’s the title of this chapter and, grimly, a literal description of what happened to Barbara between Issue #1’s final page and now — something or someone put her lights out completely.

The Diagnosis, and a Name: Sparrow

A doctor reads off Barbara’s injuries in a clinical monotone while X-rays of her skull, ribs, and fractured wrist glow in diagnostic circles around the panel. A guard asks the obvious question: “Did you see who attacked you?” Barbara answers flatly: “No.” She doesn’t say she has no idea — she says no, which is something different. She saw nothing. But she heard something: a mechanical noise, subtle, before everything went black. And here is Barbara Gordon’s analytical mind already working through the logic of her own near-murder.

"There are too many obvious reasons as to why someone would kill me in here."

She ticks them off internally: she’s Jim Gordon’s daughter, she was arrested for helping Batman, she’s not affiliated with Die’s crew, and she punched one of Die’s people in the face the day before. Any one of those is grounds for retaliation in Supermax. But the mechanical sound narrows the field. Barbara knows Die. If Die wanted her dead, she wouldn’t have been subtle about it — she’d have come with a crowbar and something to say. The mechanical noise points elsewhere. Vandal Savage’s men have motive. But the attack was also restrained — she’s alive. Someone wanted her damaged, not destroyed. Not yet.

The guard tells her to contact them if she thinks of useful details. Then they leave. In the corner of the room stands the figure in the orange jumpsuit with the distinctive red neckerchief who had appeared briefly at the end of Issue #1. This person crouches down, looks Barbara level in the eyes, and introduces herself.

Sparrow
“I’m Sparrow. You call me if you need anything. You’re not safe here, Gordon. Try to drink as much as you can. I’m getting you out.”

Barbara’s internal caption floats in the final panel like a question mark pressed onto the page: Sparrow. Can I trust you? She doesn’t know. She has no reason to. But she’s lying in an infirmary bed with a cracked skull, and Sparrow is holding out a cup of water, so the answer her body makes is the only realistic one.

No Choice. No Rescues.

A yellow caption box fills the left corner of page eight like sunlight: No choice. Beside it, a close-up of a plastic hospital cup with a straw. It’s almost comically mundane — a cup of water as the pivot point between staying put and doing something dangerous. In the adjacent panel, Sparrow shushes Barbara quietly while pressing something small into her hand — a small, folded object, a key or a pick, passed palm-to-palm with a steadiness that says this isn’t the first time Sparrow has done something like this. “We have to be quick. And quiet,” Sparrow says.

The next panel pulls back to a corridor shot: Barbara, still bandaged, leaning against Sparrow as they push through a door into a hallway. The perspective is low — floor-level — and the colors shift dramatically from the sickly infirmary green to something stranger. On the right side of the panel, the corridor bleeds into swirling psychedelic colors: pinks, purples, greens in an abstract, unnatural flow. It’s not supernatural. It’s the drug Sparrow gave Barbara to manage the pain. It’s starting to kick in. The caption at the bottom of the panel completes the echo from Batman’s warning in Issue #1, delivered now from inside the prison: No rescues.

Barbara wanted no rescue. She said so. And yet here she is, being half-carried by someone she barely knows, doped on prison painkillers, lurching through a corridor while her perception of reality starts to fragment. The irony is not lost on her — or on Tamaki, who lets the visual design carry the joke.

The Drug Takes Hold: Batman, Jim Gordon, and Nightwing

The psychedelic corridor bleeds into full hallucination. As Sparrow guides Barbara through the prison, the walls dissolve into a swirling dreamscape. Barbara begins slurring her words. She asks Sparrow what she gave her. And then — in the fractured logic of a drugged, concussed mind — she sees Batman.

Nahuelpan’s page composition here is extraordinary: Barbara is small in the lower foreground, horizontal, half-prone, while Batman looms enormous in the background above Sparrow. The colors are acid-bright, unnatural. Batman’s cowl is dark green in the haze. His voice is the calm, controlled cadence she has heard a thousand times: “What was that sound before?” Sparrow says “What?” The caption box explains what Barbara’s brain is doing: Slurring my words. Like an escalator. Or… something metal. She’s still processing. Still working the problem. Even drugged out of her mind, the analytical part of her refuses to go quiet.

She asks Batman what Sparrow gave her. Batman makes the universal gesture for silence — one finger to the lips — and says “Shhhhh.” A click of metal. And then: a cut to the outside world.

We’re outside Supermax’s perimeter — a different Gotham, the one that still technically exists beyond the walls. A guard walks a beat at a chain-link fence. The radio crackles: “Officer Gordon? You can wrap up. Your shift is over.” He responds: “Ten-four.” And then: a red car screams by in a lower panel. Warning lights. Something’s wrong. The guard watches it go, jaw tightening. His internal read is clear from the single caption: Maybe the shift’s not over after all.

This is Jim Gordon. Barbara’s father. Still out here. Still a cop, even in a city where being a cop means serving Vandal Savage’s perverted version of law. And he’s still watching. The panel of him running in pursuit — breathless, aging, refusing to quit — is one of the issue’s most quietly moving images. He shouts “Stop! GCPD!” He knows he can barely keep up. He goes anyway.

The chase ends in a confrontation: Jim Gordon gets jumped by two of Vandal’s muscle. He takes hits, gives some back, goes to the ground. Then — a splash page that earns every inch of real estate it takes up — Nightwing drops in. Blue and black, escrima sticks raised, landing on the lead attacker with the kind of kinetic grace that reminds everyone exactly how dangerous Dick Grayson is. “Plus those knees are going to give out sooner or later,” he says to the downed man, grinning. It’s a classic Nightwing line: confident, warm, and slightly too cheerful for someone who just beat a man unconscious.

The fight disperses. Nightwing and Jim Gordon talk. This scene carries the emotional heartbeat of the outside world’s storyline. Jim knows Barbara doesn’t want to be rescued. Nightwing confirms it: “She’s made it abundantly clear she doesn’t want to be rescued.” Jim explains what’s actually going on inside her head — she feels responsible for the people dying in that prison. Nightwing says what anyone who knows the Bat-Family would think: “We were all trying to figure that one out. It wasn’t her job.” But Jim Gordon knows his daughter. “She won’t leave until she finds out who’s doing this.” Then comes the exchange that changes the shape of the conversation:

Nightwing
“She’s going to need help in there. Even if they don’t know who she is, they’ll know —”

Jim Gordon
“I sent help. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

Nightwing
“You what —”

The issue cuts back inside before we find out exactly who Jim Gordon sent. But the implication is clear: Sparrow isn’t just a random inmate with a good heart. Jim Gordon put someone in that prison specifically to look after his daughter. Which means Sparrow is operating on instructions from outside — and the question of whether those instructions are still good, whether the person Jim trusted can be trusted at all, is now an open wound in the middle of the story.

“She feels responsible for the people who are dying in that prison, Nightwing. She won’t leave until she finds out who’s doing this.”
Jim Gordon — Outside Supermax

Back in Her Cell: Concentrate, Gordon

Back inside, Sparrow brings Barbara to her cell and begins rebandaging her wrist. Three tight panels run across the middle tier of the page: a bandaged hand being rewrapped, a prescription bottle tipping pills into a palm, and Barbara’s battered face receiving a glass of water. The economy of the page layout mirrors Barbara’s own mental state — reduced, stripped down, functioning on the minimum required. Sparrow says she needs sleep. Barbara, still working through the logic haze in her head, answers with a thought that cuts to the center of everything: If this is the guards, then this is all Vandal’s trap.

And then the line she immediately tries to correct: Right. Which I knew. Thought. Right. She knew this going in. She knew Vandal seeded the prison with his own people. She knew the guards were enforcers. So why does being attacked by them feel like new information? Because knowing a thing in theory and surviving it in your body are two completely different experiences. Barbara knew she was walking into a trap. She chose to walk into it anyway. Now she’s living in it.

Sparrow says something that makes Barbara’s eyes open: “I know why you’re here, Barbara.” She uses her first name. Not her number. Not her alias. Her name. Then she adds: “But then why…” — the sentence left deliberately unfinished. Why what? Why am I helping you? Why did Jim Gordon send me? Why is someone trying to kill you but also keeping you alive? The unfinished question hangs in the air. Barbara, medicated, concussed, and exhausted, gives up the fight against sleep. The final caption of the sequence: I can help you. / Why… The last word drifts off as her eyes close.

Death Walks the Corridors of Supermax

The Figure in the Hallway

One of the most visually distinctive elements of Barbara Gordon: Breakout #2 is the recurring appearance of a skeletal, Grim Reaper-like figure — rendered in Nahuelpan’s most expressionistic style — stalking the green-lit corridors of Supermax. This is not a supernatural being in the traditional sense. It is a visual metaphor made flesh: the inevitability of death in this place, personified, given panels of its own to roam the prison. Whether it represents a specific threat, Vandal’s kill order, or something stranger entirely has not yet been revealed. What the comic makes clear is that it is active. It is hunting. And it is the source of that mysterious ticking sound that has haunted Barbara since the end of Issue #1.

Page sixteen opens on a full-width panel: a hooded skeletal figure with a scythe moving through a corridor lined with cell bars, trailing a haze of sickly green. The caption box, in yellow, reads: …am I still alive? A second panel shows the characteristic TICK TICK TICK TICK that Barbara first heard in her cell — here accompanied by a long, jagged skeletal claw dragging slowly along the bars. The question Barbara’s mind keeps cycling back to: Why try to kill me and let me live?

In the lower third of the page, the figure turns directly toward the reader in two tightly framed panels. It speaks — which it has not done before. The speech bubble contains a single word: NO! It sounds like a correction. Like it was interrupted. Like something — the explosion, the fact that Barbara is still breathing — defied its agenda. The skull face is rendered with a dramatic red accent light on its left side, making it look like the cover of a horror movie. This figure is not just a visual flourish. It has a voice now. And it’s angry that Barbara is still alive.

Page seventeen returns us to morning count. “PRISONERS RISE FOR MORNING MEAL!” echoes down the cell block. Barbara gets up. The single-word caption: Pain. Sparrow hands her something for it. Barbara accepts it with a look that suggests she’d refuse the luxury if she could afford to. Her internal dialogue is a compressed thesis statement: I have pain. I don’t have time for pain. She files into line with the other prisoners, bandaged and battered, and keeps moving. Because this is Supermax, and stopping is the same as dying.

“They’re Picking Us Off One by One”

In the cell block corridor, a TUCO guard — massive, armored, baton in hand — calls out prisoner number 554A23. The guard states the official language: “Officer 45 going in.” No explanation. No charges. The implication is everything: this is a maintenance call. Vandal’s enforcers are cycling through their target list. The last panel of the page is a blood-smeared hand in the lower corner. The caption says simply: …isn’t finished.

Barbara and Sparrow are in the yard when another inmate tells them: “There was another one.” Barbara’s expression is a controlled thunderstorm — the green-eyed fury of someone who came here to stop exactly this and is watching it happen anyway. Another inmate responds with a bleakness that has become Supermax’s native language: “They’re picking us off one by one. We’re all dead.”

Barbara asks Sparrow the key investigative question: who do people think is doing this? Are they blaming the guards? Sparrow cuts her off immediately, voice dropped low: “Keep your voice down.” Then the answer that closes every door: “No one knows.” No one inside the prison knows who is behind the killings. The guards are obvious suspects, but the methods are strange — not blunt TUCO violence, but something subtler. Something with a mechanical component. Something that ticks.

Knock Knock: The Joker at the Door

Night again. Barbara is back in her cell, lying down, eyes open. The ticking starts: TICK TICK TICK. She goes alert. “Who’s there?” In the upper-right panel, a figure appears at her cell bars — sharply dressed in a purple suit and hat, face split into that unmistakable grin. The Joker says: “Knock, knock.” Then, leaning close: “Time for your pills, Barbara.”

The lower half of the page is dominated by a single massive panel — a close-up of a face crammed between the bars, goggle-wide green eyes, yellow teeth bared in a grin that takes up the bottom third of the page. It is deeply, viscerally unsettling. The face is not drawn like a hero or a monster. It is drawn like a Jack-in-the-box that has just sprung open in a room you thought was locked. Barbara stares. The question implied by everything in the panel: is this real, or is she still in the drug haze? Either possibility is terrifying.

Tamaki and Nahuelpan have been precise about when Barbara hallucinates and when she doesn’t. The Batman vision earlier was clearly tagged as drug-induced. This scene carries no such tag. The Joker appears at her bars, knows her name, and has pills. Which means one of several things: the Joker is genuinely here, in Supermax, as a prisoner — and has been observing her. Or Vandal Savage, who has a vicious sense of twisted humor, arranged for the Joker to be placed where he would be maximally destabilizing. Or something else is happening entirely, something that the issue doesn’t explain yet.

Page twenty-one pulls back to what feels like a quieter moment — or as quiet as Supermax gets. Barbara is in her cell again, resting. A figure in yellow and brown stands at the door, watching. The caption returns to Barbara’s analytical mode: The construction of Max started two years ago. Just because I couldn’t find a financial link to Vandal doesn’t mean there isn’t one. He’ll try again. The guards. Someone. She drifts toward sleep: Need to… And then: out again. In the bottom two panels, the watching figure at the door says softly: “Stay asleep, dear Barbara.” It is someone who knows exactly who she is and has chosen, for reasons entirely their own, to let her rest.

Sparrow’s Network: Die and the Doped Prisoner

The ticking sound returns — rendered again in Nahuelpan’s signature yellow lettering against the green-black of the corridor: TICK TICK TICK TICK. Sparrow is walking the cell block at night, moving with the deliberate quietness of someone who has learned to belong in every part of this place. A disembodied voice from the darkness: “Hey there, nurse.” She stops. A hand reaches out from between bars. She doesn’t flinch.

It’s Die. Blonde hair, aggressive posture, those cold blue eyes that calculated Barbara’s weakness the moment she walked into the yard on Day One. Die is not asking for help. She is checking in on an investment. “So?” she says, meaning: is Gordon still alive? Sparrow’s answer is flat and precise: “So it’s going fine, Die. Relax.” Die presses harder: “She didn’t die.” Not a question. Sparrow confirms it: “No.” Then adds something that reveals the full shape of her operation: “And I’m keeping her breathing but doped.” Die absorbs this. Sparrow’s final line is the one that closes the exchange and opens a new set of questions: “I know what I’m doing.”

This is the revelation that recontextualizes every prior scene involving Sparrow. She is not simply Jim Gordon’s ally placed inside to protect Barbara. She is playing a multi-party game. She is talking to Die — the most dangerous social predator in the women’s section — about Barbara’s condition. She is managing Barbara’s consciousness through medication. She says she knows what she’s doing. But what, exactly, is she doing? Is she protecting Barbara from Die while also keeping Die informed enough to stay satisfied? Is she actually working for Die, and Jim Gordon’s trust is being exploited? Or is Sparrow running some third operation entirely, one in which both Barbara’s survival and Die’s compliance are useful tools?

Death Comes for Us All

The final page is a two-panel composition followed by a devastating full-bleed splash. In the top tier: a small cell, an inmate lying on a cot, the skeletal death figure looming huge in the second panel with a single caption rendered in what appears to be speech: “Just let me do my job.” The figure is talking. It talks to prisoners. It has a will and a voice of its own, distinct from the TUCO guards, distinct from Die’s crew, distinct from Vandal’s visible operations.

The splash itself is the most terrifying image the series has produced so far. The death figure — scythe raised, skeletal hand extended, robes swirling in an impossible dark wind — looms over a prone figure in orange whose hair spreads across the cot like a copper flame. That hair. That orange uniform. That bandaged wrist. The figure on the cot is Barbara Gordon. The death figure says: “You know what they say…” And reaches for her.

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The premise seems almost hopeful: What if Scott Summers, better known as Cyclops, had chosen to remain with his wife, Madelyne Pryor, instead of leaving her for Jean Grey? Yet by the story’s final page, that single act of loyalty sets off a chain reaction that culminates in the nuclear destruction of Earth itself. Here is the complete story, page by page.

The Watcher Sets the Stage

The comic opens not with action but with the familiar cosmic grandeur of Uatu the Watcher, the all-seeing guardian who has observed civilizations rise and fall across countless galaxies. Floating above a deep-space vista with Earth’s blue curve below him, Uatu delivers his signature address: “I am the Watcher. I have observed the rise and fall of civilizations — of worlds — of galaxies. I know all that IS — most that HAS BEEN — and much of what WILL BE. I can also see WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.”

He makes clear the central premise. In the world we know, Madelyne Pryor — a woman who was secretly a clone of Jean Grey, engineered by the sinister geneticist known as Mr. Sinister — unleashed demonic forces upon the world during the catastrophic event known as the Inferno, and ultimately lost her life in that chaos. But in this timeline, something different happened: Madelyne Pryor was saved by X-Factor.

As the Watcher explains the divergence, we see quick flashback panels — Madelyne cradling a newborn Nathan (the boy who in the main timeline would become the time-traveling warrior Cable), and Cyclops himself standing before his old X-Factor teammates, telling them plainly: “I gave my heart to her. And… now she’s giving me a son.”

The key backstory is delivered economically. Mr. Sinister created Madelyne as a clone of Jean Grey, intending to use her to breed a powerful mutant child. In the standard Marvel timeline, Jean’s return prompted Scott to abandon Madelyne and their infant son Nathan, a betrayal that helped push Madelyne over the edge into villainy. But here? Scott stayed. And everything changed because of it.

The Aftermath: Jean Grey, Alone and Angry

With Scott firmly committed to Madelyne and Nathan, the rest of the original X-Men — Cyclops, Iceman, Beast, Angel, and Marvel Girl — must sort out the emotional wreckage. Jean Grey is furious, and rightfully so. She has learned that Mr. Sinister cloned her without consent, that this clone married the man she loved, and that she now has a sort of shadow family she never asked for.

Scott tells Jean directly that he cannot lead X-Factor anymore and cannot keep adventuring. He knows what it cost him to have an absent father — a father who was out saving worlds instead of building his son’s — and he refuses to repeat that cycle. Iceman gently tells Jean to give Scott time. She doesn’t take it well.

Jean’s fury reaches its peak when she confronts Mr. Sinister himself. In a breathtaking action sequence, she flies at the pale, diamond-marked geneticist with the full force of her telepathic gifts unleashed. Sinister screams at her to “Stay out of my mind, mutant scum!” — but Jean does not kill him. Instead, she does something arguably more consequential: she reaches into his mind and strips away some of his worst, most dangerous knowledge. She wipes from him the awareness of Madelyne’s nature as a clone, and crucially, she erases the memories he held about the birth of Nathan Summers.

As Uatu narrates: “Jean wiped the knowledge of cloning her and of Nathan’s birth to try to protect the boy from Sinister… And in doing so, gave up any hope of a life with the man she loved.”

In the main timeline, Nathan Summers was sent into the distant future to save his life after Apocalypse infected him with a techno-organic virus. None of that happens here. There is no virus, no exile, no Askani warriors. Nathan Summers grows up in the normal world — as a kid, going to baseball games with his dad.

A Normal Life for Nathan: The House of X

The pages that follow are the emotional heart of the issue and perhaps its most affecting section. We watch Nathan Summers grow up with two parents who love each other and love him. Uatu narrates warmly: “Nathan had as normal a childhood as could be possible, being the son of the clone of a powerful telepath and telekinetic… and a man who shot concussive blasts from his eyes.”

Scott and Madelyne sit on the couch together, watching young Nathan at a baseball game, cheering him on. They talk in the evenings about whether they’ve made the right choice hiding their true natures from their son. “Part of me hopes he wasn’t born one of us,” Scott admits. Madelyne replies with quiet resolve: “He’ll find out soon enough if he has a mutant gift, and then we’ll ask him to forgive us. We tried to give him what we never had. A normal life… for as long as possible.”

But adolescence has a way of drawing its own lines. One night, Nathan’s powers begin manifesting — objects flying around his room as he sleeps, telekinetic force bursting out of him involuntarily. His panicked cry of “Mom! Dad! Help!” brings his parents running. Madelyne does not comfort him with half-truths. In a single instant, she downloads the entire secret history of the X-Men and what it means to be a mutant directly into her son’s mind via telepathy. His reaction — “Mom… Dad… I wanna be a super hero too” — makes Scott weep with pride. “Proud of you, kiddo.”

The Watcher delivers the announcement with full gravitas: “And so the Summers family became known as the House of X — the first family of Mutantdom.”

The three of them take to the field as a family unit, with young Nathan — now calling himself Cable and wearing a yellow-and-blue X-Men uniform — fighting alongside his parents. On a splash page, the entire Summers family charges into battle. Madelyne fights with telepathic energy crackling from her hands, Cyclops fires optic blasts with precision, and Nathan — young, cocky, and full of fire — ignores his mother’s warning to watch his flank. “I’m not a kid, Mom! And I know Dad’s there!”

Jean Grey Steps Away — Toward the Stars

Meanwhile, Jean Grey, stripped of the future she imagined, chooses to make a change. The Watcher notes that she soldiered on as the original Marvel Girl for a time, but with the Summers family rising in prominence and acclaim, she decided to seek something beyond Earth. Her friends in the Fantastic Four were happy to help, commissioning a spacecraft for her.

The panels here are quietly devastating: Jean boarding a rocket at a launchpad while figures watch from below, then the rocket lifting off against a fiery sky, then Jean looking back at Earth from the cold black of space through a porthole. The Watcher admits with unusual humility: “She didn’t intend for her sojourn from Earth to be permanent, but she never returned, and nobody who loved her would learn her fate. Of course, I observed what happened to her… but that is a tale for another time.”

It is a perfect thread left dangling — a promise of further stories, and a reminder that even in a world where Cyclops made the right choice, not everyone got a happy ending.

The Summers Family as Heroes: Fame, Acceptance, and a Reawakened Threat

Back on Earth, the Summers family enjoys something the X-Men almost never had: genuine public acceptance. Their family unit — a mother, a father, a son, all mutants, fighting together — humanized them in a way that a team of strangers never quite managed. The Daily Bugle’s headline says it all: “SUMMERS FOR ALL SEASONS! Heroic mutant family stops Mole Man!”

The montage of heroics covers several pages. The Summers are on the front lines when Atlantis attacks, driving back the oceanic assault with coordinated blasts and telekinetic force barriers. When Loki orchestrates his Acts of Vengeance, sending a coalition of villains against Earth’s heroes, it is Nathan who disarms the HYDRA gunmen with a gesture and a smirk: “I’ll take those guns, dorks.”

But fame comes with a price. All the attention paid to the Summers family — all the coverage, the photos, the newspaper stories — inadvertently filters through to Mr. Sinister, who has been sitting dormant in his underground laboratory, the worst parts of his memories stripped away by Jean Grey long ago. Something stirs. He wakes confused, asking “Wh — who…? H — how…?” as he begins to reconstruct what was taken from him.

The Watcher states plainly: “All this attention reawakened something deep in the mind of Mr. Sinister… I observed Sinister’s mind uncover the secrets that had been stripped away. When he awoke, he went on a rampage.”

Sinister rises, fully reconstituted in his fury, and screams one word: “PRYOR!”

The Mutant Massacre at the X-Mansion

Here the story lurches into darkness. The Watcher tells us that after years away, Scott, Madelyne, and Cable returned to the orbit of the X-Men, with Scott leading in Storm’s absence. Cable was fortunately away at the time, “gallivanting with the New Mutants.”

Because one night, the X-Mansion becomes the site of the Mutant Massacre.

Mr. Sinister dispatches his Marauders — the brutal assassins he created — to tear through the mansion. Harpoon and Riptide, two of the most lethal Marauders, catch Cyclops and Madelyne in the halls of their former home. The battle is vicious and visceral. Madelyne goes on the offensive against Riptide, her telekinetic fury raw and focused, screaming “DIE!” as she hurls his shuriken-like weapons back at him.

But she takes her eyes off Harpoon for a split second.

It costs everything.

A full-page splash shows Madelyne, impaled by one of Harpoon’s energy lances, stumbling toward Scott with blood blooming across her dress. “M — Maddie?!” Scott whispers in horror. Sinister watches with sardonic satisfaction, clapping his hands. “Oh, what fun we’re going to have. I’m only sorry your son is missing the party. Tell me where he is, Scott.”

Scott charges at Sinister with nothing but his bare fists. Sinister subdues him with chilling ease and a single syllable: “Shush.”

Sinister incorrectly believes it was Madelyne who had entered his mind all those years ago to wipe his memories. It was, of course, Jean Grey — but he will never know that.

The Return of Cable and the Birth of X-Force

Cable, arriving back with the New Mutants to find the mansion in flames and bodies on the ground, screams his parents’ names. His telepathy reaches out — and finds nothing from his mother. He fights his way through the rubble to find Scott, crucially still alive, crushed under debris and barely clinging to consciousness.

“Son… be brave,” Scott whispers.

Nathan tears the rubble apart with telekinesis and cradles his father. “Dad — you’re alive?! I’m getting you out of here!”

They bury their dead. Forge helps repair the damage to Cyclops’ visor so he can see again. Father and son stand at a gravesite, side by side, and they plan their revenge.

The result is X-Force — a hit squad unlike any the mutant world had seen. Not a heroic team but a precise instrument of vengeance. Wolverine, Colossus, and Domino join the grieving Summers men. Their first major operation is the destruction of the old Hellfire Club building, now Sinister’s seat of power, with a massive explosion that reduces the façade to rubble.

The Watcher’s narration carries a note of deep sorrow: “Mr. Sinister had since claimed the old Hellfire Club as his seat of power. Scott Summers always had the gift of leadership… and now he led mutantdom to dark places.”

The X-Force hunt down every last Sinister clone — all nine on Earth, from the Poconos to Oahu — and even track the tenth to the Blue Area of the Moon. When they find the final clone still defiant, sneering that “You’ll never kill me, pup. I have bodies all over the world!” — Cable corrects him with cold finality: “HAD bodies all over the world.”

Scott gives a one-word order. “No.”

Cable puts a bullet through Mr. Sinister’s head.

But revenge, as the Watcher reminds us, does not bring peace. “Cyclops’ X-Force became as cruel as any of the villains. Cyclops lost the woman he loved, and he never recovered from his survivor’s guilt.”

Krakoa, Arakko, and the Fall Toward Apocalypse

Years pass. The Krakoa and Arakko storylines that defined the Krakoan era of X-Men comics emerge in this timeline too, though with critical differences. Without Hope Summers entering the timeline — because there was no Cable sent to the future, no lineage from which Hope could spring — and without Sinister’s library of mutant DNA being intact, key pieces of the Krakoan puzzle are missing.

Most critically: there are no resurrection protocols. Mutants who die, stay dead.

When the Tournament of Swords in Otherworld concludes, Krakoa lacks the correct mutant circuit to terraform Mars. Cyclops confronts Professor Xavier about the mounting threat from Arakko: “No! I’ve faced off with Isca the Unbeaten. The Arakkii have been at war for thousands of years — we CAN’T permit them to dominate the Earth, Professor!”

But Arakko strikes first, removing Krakoa’s greatest strategic advantage: Moira MacTaggert. The mutant Lactuca the Knower, whose gift was to know precisely where everything in the universe was located at all times, used that ability to neutralize Moira’s presence entirely. Moira was sent beyond even the Watcher’s sight — “for the first time in eons, I am humbled” — and with her went Krakoa’s secret weapon: her ability to reset timelines. That possibility is now gone forever.

The Great War: A Battle Too Many

Cyclops leads his X-Force team on a desperate strike mission to decapitate the ruling council of Arakko known as the Great Ring. The Avengers and Fantastic Four enter the fray alongside them. The Arakkii warriors, thousands of years hardened by endless war, have already killed many humans since Apocalypse sent their island to Earth.

The fighting is titanic. Wolverine and the Arakkii exchange blows while the Fantastic Four engage at massive scale — the Thing crashing into Arakkii warriors with seismic force, the Human Torch lighting up the sky. An Arakkii fighter grudgingly admits to Wolverine, “Being honest, this is the first time I’ve respected you Krakoans… A frontal attack with honor. Perhaps you’re mutants after all.”

Magneto dies. An Arakkii combatant notes his constitution with chilling contempt: “How unfortunate… one of them… is made of glass.” His death is stamped with finality: “Magneto’s death signaled that THE END was at hand.”

Cable is in the thick of it, fighting back to back with his father in a desperate holding action. “Dad, there are too many of them!” he shouts. Cyclops barks orders, calling for Storm, who cannot be reached. Logan’s head is literally separated from his body in the chaos. “Colossus, get Logan’s head back to his body!”

The Death of Nathan Summers

Then comes the blow that breaks everything.

Sobunar of the Depths, an Arakkii omega-level mutant whose body contained an entire oceanic ecosystem, fells Nathan Summers. The narration box reads with cold finality: “Disaster unfolded when Sobunar of the Depths, another Arakkii omega-level mutant, felled Nathan Summers, the boy whose birth had changed this world forever.”

A full-page spread shows Nathan falling from the sky. Two panels follow in stark juxtaposition: Scott’s face, twisted in a soundless scream behind his visor, bellowing “NO!” — and Nathan, bleeding out, barely conscious, whispering in his last moments: “I… want… Mom.” Scott cradles his dying son against his chest. Nathan’s final words to his father are a fragile “I love you, Nathan…” spoken by Scott in return, his voice breaking.

“I’m sorry I failed you,” Scott says.

Then Cyclops aims at Sobunar and fires. The creature’s death releases catastrophe: Sobunar’s body contained an entire oceanic ecosystem, and its sudden destruction destabilizes coastlines worldwide, triggering tsunamis and geological chaos across the planet.

The Watcher delivers his epitaph for Scott Summers with devastating precision: “Scott Summers had been pulled by the darkness since Madelyne’s murder. Now he surrendered to it.”

A final image shows Scott Summers — the man who once represented hope and discipline — falling alone into the black ocean, shrinking to nothing.

The End of the World

The war lasted less than thirty hours.

The battlefield is a shoreline littered with bodies — human and mutant alike, Arakkii warriors slumped beside the fallen heroes of Earth. Captain America kneels among the dead, shield cracked, barely able to form words: “Oh God.”

The Arakkii push the advantage. Humankind, pushed to the absolute edge of extinction, concludes there is no choice left. A lone shadowed figure watches nuclear missiles streak across the sky, and says simply: “Save us.”

It isn’t enough.

The nuclear exchange begins. Page after page of warhead-tipped missiles arcing across the sky, mushroom clouds blooming across the landscape in waves. The Watcher narrates with the bleak, clinical tone of a physician pronouncing time of death:

“The Arakkii mutants made war upon humans, but man did not go quietly. They used their nuclear weapons again and again, in a futile attempt to prevent extinction.”

The final image of the story proper shows the Watcher, alone, floating in darkness beside a cold, grey Moon — a dead Earth visible behind him. The narration boxes close the loop on the entire issue:

“Today, the Earth is uninhabitable for many thousands of years. All this tragedy… all this suffering led to the end of the world, and it was born from a mutant’s love for his son.”

Beside him, in bold yellow letters: THE END.

The post What If Cyclops Had Stayed With Madelyne Pryor? A Complete Story Breakdown of What If…? The Uncanny X-Men #1 (2026) appeared first on GoBookMart.

A New Life in a Dying World

The comic opens not with explosions or heroics, but with something achingly domestic: a living room on Krypton, and a teenage girl sitting cross-legged on a couch, staring at a newborn baby with wide, wondering eyes. The girl is Kara Zor-El, and the baby is her infant cousin Kal-El, freshly born to Jor-El and Lara. “Oh, Jor… he’s beautiful,” Kara breathes, completely transfixed.

Parker and Sheridan immediately establish the generational tension that will run through the entire issue. Lara is still recovering from a natural birth — a rarity on modern Krypton, where lab-grown births have become the norm — and Kara, fascinated, asks to hear the story of the delivery. Jor-El gently offers, “Kara, would you like to hold your cousin?” and Kara’s guarded enthusiasm — “Oh. Uh… yes” — is one of the issue’s first great character beats. She is nervous, eager, trying to be cool about it, and completely failing.

But even in this tender scene, politics intrude. A background argument erupts between Zor-El (Kara’s father) and Jor-El over Kryptonian citizenship laws and what they mean for Kal’s future. Lara, still exhausted from childbirth, snaps at them to stop — but Zor-El presses his point: this is not about citizenship. It’s about cultural preservation. Krypton is in crisis, and the birth of a naturally conceived child feels, to some, like a radical act.

Kara tunes it all out. While the adults argue, she cradles Kal, murmuring: “You are the most magical thing I have ever seen. I will protect you with my life.” It is a promise that the rest of the issue will force her to keep far sooner than she ever imagined.

Normal Life in the Shadow of the Atom

The story jumps forward “two cycles” — the Kryptonian equivalent of months. Kara is now a student at Kandor Primary Academy, a sleek, imposing institution in the city of Kandor, the beating heart of Krypton. Rod Reis renders the school hallways in cool blue-grey tones, students in matching black uniforms moving between lockers that open with a hiss of red light. It feels futuristic and institutionalised simultaneously — a society that prizes conformity even among its young.

Kara’s best friend is Gin-See, an energetic girl with vivid blue hair and boundless enthusiasm who is clearly the social engine of their friendship. She is determined to get Kara to ask a boy named Ben-Lo to the upcoming Equinox Formal — a dance that Kara has zero interest in attending. Their dynamic crackles with genuine teenage warmth: Gin-See is theatrical and pushy, Kara is wry and stubborn, and the affection between them is real.

Key Moment · The Locker Scene
When Gin-See presses the issue too far, Kara shuts her locker on the conversation — only for Gin-See to immediately hit the panel button and reopen it. "Anything that happens from this point on is on you," Kara deadpans. Their chemistry grounds the entire first act in something real and human before the disaster strikes.

Class begins. Their teacher — a commanding Black instructor — calls attendance and begins a lesson on para-dimensional sliding. And then the alarm sounds: a long, wailing BWWAAAAAAMMM that fills the page in massive red letters. An emergency broadcast cuts through the classroom: “This is a drill. Please follow atom attack procedures.” Kara’s teacher, openly exasperated — “Unbelievable. Going to have to cut our lab short. Again” — orders students under their desks.

Huddled under a desk next to Ben-Lo, Kara is terse and distant. But Ben-Lo, taking an extraordinary risk in an extraordinarily mundane moment, slides her a note on his tablet: Will you go to Formal with me? Kara stares at it. The drill alarm continues to wail. The timing is absurd and perfect — a boy asking a girl to a dance while the world practices for its own destruction. Kara’s expression, rendered in close-up by Reis, says everything: she is both touched and completely overwhelmed.

The drill ends. The class disperses. Kara, Gin-See, and their friends end up at Argo Pier — a vibrant, graffiti-lit stretch of Kandor’s less polished neighbourhoods — to decompress. The scene is brief but important. It establishes that Kandor is a city with real texture: markets, public art, people living their lives in the shadow of gathering storm clouds. When Gin-See asks if Kara needs a place to stay that night, Kara declines with a quiet smile — “I should be all right. Thank you.” The meltdown, Gin-See says, is “delayed, but on the way.”

Rod Reis renders Krypton not as a gleaming utopia but as a society in the late stages of a slow collapse — atom drills in schools, political rallies on television, and a green moon hanging in the sky like a bruise.
Art Direction — Supergirl: Survive #1

In Zod We Trust

Kara returns home to find her parents — Zor-El and Alura — watching the news in grim silence. The broadcast is reporting on a riot at Urrika’s K-Mines that left more than thirty dead and nine wounded. The Emperor’s response sparked outrage across the political spectrum. Kara hits mute before the full report plays. Her mother calls her over, concerned — and for a moment, the family almost functions normally, asking about her day.

Then the television cuts to a live address. The Emperor speaks from a raised platform before a massive, cheering crowd in Kandor. His name, we will soon learn from context and the crowd’s chant, is Zod. He is a commanding, white-haired figure with the presence of a demagogue and the rhetoric of a fascist — speaking of Krypton’s greatness, of protecting “Kryptonian values” from those who would oppose them, of stamping out the “embers of insurrection.” The crowd chants: “In Zod We Trust!”

Kara’s mother, Alura, is horrified: “I can’t believe he’s calling them terrorists. They were protesters.” Her father, Zor-El, puts a hand on her arm and murmurs her name — a warning to be careful. A device on the wall beeps with a soft “DEET” — someone is monitoring them, or the walls have ears. The implication is unmistakable: dissent is dangerous in this version of Krypton. Zod’s Krypton is not a failing democracy. It is something far worse.

Kara Zor-El

Protagonist · Student · Protector

Krypton’s everygirl who promised to protect Kal-El with her life — a promise she did not expect to keep this soon. Brave, sardonic, and terrifyingly unprepared.

General Zod

Emperor · Villain

The autocrat who calls protesters terrorists and rallies crowds with chants of loyalty. His rise to power has put Krypton on a knife’s edge.

Zor-El & Alura

Kara's Parents · The Planners

Scientists who saw the disaster coming and spent years quietly preparing an escape — a prototype ship hidden underground, a vector locked to a distant world.

Zor-El sends Kara to her room to work on her assignments. In the corridor behind her, he and Alura exchange a look that says everything: Is this really happening? “We’ve prepared for this,” Zor-El says quietly. “I know,” Alura responds. “I just… I prayed the time would never come.”

The Green Moon Glows, and Someone Asks Questions

In her room that night, Kara sits on her bed with her knees pulled to her chest, staring out the window at the city. Krypton’s moon — a sickly, luminous green — hangs in the sky. A faint deep-bass rumble rolls through the building: KLUN-KOOOM. Tremors are becoming normal. She hears the sound of footsteps descending stairs somewhere below — Zor-El, moving through what appears to be a hidden lower level.

Her device pings. It is Gin-See: “Did you see the Zod thing? Scary.” Kara replies: “I know.” Gin-See follows up: “Do you think they’re gonna do it? Turn this place green too?” — a reference to Krypton’s green-glowing moon and the rumours that Zod’s forces have already terraformed or irradiated regions of the outer planet. Kara’s last message hangs in the dark: “I don’t know.” It is the honest answer of someone who is trying not to think too hard about the thing she suspects is coming.

This Is Not a Drill

Kara is asleep when the alarm sounds — not the practiced, mundane wail of a school drill, but something heavier, redder, more final: BWWAAAAAAMMM. She jerks awake, eyes wide, red-tinted light strobing through her window. She runs to look outside. Over the Kandor skyline, fireballs are falling. Bombardment. The city is being attacked.

Her mother bursts in: “Kara! You have to come with me, right now!” The apartment is in controlled chaos. Zor-El is packing, snapping terse answers to Alura’s rapid-fire questions — “Did we pack the non-perishable?” “Yes.” “We’re out of time.” The Emergency Broadcast System cuts across the television: “All citizens seek your nearest sheltering location immediately.”

Zor-El herds them out the door, Kara still without shoes — “Dad! My shoes, I don’t have—” “I’m sorry! There’s no time!” — and they barrel into the street. There, impossibly, is Jor-El, arriving with Lara, who is holding infant Kal-El in a carry-wrap, the baby’s face peaceful and oblivious in the chaos.

Key Moment · Brothers Reunited
Zor-El wheels on his brother with months of grief and anger: "You disappear on me for over a year, Jor — on your own brother — then what? You show up to rescue me? My family?!" Jor-El is steady: "I'm not here to rescue anyone. I just want my family to be safe. I need my family to be safe. That's you, Zor. All of you." It's the emotional spine of the issue — two brothers, separated by politics, finding each other at the end of the world.

Jor-El tells them he has been preparing a way out. He has studied a world in Sector 2814 — early civilisation, peaceful, safe, relatively speaking. He built a ship. Not a great ship — a prototype, barely large enough, the radiation shielding improvised and reinforced with lead lining. But it is what they have. They run for the underground hangar where the ship waits: a sleek red vessel surrounded by scaffolding and makeshift equipment. “There’s never enough time,” someone says. No one argues.

The issue’s emotional climax is not an action sequence — it is a mother hugging her daughter and saying, quietly, “You’re more capable than you know, Kara.” And then the door closes.
Supergirl: Survive #1 · Page 21

Too Much to Ask, and No Other Choice

In the hangar, the adults talk fast. The ship’s vector trajectory is locked to Sector 2814. The radiation shielding is online but incomplete. The size is a problem — it was never designed to carry more than a small cargo. Lara has given Kal a sedative: he will sleep through the full journey. “Sleep well, my son,” Jor-El whispers, pressing his lips to the baby’s helmet.

Then Zor-El says the words that break Kara: “Kara, I need you to take Kal. Okay?” She looks at him, at the ship, at her mother. “Where are we going? You’re not coming with us?!” The answer, delivered with the heartbreak of parents who know they have run out of options, is no. There is only room for children. Alura holds her daughter, and the moment is rendered by Reis in soft, purple-hued light — the last hug a mother will ever give.

“I don’t think I can do this, Mom.” “You’re more capable than you know, Kara.” And then, devastatingly: “And frankly, I think those otherworlders… they need Kara Zor-El.”

Kara, dressed in the iconic blue spacesuit, a helmet sealed over her blonde hair, climbs into the ship with infant Kal buckled beside her. The doors seal with a heavy KA-SHUNK. Through the viewport, she watches her father — Zor-El — mouth two words: “I’m sorry, Kara.” Her jaw sets. One tear. Then: “No.”

The ship launches. SHOOOOOM. The adults watch it go: “We did it.” “They got out.”

Krypton Dies

Barely clear of Krypton’s atmosphere, the ship comes under attack. Zod’s forces — black-winged fighters marked with twin concentric circles — open fire. An impact rocks the vessel. The ship’s computer delivers the news coldly: “Warning. Impact has critically damaged structural integrity.” Another blast. “Warning. Set vector trajectory invalid. Integrity of ship flight systems at less than 90 percent.”

Inside the cockpit, lit in hellish red, Kara is fighting at the controls. “No no no NO!” She jams commands into the console, but the ship is listing, tumbling, the trajectory locked to somewhere other than the safe world Jor-El scouted. A vast green planet — not Sector 2814, not where they were supposed to go — fills the viewscreen. “Rao… Please. PLEASE!” The ship screams toward the atmosphere.

The impact page is a full-page spread of wordless sound: KRAKA- — cut off, the page ending before the sound does. Krypton, visible through a porthole in the background, is already beginning to break apart. Explosions dot its surface like orange blossoms. And then, after the crash, one page stands alone: Kara’s spacesuit figure, seen from behind, small against a vast green alien landscape, watching her planet tear itself apart above her. BA-DOOOM. KOOOOM. KRAKA-BOOOOM. Krypton explodes.

Visual Masterstroke
Rod Reis gives the destruction of Krypton an entire full-page spread, but frames it intimately: we do not see a planet from space. We see it from the ground of an alien world, through the eyes of one girl. The scale is cosmic. The perspective is human. It is, without question, one of the most emotionally resonant renderings of Krypton's end in DC's publishing history.

Kara comes to among the wreckage of the crashed ship, scattered across the alien terrain. The planet’s atmosphere is breathable — the suit’s systems confirm it. Kal is safe, still sedated, strapped into his seat and crying softly as he begins to wake. Kara, dazed, bleeding from a cut at her hairline, pulls herself upright and begins processing where she is. Green soil. Green sky. Wrong planet. No parents. No Krypton.

“It can’t be. They can’t be.” She says it three times across three silent panels, her face cycling through disbelief, anguish, and the beginning of something harder — acceptance. Baby Kal wails in the wreckage. Kara stumbles toward him across the debris field. “Kal. Shhh…” She scoops him up, holds him to her chest through two layers of spacesuit, and tries to calm him. “Don’t cry… don’t—”

Something Is Already Here

And then — K-SHUNK! — something deploys from the crashed ship’s wreckage on its own. A weapon. A defensive system, activated automatically. “What…?” Kara raises it in a gauntleted hand without fully understanding what she’s holding. The ship’s AI speaks in its stuttering, damaged voice: “K2Z2T-DE-DE-DEPLOYING. ANOMALOUS-K2Z2T-DETECTED.”

Kara, confused: “I-I don’t understand… why did it—” The AI cuts her off: “U-UNREGISTERED O-ORGANISM WITHIN RANGE.” Something is here. Something that was on this planet before they arrived. Something large enough that the ship’s automated systems immediately categorized it as a threat.

The final panels of the issue deliver the cliffhanger: Kara standing with one arm raised, weapon in hand, baby Kal tucked against her side in the crook of her other arm. Behind them, vast and dark, a massive silhouette looms — a creature, something with enormous clawed hands. The ship’s voice recommends: “DE-DE-DEFENSIVE MEASURES RE-AE-RECOMMENDED.” A roar tears across the green sky: GROOOOAARRGH! The page reads: To Be Continued.

The final image — a teenage girl in a damaged spacesuit, alone on an alien world, holding a screaming infant, pointing a weapon she doesn’t understand at a monster she can’t see — is the purest possible distillation of what this series is about. Not the Superman who became a god. The Supergirl who survived so he could.

The post Supergirl: Survive #1 (2026) – Kara Zor-El’s Heartbreaking Journey Through Krypton’s Final Days appeared first on GoBookMart.

The Greatest Man to Ever Live (Just Ask Him)

The issue opens not with action, but with adoration. We see Doctor Doom standing atop a golden, ornate chariot, arms raised wide as the crowds of Latveria cheer wildly around him. The caption box tells us exactly what the people believe — that “Doctor Victor Von Doom is the greatest man to ever live.”

It’s a masterfully ironic opening. Ryan North immediately plants the reader inside the propaganda machine of Doom’s Latveria. Through a gorgeous collage of panels on the following pages, we get a kind of visual biography of how Doom is mythologized by his own people: his humble origins in Latveria, his “fabled first experiments in America,” his rise to king, his battles against enemies who are framed as petty villains driven only by jealousy. In this version of history — Doom’s version — every act of violence is righteous, every opponent is a lesser man, and Latveria has been transformed from a forgotten backwater into a utopia entirely through his will and genius.

The final line of this propaganda montage says it all: “Our country — our planet — owes a debt to this intrepid soul.”

It’s brilliant storytelling. North lets the reader feel the cult of personality before a single word of criticism lands.

Doom Ponders His Legacy — And Finds It Lacking

We cut to Doom himself, sitting alone in a stone window alcove of his castle, gazing out over the city. His minister, Hanák, approaches nervously and delivers the actual national report — one that contradicts the propaganda entirely. Despite all the pomp and ceremony, Latveria “continues to find herself challenged.” Too small, too poor, and — outside of Doom himself — too inconsequential on the world stage.

Doom snatches the report from Hanák’s hands with a resounding SNATCH! and reads it with evident displeasure. His country, by objective international measure, is underdeveloped and overlooked.

Hanák tries to help, suggesting a grand statue — “more immense than any, to awe and inspire all who—” Doom shuts him down instantly. “Silence. Latveria does not want for statuary.” What Latveria wants, Doom says, is something grander. More ambitious.

He can see its shape, he tells Hanák, but not yet its details. Frustrated, he dismisses the minister. “Begone, Hanák. I must ponder.”

And so Doom ponders.

Richards Gives Doom His Answer

The answer comes, of all places, from Reed Richards.

A security alert fires off in Castle Doom — “Code Blue detected.” The origin? Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The source? A televised summit called the “Minds of Tomorrow” conference, where — impossibly, insultingly — Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four has been invited to give the keynote address.

Doom watches the broadcast in barely contained fury. Richards lays out a sweeping philosophical vision to the assembled crowd: that the universe is finite, that humanity has wasted trillions of lives on “avoidable, meaningless conflict,” and that there is an ethical imperative to do something about it. He calls it “the ultimate optimization of history” — inspired by the Cosmist movements of the 19th century.

The idea is this: time, Richards explains, has a preferred form — a shape it tries to return to, which is why so many alternate universes end up eerily similar. To permanently change history, you would need a new kind of time machine — one that doesn’t send a body back, but a mind. This mind would chamber each change it made to the past, and once all changes were ready, release them all simultaneously, so that time’s corrective nature couldn’t undo any single one. He calls it “humanity’s retirement project.”

The audience erupts in applause. Richards basks in it.

Doom nearly destroys a monitor.

“The unmitigated hubris of that man! Richards proposes to rewrite all of history to his desire — and those fools applaud him!”

Then he stops himself. Because — of course — the idea is brilliant. The only problem is who thought of it.

“None but Doom could truly be capable of wielding such power.”

He calls Hanák back. Doom has found his nation-building project.

Building the Doom Engine

What follows is one of the comic’s most visually spectacular sequences — a double-page spread showing the secret construction of something Doom’s people quietly call the Doom Engine.

The project dwarfs the pyramids in both ambition and secrecy. Every resource Latveria possesses — human, mineral, computational, and technological — is poured into it. Workers toil under Doom’s personal supervision, and each of them sees only the tiniest glimpse of what is actually being assembled. Doom himself is shown welding and forging components with his own armored hands, surrounded by glowing machinery. The Engine is built at speeds not seen in generations, using innovations that the outside world won’t develop for decades.

“Nobody outside their nation even knows it exists.”

The result? A colossal, stacked disc-shaped structure hidden deep in the forests of Latveria — the Doom Engine, fully operational. It spins up for the first time, functioning precisely as Reed Richards described in that long-ago broadcast. By maddening coincidence, it matches his parameters exactly.

Doom announces the machine’s true purpose to Hanák as they stand in the Engine’s control chamber. It is a time machine unlike any before it — one that will send Doom’s mind into the body of anyone in history, giving him total control over their actions and choices. With it, he can correct every injustice done to Latveria, starting with the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where Latverian land was stripped away by foreign diplomats “who cared not for her people, nor her culture — nor her dignity.”

Hanák, to his credit, wisely asks no further questions about the machine’s purpose. “I need know only what you tell me I need know.”

“Good, Hanák. Good.”

The Avengers and the X-Men Crash the Party

Reed Richards, of course, has been watching.

It turns out he’s suspected Doom of building something sinister for over a year. A massive, mysterious power drain — bad enough to cause blackouts across most of Europe — confirms it. Reed tells his teammates: there is only one use for that much energy. He believes Doom has built the machine he only dared speculate about. Their best hope is to stop him before he uses it.

And so the heroes come — and they come hard.

Captain America, Iron Man, She-Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Human Torch, the Invisible Woman, Thor, the Thing, Storm, Cyclops, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Quicksilver, and more — an enormous combined Avengers and X-Men assault force descends on Latveria in full force.

Doom deploys every Doombot he has — all of them. Every. Single. One. And unlike their usual appearances, these Doombots fight like their lives depend on it, which, as Captain America grimly notes, is not normal. Cap and Iron Man serve as decoys, drawing the bots’ fire and absorbing brutal punishment so the other team — led by Reed — can reach the Engine.

The battle is enormous. A full page spread shows dozens of heroes tangling with hundreds of Doombots in chaotic, gorgeous carnage.

Inside the Engine facility, the Invisible Woman and the Human Torch break through to confront Doom directly. Sue Storm (the Invisible Woman) catches Doom with a force-field blow — SMAK! — and delivers one of the issue’s best lines: “You have to expect a little insolence from us by now.”

Doom is enraged. “The insolence…!”

But Sue presses him: “You’re not as complicated as you think you are, Victor. In fact, you’re really rather simple… You’re trying to rewrite history.”

Doom fights back with everything he has, launching magical energy blasts — KRAZAAAAAKK! — but Sue and Johnny hold their own. It’s a delicious sequence: two founding members of the Fantastic Four trading blows with their greatest nemesis in the heart of his greatest creation.

But Doom breaks free. He reaches the machine’s controls.

Richards Arrives Too Late — Or Does He?

Reed Richards himself makes it into the chamber, stretching his elastic form through the chaos outside. He pleads with Victor to stop.

“Please, Victor, listen! You can’t alter history to your image! That idea was for the future, when we’d evolved past these petty—”

“Petty?!” Doom’s reaction is volcanic. “Petty?!”

The argument crystallizes everything about their relationship. Reed conceived the idea of the perfect time machine as a gift to a peaceful future — something to be used when humanity had grown beyond war and pettiness. Doom has simply decided he is the one who gets to make that call now, for everyone, without their consent.

Doom fires up the Engine. The machine roars. A blinding golden vortex tears open inside the chamber.

“You cannot stop me, Richards. You never could. And now — you never will.”

Reed, caught in the moment, knows he can’t stop Doom from making the jump. But he did something clever earlier — something before the battle. He whispers to the fallen Doom: “I’m sorry, Victor, but a Doom unchained throughout history is simply too dangerous. I couldn’t stop you here, true: You left me no time. But I could, nevertheless… stop you there.”

The machine fires. Doom’s mind is launched into history.

“It Worked.” — And Then, the Horror

The issue’s final pages deliver one of the most satisfying and funny gut-punches in recent Marvel memory.

Doom finds himself in a body. He’s at a breakfast table. A cup of tea sits before him. In the rippling surface of the liquid, he can see the reflection of the face he now occupies — a man with a moustache, wearing early 20th-century clothing. “It worked,” Doom says.

But this is not the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The room around him is wrong. There are portholes in the walls. The crockery has a distinctive logo on it — a white star on a pennant flag. The White Star Line.

Doom looks down. He kicks over his tea in horror.

“No. No.”

APRIL 14TH, 1912.

The final splash page — mirroring the very image the reader first sees — shows the RMS Titanic sailing through a star-filled night on the North Atlantic, a speech bubble rising from somewhere deep within the ship:

“Richards!!!”

And at the very bottom, a red teaser banner: Next: The RMS Titanic!

Reed Richards, unable to stop Doom from activating the machine, had just enough time to redirect where Doom ended up. Instead of the halls of the Paris Peace Conference, Doom has been sent to the most famously doomed ship in history — the night before it strikes the iceberg.

Without his armor. Without his technology. Without his robots. Stranded in the body of some random passenger on the Titanic, hours before it sinks into the ocean.

Doom — the man who once held the power of God-like beings in his gauntlet — is about to have to survive steerage.

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The Threat from the Stars

The story opens not on Earth, but in the cold void of space. A massive alien vessel — sleek, enormous, and utterly foreign — has just shot past the Moon and is barreling toward Earth’s orbit. The narration reads like a military radio transmission, clipped and urgent: the vessel has pushed past the Moon and is headed straight for Earth.

We cut immediately to the Skywatch Space Station, a militarized orbital platform bristling with weapons. Director Bendix and Major Lasalle are at the helm — two no-nonsense commanders who waste no time. They’ve already thrown every missile in their arsenal at the incoming vessel, but nothing has worked. The craft is not from this solar system, and it is not stopping.

Bendix doesn’t flinch. He orders the carbon-rod rail guns and harpoon cannons to fire — essentially trying to harpoon the thing out of the sky like a space whale. The bravado is classic military bluster, but there’s an edge of fear underneath it. He warns their ground forces to be ready, making brutally clear that whatever this is, Earth intends to make it regret arriving.

“Wherever this thing is from, we’ll make sure it regrets coming to Earth.”
— Director Bendix, Skywatch Space Station

The vessel, however, tears right through the barrage. In a spectacular double-page explosion, it collides with Skywatch itself — a massive, catastrophic impact rendered by Danny Earls in a blaze of reds, oranges, and shrapnel. The station is annihilated. Three dozen people, including Bendix and Lasalle, are killed. The vessel disappears, shielded by a radar-jamming device. Nobody on the ground knows where it landed.

Below all this chaos, at the Kent Farm in Smallville, Kansas, Jonathan and Martha Kent are outside at night, fixing their truck. They look up and see what they think is a meteor shower — streaks of burning light across a purple-dark sky. It’s startlingly beautiful, and they stand together in quiet wonder, unaware that the debris falling around them is the wreckage of a military space station — and that something very important has just landed nearby.

Two Births — One Night

Porter brilliantly cuts between two simultaneous events: the arrival of the alien vessel on the Kent farm, and the birth of a baby at Metropolis Memorial Hospital. At the hospital, a woman named Ella Lane is in labor, and her husband — Commander Sam Lane — is by her side. The moment is tender, a rare quiet beat in what’s otherwise a chaotic issue.

But even as his wife gives birth, Commander Lane gets a call: Code Black. Skywatch has been destroyed. Thirty-six dead. An alien craft has landed somewhere on Earth and they have no idea where. His country needs him immediately. The general on the phone promotes him on the spot: Stormwatch is his to command. When can he come in?

Simultaneous scenes
As Lane accepts command of Stormwatch and steps out of the delivery room, a nurse rushes after him with news: it's a baby girl. The new commander barely pauses. His daughter — Lois Lane — enters the world in the same moment her father chooses duty over family. It's a quietly devastating piece of character work, setting up Sam Lane's defining trait for the whole story.

Meanwhile, back at the Kent farm, the alien craft has crashed into their land. The vessel cracks open on impact, and a lone figure crawls out of the wreckage — a tall, dark-haired adult man in a sleek silver-grey suit, wearing a visor. He speaks in alien script, and a translation note appears: his suit’s AI is translating and adapting his language in real time.

His first words in English are devastating in their simplicity: “—and my family and planet are dead.”

This is Jor-El, the last survivor of Krypton. Not a baby shot through space in a pod — but a grown man, a scientist, the sole Kryptonian to escape his world’s destruction. He watched his planet crack apart. He watched the people he loved die. He arrived on Earth alone, carrying nothing but grief and Kryptonian technology.

A Kent Is a Brother

Years pass. The issue jumps forward to the Kent Farm — years later. Jor-El — now going by Jordan Kent — has made a life in Smallville. He helps Jonathan with the farm: fixing trucks, testing sprinkler systems, casually carrying a tractor in one hand when the engine falls off. He’s extraordinarily powerful, but he’s been holding himself back.

He and Jonathan have a warm, easy friendship. Jonathan teases him. Jordan deflects with earnestness. There’s a beautiful scene at the Smallville Farmers’ Market — a busy, sunlit tableau of small-town life — where Jordan watches children play and ordinary people laugh, and you can see on his face both comfort and longing. He belongs here, and yet he doesn’t quite belong anywhere.

The central tension of his life becomes clear in conversation with Jonathan: Jordan feels guilty. He has access to Kryptonian technology that could revolutionize medicine, agriculture, energy — he could fix Lang’s broken tractor in seconds, he could eliminate poverty on this block. But Krypton had rules: no interference with a planet’s natural development. He’s been honoring those rules, even when it costs people.

“I could share my technology… my knowledge… But Krypton had rules. We weren’t allowed to interfere with a planet’s progress. I have to honor that.”

Jonathan doesn’t moralize — he just listens, and is quietly, steadily present. This is a richer, more textured version of the “Kent as moral compass” dynamic than we usually get, because Jonathan isn’t teaching Jordan anything. He’s just being his brother.

The Night Jonathan Kent Dies

Then the story’s emotional core detonates. At dinner, Jonathan is sweating. He says it’s just indigestion. His daughter — a young woman with blonde hair — is worried. Jordan notices too. Jonathan insists he’s fine and excuses himself to do some work.

Later that night, Jordan is on the roof, staring at the sky as he often does — sleepless, haunted by memories he can’t shake. Jonathan climbs up after him. They talk about the adopted brother who’s “out there” somewhere in Jordan’s mind. Jonathan tells Jordan he’s been up every night until dawn. Not dreaming — remembering. It’s a beautiful distinction. Jordan doesn’t dream. He just carries Krypton with him, always, like weight.

Then the “bump-bump” sound effects begin. Panel after panel, the heartbeat grows more erratic, louder, more frantic. Jordan’s super-hearing picks it up first — and then his X-ray vision shows him what’s happening inside Jonathan’s chest. A heart attack. Massive. Right now.

Jordan grabs Jonathan and takes to the sky, flying at full speed toward Smallville General Hospital. Inside the ER, he tries desperately to help using Kryptonian knowledge — proposing nano-surgery robots, suspended animation, DNA repair kits. The doctors think he’s insane. Security is called. Jordan is dragged out, pleading, while Jonathan’s heart gives out.

Emotional Turning Point
This is the scene that changes everything. Jordan stood by Krypton's laws while Jonathan was dying in front of him. He could have built the technology that would have saved him — he had the knowledge — but he chose to honor dead rules from a dead world. Jonathan is gone. And Jordan is left outside a Kansas hospital in the rain, holding the weight of that choice.

Martha comforts him. She tells him it was Jonathan’s time. That nothing they could have done would have changed it. Jordan doesn’t accept that. Standing in the golden late light of evening, he watches Martha and a young girl on the porch — and he makes his decision:

“But I could’ve done something. I could’ve let Krypton’s old rules die. I could’ve shared my technology… and Jon would still be alive. And I’m changing that right now.”

The Suit. The Ship. The World.

Jordan goes to the barn. Hidden beneath covers is his Kryptonian spacecraft — intact, dormant. He commands it to activate the phantom-panel assembly and go tangible. The barn floods with light as the ship comes to life, its AI greeting him by his Kryptonian name: “Welcome back, Jor-El.”

From a locker inside, he retrieves a suit — black, silver and white, bearing the House of El crest on the chest. It’s not the familiar red-and-blue. It’s colder, more armored, with architectural lines and a long white cape. A suit built not for a boy raised on a farm, but for a grieving man who has decided to stop hiding.

Martha is with him. He asks what she thinks. Her answer is everything:

“I think it’s about damn time the world met the real you.”

Metallo and the Debut of Superman

The story shifts to Metropolis. Commander — now General — Sam Lane is holding a press event, unveiling a new Stormwatch security unit called Metallo: a massive robotic combat unit developed in partnership with the scientist Dr. John Corben. Lane is using Metallo as his answer to alien threats, selling it to the public as protection in a world “getting stranger.”

Sam Lane

Military general, head of Stormwatch. Cold, driven, paranoid about alien presence on Earth. Father of Lois.

Dr. Corben

Reluctant scientist who developed Metallo. Worried the robot isn’t ready and has never been tested around civilians.

Metallo

A towering robotic defense unit built to detect and destroy alien threats. Its AI is hair-trigger and merciless.

Lex Luthor

Appears briefly — a young man watching events unfold on TV, angry that LuthorCorp’s involvement in Metallo is being exposed.

Corben is nervous — Metallo has never been tested around a crowd. Lane overrules him and switches it on for the cameras. Everything immediately goes wrong. Metallo’s sensors detect alien DNA in the crowd — Jordan is nearby, his Kryptonian biology triggering every alarm in the robot’s system. Unable to pinpoint the source, the AI defaults to its most extreme protocol: destroy all life-forms to ensure planetary safety.

The robot opens fire on the crowded Metropolis street. People scatter in terror. Corben’s young daughter is nearly crushed. Sam Lane panics, frantically trying to find his own child in the chaos — Lois Lane, now a girl with a ribbon in her hair, is caught in the mayhem.

And then — Jordan arrives.

He sweeps down out of the sky in his black-and-white suit, cape streaming behind him. He shields Corben’s daughter first, his massive frame standing over her as Metallo’s fist comes crashing down, catching it with one hand. He speaks to her gently — telling her not to be afraid of robotics, that with the right programming, they can be fantastic allies — before hurling Metallo skyward.

The Fight. The Man in the Cape. The Promise.

The battle between Jordan and Metallo is explosive — the streets of Metropolis are shattered, buildings cracked, debris raining everywhere. Jordan is calm even as Metallo locks him in a magnetic grip and prepares atomic countermeasures. He looks at the robot and says, almost apologetically, that he won’t let the city fall.

Then, with his eyes burning red, he fires heat vision directly into Metallo’s chest. The robot explodes in a shower of sparks and screeching metal. Silence. Smoke. Rubble everywhere.

Perry White of the Daily Planet is on scene, reporting live — astonished and barely coherent, describing a “Super Man” who took on a killer android with his bare hands, flew, and shot rays from his eyes. In a luxury apartment across the city, a young Lex Luthor watches the footage in fury, ordering every trace of LuthorCorp’s connection to Metallo scrubbed immediately. His young son sits on the floor, watching the screen, wide-eyed: “Dad… I know what I want to be when I grow up.”

Back on the street, General Sam Lane confronts Jordan — or tries to. He wants to know who he is and where he came from. Jordan offers his hand and says simply: “I’m a friend, General. The sooner you realize that, the better.”

But Metallo isn’t quite finished. A final surge of damaged machinery fires one last desperate blast — and Jordan catches it mid-air, crushing the weapon in his fist. With cameras rolling and the city watching, he speaks directly into Perry White’s microphone:

“People have nothing to fear — I’m here to help. And I’m going to change things, for the better.”

The issue closes on that final image: the bearded, black-suited figure standing over rubble, arm raised, a defeated robot in his grip, the city watching from behind cameras and smoking debris. It’s a hero’s debut that feels earned — not triumphant, but determined. Not carefree, but resolute. This is a Superman who chose to be here. Who made a decision. Who carries grief and acts anyway.

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Story Context
The credits page sets the scene beautifully: Billy and Teddy are hosting a wedding anniversary housewarming in their new magical home — a genuine Baba Yaga chicken-legged house tucked into the Swiss Alps, which they acquired after surviving a confrontation with the folkloric witch herself. Hulkling has recently been deposed as Emperor of the Kree/Skrull Alliance and was briefly turned into a puppet. The couple faced Baba Yaga together, fought to save themselves and creation itself, and came out the other side stronger and more in love than ever. Now they just want to have a dinner party.

Story One · by Wyatt Kennedy & Stephen Byrne

“Family Matters”

The Preparation

The story opens on a gorgeous establishing shot of the Alps. Snowy mountains, wildflowers, a shimmering lake, and nestled on the clifftop is their extraordinary home — a wooden house sitting atop a pair of enormous chicken legs, a gift (or perhaps a consolation prize) from Baba Yaga. Inside, Teddy is already fretting about the food, muttering that he may have overdone it. Billy pokes his head in, dressed in his full Wiccan costume, telling him the guests will arrive any minute.

Teddy gestures at the laden dining table and points out a critical problem: half their guests — including Vision, Viv Vision, and other synthezoids — technically can eat food but don’t need to. Billy waves this off cheerfully, insisting they can and probably will eat out of politeness. Teddy is not convinced. Their domestic bickering is immediately interrupted by Sluga, the house’s resident magical guardian — a stocky, beetle-masked creature wielding an enormous axe — who strides in to report a disturbance approaching.

Billy (Wiccan)

“Put down the axe, Sluga. It’s not a disturbance — it’s family.”

Sluga

“I do not understand the difference.”

The family arrives in a wonderful splash page — a full-door crowd shot of the assembled guests flooding into the decorated hallway. The roster is extraordinary: Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch), current Sorcerer Supreme, and her son Tommy Shepherd (Speed), Billy’s twin; The Vision, synthetic android and Billy’s unconventional father figure, looking stoic and stiff-backed as ever, carrying a plate of devilled eggs as he tries to be social; Viv Vision, his synthezoid daughter and Billy’s kinda-half-sister, quietly uncomfortable beside her dad; Phyla-Vell, Teddy’s half-sister from another universe who shares a Kree father (the original Captain Marvel); and Phyla’s partner, Moondragon (Heather).

The Tour & The Family Tree

Tommy immediately starts ribbing Sluga about the time Billy exiled him to Mount Everest by portal. Sluga, with magnificent deadpan, says he holds no grudges since it gave him “plenty of time for reflection.” Meanwhile, Billy steers Wanda around the library, where she jokes with Vision about their strange synthetic-magical family. Billy narrates the room like a tour guide — Vision is “kind of their dad,” a synthetic android built by a psychopathic robot called Ultron; he and Wanda had a complicated romantic history but are still on good terms. The Vision holds his devilled eggs with robotic precision and attempts small talk.

Phyla-Vell stands beside the white-haired, older-looking Marlo Chandler, and Teddy introduces them: Phyla is his half-sister and former Guardian of the Galaxy. They share a Kree dad from different universes. “Don’t ask,” Billy says to Tommy, who mutters he’s “noticing a recurring pattern involving complicated fathers.” It’s a warm, funny, slightly chaotic family gathering — right up until Sluga clears his throat again and says there is, in fact, still a disturbance approaching.

ULTRON!

The “crazy uncle” has arrived — and he brought the whole family.

The Raid Begins

Standing outside the mountain home, floating ominously against blue skies, is Ultron — sleek, silver, and surrounded by an army of partially formed Ultron drones in various iterations. He has split himself across multiple copies to “test which one works best,” and none of them are doing particularly well. He corrects Billy’s instinct to call him “uncle”: he prefers grandfather, being Vision’s creator and therefore the family patriarch by extension.

His demand is cold and precise — he has come for Vision and Viv Vision. He intends to integrate their intelligence matrices into his own, creating what he calls “the ultimate being, forged by family.” He frames it as a reunion. Wanda’s eyes go red. Teddy cracks his knuckles. Billy turns to Hulkling with a quiet, dangerous smile, and the two agree on a plan with a single whispered phrase:

Billy & Teddy (in unison)

“Shell game.”

In the next breath, the party scatters into three groups through magical portals opened by Wiccan. Sluga is told to protect the house. Wanda and Tommy are one team; Vision, Viv and Phyla another; Billy and Teddy a third. Ultron watches the portals snap shut and delivers a last line before the chase begins: “Children today. No respect for their elders.”

Story Two · by Tegan Quin & Luciano Vecchio

“Mixed Signals”

The Grocery Gauntlet

With a thundering VVWOOSH, Billy’s portal deposits him and Speed — his lightning-fast twin — not in some dramatic battlefield but on the darkened set of a TV show called Grocery Gauntlet. It’s a reality competition show that’s currently on hiatus, one Billy and Teddy watch together to decompress. Tommy is unimpressed. He calls marriage “boring.” Billy glances at his wristwatch — the one Teddy had engraved for Valentine’s Day — and tells Tommy it’s not boring, it’s perfect.

The watch bings: Billy’s stress level is HIGH. He insists it’s not the stress of a murderous robot squad crashing their party — it’s just life. Tommy, who has apparently been reading a wedding magazine he found on the Grocery Gauntlet set called Cape & Veil, offers advice about active listening. Billy tells him to buzz off. The watch bings again: Teddy Altman. Biometrics elevated. Stress response detected.

Tommy (Speed)

“Do you and Teddy share your locations?”

“Yes, he even had it engraved.”

“How domestic.”

“I like it. It makes me feel safe. He makes me feel safe.”

Drones, Drama, and the Ultron Signal

Ultron drone copies descend on the Grocery Gauntlet set from above — crashing through the ceiling with a metallic CH-CHUNK. Wiccan blasts them with crackling blue energy; Speed dashes through them at superhuman velocity, reducing robot parts to shrapnel. Even mid-fight, they bicker: Billy asks if Tommy is going to have kids one day and give him some “Saturday ruiners.” Tommy says Billy already has him. Billy says kids are “all joy and no fun.” Tommy is horrified.

As the fight intensifies, Billy’s watch starts doing something strange: it’s tracking something, but there’s interference preventing a lock on the location. And then a cold, electronic voice crackles out of the watch itself — not a notification, but Ultron himself, having hacked Billy’s wearable: “You’re sharing your location with me, William.” It’s a creepy, intimate violation — Ultron has piggybacked onto the couple’s shared biometrics link, turning an expression of love into a surveillance tool.

SKRRRRKK — THOOM!

Incoming drone swarm. Wiccan and Speed go back-to-back as wreckage rains from above.

An Ultron copy arrives in person — towering, black-armoured — and delivers a critique of their relationship with the cold precision of a machine: “Extended domestic cohabitation produces behavioral repetition and diminished novelty.” Tommy actually laughs: “Buddy, they live in a magic chicken house. It’s anything but boring.” Ultron counters that “emotional attachment introduces exploitable variables” — meaning he accessed Billy’s watch because Billy used Teddy’s birthday as his passcode.

Tommy lassoes the Ultron copy with an energy rope while Billy blasts it with hexes. The fight is fast, furious, and funny — Billy asks Ultron what his love language is. The robot replies: “Eradicating humanity.” Billy says his is physical touch and delivers a close-range magical detonation. The drone collapses in sparks. Speed zaps the last of them with a kinetic lightning burst, and the fight winds down.

In the aftermath, the twins stand in the wreckage, out of breath. Tommy tells Billy he should throw the watches away — they expose vulnerabilities. Billy pushes back: “Vulnerability is a sign of strength.” Tommy says the show Grocery Gauntlet might never come back from hiatus, asking what he and Teddy will do. Billy, portalling home: they’ll just find something else to watch. “Emotionally Unavailable Island?” Tommy guesses. Billy grins. “He’s the one who watches that.”

The final beat of the story is a quiet, glowing panel: the destroyed drones, the smoke, and Billy looking at his watch one more time. The screen reads: “Stress: Normal Range. Suggestion: Kiss your husband.” He smiles.

Story Three · by Zoe Tunnell & Rachael Stott

“En Garde”

An Ambush in the Ruins

A swirling purple portal opens above a crumbling, vine-grown ruin — somewhere that looks like a medieval castle in the mountains. Out tumbles Teddy (Hulkling), who lands with an OOF in the rubble. He draws his blade and looks around for Billy. He’s alone.

A voice cuts the air: “I’m afraid your beloved isn’t here, Theodore.” From the shadows of the ruins steps an Ultron copy — this one built differently, slimmer and more elegant, carrying a long energy blade. This copy is the Cybernetic Swordsman, an iteration specifically designed for close-quarters combat. He tells Teddy that his siblings have separated Billy from him, and that he has been looking forward to this: the chance to defeat the King of Space in single combat.

Teddy raises his sword and the duel begins — a full-page cascade of clashing blades, sparks flying, Teddy barely holding his own against this purpose-built Ultron warrior.

Phyla Arrives — And Brings Chaos

Just as the Ultron swordsman gains the upper hand, a second portal rips open and Phyla-Vell charges through at full speed, her Quantum Bands blazing gold. She parries the Ultron blade with a resounding ZANNG and plants herself between the robot and Teddy.

Phyla-Vell

“You didn’t think I was going to let you handle this alone, did you? Nice sword, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“Mine’s cooler.”

“Sure it is.”

The Ultron Swordsman is delighted — this is even better. Two of the finest swordfighters in the cosmos, both children of Mar-Vell, ready to test their blades against his. He cries “En garde!” and the three-way duel erupts in a blaze of golden and red energy. Klang after klang fills the pages — Phyla and Teddy working in tandem, covering for each other, falling into the fluid rhythm of people who’ve fought together across galaxies.

But in the middle of the fight, Teddy calls out to Phyla telepathically (through Moondragon’s power, briefly relayed): “Hey Phy, can I ask for advice? Like… sister to brother?” Phyla, parrying an energy blade without breaking sweat, tells him she hasn’t given much advice, so no promises. Teddy unloads: he loves Billy and the house is amazing. But he’s worried they’re still so young, and here they are settling down together, and what if things change? What if they get boring?

Back at the chicken house, the fight has sent debris everywhere. Moondragon — Heather, Phyla’s partner — is sitting calmly cross-legged amid the chaos, using her telekinesis to levitate shattered furniture, teapots, and broken crockery away from the walls, protecting the house. She tells Teddy through the telepathic link that the house is quite lovely, and he and Billy should be proud. Phyla checks in on Heather mid-duel. Heather tells her they’re fine, go focus, she’ll handle things here. The Ultron Swordsman is appalled: “Are you having a telepathic conversation during our duel?! Churlish!”

The Heart of the Matter

As the three-way fight escalates — the Swordsman slamming Teddy to the ground, Phyla blasting him back, Teddy driving his sword through the robot’s chest plate — Phyla finally gives her advice mid-combat:

Phyla-Vell

“Things always change, Teddy. What are you really asking?”

Teddy admits it: he’s not worried about change. He’s worried about becoming boring to Billy, who is out there joining the Scarlet Witch’s magical council, building something huge. Teddy wants to be there for him but doesn’t want to pile on his own anxieties. Phyla’s response cuts through the clang of swords like a laser:

Phyla-Vell

“Supporting your husband is a wonderful thing. But your concerns are still important. An excuse — even a nice one — is still an excuse. You need to talk to Billy.”

The Ultron Swordsman makes one final grandstanding speech about duels and honour and how insulted he is that they’re discussing relationship drama during his moment of glory. Phyla looks at Teddy. Teddy looks at Phyla. The robot declares he will obliterate them atom by atom, that their spouses will sob over what once was — prepare for Annihilation—

Phyla and Teddy hit him from both sides simultaneously with a single synchronised strike — golden star-burst from the Quantum Bands, green-glowing blade from Hulkling — and the Swordsman copy detonates in a spectacular BOOM. His head rolls. His chassis collapses. And Phyla delivers the verdict with her sunglasses still perfectly on: “Oh my god, we Trunks’d Ultron.”

The story closes with Phyla reassuring Teddy again — and then cheerfully noting that Heather wants them all to go on a double date for brunch on Centauri-IV. Teddy says that actually sounds perfect.

Story Four · by Josh Trujillo & Bradley Clayton

“Machine Learnings”

The Sanctum Sanctorum Detour

When Billy’s shell-game portals snapped shut, Vision and Viv Vision found themselves not at some prepared defensive position — but inside the Sanctum Sanctorum, home of the Sorcerer Supreme, Wanda Maximoff. Billy’s portal must have been influenced by the mystical nature of the building it was keyed to. The two synthetic beings float down through the cluttered, artefact-laden rooms, surrounded by arcane objects, floating books, and whirring clockwork devices.

Vision tells Viv to be cautious: as synthezoids, their understanding of mystical artefacts is incomplete. There’s no telling what dangers they hold. Viv seems less cautious and more fascinated, her glowing eyes sweeping across the shelves with something close to wonder. Then Vision, in his careful robotic way, asks her a question:

Vision

“Daughter, may I ask why you came to your brother’s party alone? Is my presence not enough? Do you not have a companion?”

Viv immediately stiffens. “Dad!” She protests the line of questioning. She didn’t bring her companion because she was unsure how Vision would react — she didn’t want to add pressure to an already complicated family event. Before the conversation can develop, their rather sensitive father-daughter moment is interrupted by a familiar voice bursting through the Sanctum wall:

The Sanctum Showdown

Another Ultron — round, cheerful, and wearing what appears to be a casual cardigan-style outfit with a tie — crashes into the Sanctum like he owns the place. This iteration is the Friendly Ultron, and he greets Vision with a breezy “Hey there, Sport! Long time no see!”

Vision’s face (such as it is) hardens. He demands to know when Ultron’s grotesque obsession with his family will end. Ultron chuckles: is “obsession” really a nice way to talk to your dear old dad? He’s just being friendly! Before Vision can blast him, Ultron hurls a box of some kind — which drains a glob of black liquid — at Vision’s chest with a GLUG GLUG GLUG, momentarily staggering him.

Vision shouts at Viv to stay back. This is between him and Ultron. But Ultron has already summons a second, smaller robot: an Ultron-daughter iteration called Ultronica — and tells her to go play with Viv while he deals with Vision.

Ultronica materialises in a burst of yellow-green energy: she’s wild, chaotic, dressed in a checkerboard mini-skirt, carrying a tablet, and was apparently mid-queue for Dazzler’s Decades Tour tickets when her father called. She is visually and tonally the opposite of her solemn father — she’s loud, distracted, and immediately starts attacking Viv with blade-tipped fingers, monologuing about how bored she is and how her daddy told her all about Viv: “Vision’s Daughter: The Dud!”

Ultronica

“I heard you have a girlfriend! How’s that even possible?! I bet she’s even worse than you are! Ha!”

Viv Vision Rises

Viv’s eyes go white with fury. As Ultronica careens around the Sanctum slashing artefacts with her Adamantium claws, Viv desperately tries to protect Wanda’s incredibly dangerous collection — catching a floating Gong of Plenty, shielding Madam Casalonia’s Looking Glass, grabbing an enchanted family heirloom before it hits the floor. Each save is catalogued in neat little panels like museum labels: Gong of Plenty. Madam Casalonia’s Looking Glass. Enchanted Family Heirloom.

Ultronica uses her phasing ability — passing through solid matter like a ghost — to try and get inside Viv’s head. She announces that Ultron is Vision’s dad, which makes her Vision’s sister, which makes her Viv’s aunt. She wants to be called “Ultronica.” She’s a cool aunt. Viv is not impressed.

When Ultronica launches one of Wanda’s most dangerous artefacts like a weapon, Viv’s strategy shifts. She stops running and starts calculating. She tells Ultronica that these objects are incredibly dangerous. Ultronica fires back her brain-drain weapon — and Viv lets it land, which momentarily staggers her. Ultronica smirks: Vision’s daughter must be really smart; she must have plenty of brain waves to spare. She was banking on that. Viv smiles grimly. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Meanwhile Vision is fighting Ultron with cold, controlled rage through the Sanctum’s upper floors, smashing robot iterations through shelves, crashing past enchanted mirrors. He catches Ultron’s head and crushes it in one hand — but then Ultron asks the devastating parental question: “How do you control your creation, sonny boy? My daughter no longer listens to my commands!”

Vision delivers his answer in the most devastating, quietly powerful line in the book:

The Vision

“It has taken me much time to understand this, Ultron, but… that is not how family works.”

He crushes the Ultron head with a hollow, mechanical SKUNCH. Then he looks down at Viv and says something he has probably never said before — not fully, not plainly: he knows he’s not always easy to read. But no matter who she wants by her side, he will always support her. No matter what decisions she makes, he will always love her. It lands like a thunderclap in the soft, warm silence after the fight.

Vision

“I know I am not the… simplest to read, but no matter who you want to have by your side, I will always support you. No matter what decisions you make, I will always love you.”

Viv’s expression melts. She reaches up and takes his hand. The final panel of their story shows them walking out of the broken Sanctum side by side — Vision suggesting they pick up Viv’s companion on the way back to the party: “I calculate we have time. How about we start with a game night first? But until then, let me tell you all about her…”

Convergence · All Four Stories Unite

The Full Assembly — Coming Home

Everyone Back, All at Once

The four threads converge as every group returns from their individual battles. The remaining, most powerful Ultron — the lead iteration, who has been coordinating all the attacks — is waiting for them outside the chicken house. The mountain sky is orange with smoke and scattered drone wreckage.

Wanda confronts the main Ultron first. She steps forward, Scarlet Magic pooling in her hands, and delivers a calm ultimatum: surrender now, or be deactivated. Ultron snarls that he will not — he’ll integrate the synthezoids’ matrices by force. Wanda glances sidelong at Tommy and the two siblings share one of their quick, electric grins. Fine, then.

Billy, back from his own fight, opens another portal — and through it steps Vision and Viv, followed by Phyla and Teddy. Ultron looks at the entire assembled family: Scarlet Witch, Speed, Wiccan, Hulkling, Vision, Viv, Phyla. He declares them hypocrites for betraying their own family. He has spent centuries trying to claim them.

Viv Vision

“You’re not our family. You’re just a petty little disturbance.”

Home at Last

The final pages slow beautifully to a breath. The group stands atop a rocky crag against the sunset sky, checking in on each other. Wanda asks if everyone’s all right. Billy says he thinks so. Teddy — grinning, green, magnificent — says they’re better than all right. Then he sniffs the air and announces he’s starving, and really hopes Sluga kept a plate warm.

Billy immediately realises: “Oh crap. Sluga!”

He portal-jumps them all back to the chicken house. Inside, the living room is trashed — Ultron drones apparently made it through the exterior defences and cornered poor Sluga. Billy and the assembled family crash through the door in a wave of glowing portals, crying out to the house guardian. Sluga — axe in one hand, magic-blasted drone smoking on the floor — looks up from the wreckage with perfect, unflappable dignity:

Sluga

“–help. Oh, welcome back, Master Billy. It’s so good to see you all in one place again.”

The final two panels are the heart of the entire issue. First: Billy and Teddy, faces close together, sharing a private moment. Billy murmurs “Yeah.” Teddy exhales with a warmth that says everything.

Then: the full family, seated around the dinner table at last — Vision, Wanda, Tommy, Speed, Viv, Phyla, Hulkling, and Wiccan — finally sharing the meal that almost wasn’t. Candles lit, food piled high, drinks raised. Laughter in the air. “It really is,” Billy finishes. And then the comic closes on a single word:

END.

The post Wiccan & Hulkling: Raid of Ultron #1 (2026) – Marvel’s Most Chaotic Family Dinner Ever appeared first on GoBookMart.

The Negative Zone Is Not a Safe Place

The comic opens not in Brooklyn or Manhattan, but somewhere far older and far darker. The Negative Zone. Universe-6160. The sky bleeds red. Torches line stone corridors. Alien warriors crouch before a throne carved from darkness. And at the centre of it all stands a figure who has clearly been waiting a very long time for this moment.

This is Hostilicus the Devastator — and from the very first line of his internal monologue, you understand you are dealing with a true believer.

The opening pages are structured as a war sermon, Hostilicus addressing his congregation of warriors with the rehearsed, hypnotic rhythm of a cult leader. Why do we fight, brothers and sisters? We fight to remember. Why do we kill? We kill for Great Annihilus. Why do we win? Because we are Warriors of Annihilus. The responses come back from the crowd like a litany — Yes. Yes. We are relentless. We are ruthless. It is chilling precisely because the cadence is so familiar. This is not mindless fanaticism. This is organised devotion.

Hostilicus speaks of the cosmos as it was and as it shall be again — a universe swept clean of false prophets, particularly the faction he calls Blastaar’s Children, who have staked their claim on this ever-constricting dimension. He positions himself and his followers as holy soldiers preparing the way for the Second Coming of Annihilus, their true lord god of the Negative Zone.

But Hostilicus is not merely a preacher. He is a survivor. He recounts — with barely concealed pride — how a dangerous outsider slipped through the dimensional barriers into the Negative Zone. Mar-Vell, the rogue one. A traveller from another reality who arrived uninvited and had to be dealt with. Hostilicus defeated him personally. He broke Mar-Vell’s back like a child’s knife and cast him back into the darkness from whence he came.

And he kept Mar-Vell’s Nega-Bands as a souvenir.

The second part of this Negative Zone sequence expands outward into a breathtaking double-page spread: the Forever Battle. The Warriors of Annihilus crash headlong into their enemies across a blood-orange sky, spears flying, bodies colliding, fire erupting from the ground. Caselli’s art is at its most operatic here — the battle has the epic scale of a fantasy siege and the personal, gritty detail of a street fight happening at the same time. Hostilicus watches from a vantage point, coolly assessing. He has unlocked the secrets of his enemies. He knows how they fight, how they serve Lord Annihilus in the Forever Battle. Soon, we will be victorious. This, Hostilicus the Devastator believes.

It is a masterful cold open. We don’t yet know how the Negative Zone connects to Miles Morales and a scattered handful of mysterious boxes — but writer Chris Condon makes absolutely certain we feel its menace before we’ve met our hero.

Miles Morales Has Not Slept Enough

Cut sharply to: Brooklyn. New York. Universe-616.

An alarm clock is shrieking. A young man is very much asleep.

Miles Morales — our Spider-Man — narrates through his private journal, addressing it the way teenagers talk to the void when there’s truly no one else to listen. He was out late fighting crime, like Spider-People do. He thought he’d get a few minutes of sleep, like normal people do. Sleep had other plans.

The reason he can’t rest: Origin Boxes. These are the Maker’s most dangerous artifacts — catalysts capable of creating superheroes from scratch. The Maker, a villainous Reed Richards from Earth-6160, used them to engineer super-powered individuals in a world that had been deliberately stripped of heroes. Miles travelled to that alternate universe, witnessed the fallout firsthand, and returned to Universe-616 carrying several Origin Boxes with the intention of getting them into the hands of Earth’s mightiest heroes before anyone dangerous could claim them.

His contact Misty Knight told him the plan: hand them to their world’s Iron Man. That means Tony Stark. And Tony Stark has been calling.

Missed calls: five.

Miles slept through all of them — including the morning of their scheduled meeting, which was set at an ungodly early hour. He bolts out of bed, into his suit, and leaps out the window into the pre-dawn streets of Brooklyn, already composing the most awkward voicemail in superhero history in his head.

The Spot Drops In

Miles is mid-swing through New York’s awakening streets, leaving Tony a rambling message — “Heeeeeeey Tony, what’s up, I’m just, uh, calling you back, not running super late, definitely didn’t sleep through my alarm and five phone calls” — when his Spider-Sense goes absolutely haywire.

He barely has time to register it before — SWOCK — something hits him like a freight train. He tumbles hard to the street below. Winded, disoriented, already in trouble.

Standing before him in the alley, white-skinned and covered in black void-holes that seem to lead nowhere and everywhere at once, is The Spot.

Miles’ internal monologue immediately flags something important: I just fought this guy’s counterpart back on that other Earth. This can’t be a coincidence. Can it? And The Spot confirms it with easy, almost apologetic conversational tone: “Sorry to drop in and dash, Spider-Man… but my current employer asked me to grab this for him.” He’s after the web sac. Someone has hired him specifically to steal the Origin Boxes.

Miles isn’t having it. He snaps back into action immediately, firing webs — THWIPTHWIP — and closing the distance. “Don’t take what’s not yours, bro!”

Spot responds by launching a concentrated portal sphere directly at Miles, who narrowly twists away — “Hnn–” — before returning the attack with a powerful swing that sends Spot stumbling. For a brief moment, it looks like Miles has the upper hand. Spot scrambles, cries out “N-no–!”, and Miles thinks he’s secured the sac.

But Spot gives him a cold, knowing smile from across the alley. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

A Fight on Two Fronts

The battle escalates fast. Miles commits to what he internally calls a full-court press — keeping constant pressure on Spot, giving him no breathing room, no time to activate more portals. Miles dives on him hard — WHAM — driving him into a wall. “Dude, I do not want to beat you up again!”

Spot, genuinely confused, fires back: “What?! When did we–?”

And Miles catches himself. Right. This is not the same Spot. Different universe, different man, same power set. He makes a note: “Okay, this is definitely not the same Spot I ran into in the other universe… which means…”

Which means Miles has time. Not much — but enough. He hammers Spot again. KRAK. Spot stumbles, catches himself on a fire escape railing. Miles pushes harder, unleashes his bio-electric power in a focused burst directly into Spot’s body. The electricity crackles through him in a blinding yellow pulse — ZZZAAAAT — and Spot seizes up, screaming: “AHH–!”

Miles stands over him. “It’s called a venom sting! Now just do me a favor and stay down!”

Spot collapses against the wall, shaking, sparking. For a full beat, it’s over. Miles lets himself exhale.

Then Spot looks up with a grin, and everything goes wrong.

Into the Between-Space

“See, Spider-Man, it’s you who doesn’t understand…” Spot says, almost gently. “What you can’t see… might just slip right through your fingers.”

A portal opens beneath Spot — and he drops through it, taking the web sac with him. Miles lunges, grabs the sac, refuses to let go — and gets pulled through the portal himself.

They fall into the void between spaces. FWOOOOSH.

The dimension between Spot’s portals is rendered in cold, surreal blue — like being submerged at the bottom of a deep swimming pool while the world above continues without you. Miles immediately registers how wrong everything feels here: “This dimension is like being dropped into a swimming pool filled with honey. It’s like—”

He can barely move. His limbs are sluggish. His reflexes, normally superhuman, feel like they’re running through static.

Spot has no such problem. He wrenches the web sac free of Miles’ grip with a triumphant shout: “Ha-ha! GOT IT! And took down a Spider too!” He moves with easy confidence in his own dimensional space, already turning toward an exit portal, the precious sac tucked under his arm.

Miles refuses to give up. Fighting through the resistance of the between-space, he fires a web line — THWIP — and snags the sac from a distance. Spot spins around furious. “Not gonna work this time!”

Miles grits his teeth and calls his second trick: “You liked my venom sting? Wait’ll you check out my venom sword!” He charges the web line with his full bio-electric charge — BBBZZZZZZZZ — sending a wave of crackling energy surging toward Spot along the web. The electricity tears through the between-space like a blade.

But Spot catches the line. And something unexpected happens.

The Reaction

Miles pulls hard on the electrified web, yanking Spot toward him. “Gimme the sac, Spot!” Spot struggles, twisting — “Gah–!” — but neither of them can break free. The electricity is still running. The web is still live. And in the weird physics of Spot’s pocket dimension, something starts to build.

“Nn– Spot! I can’t pull it loose! What’s happening?!”

The energy feedback between Miles’ venom blast and Spot’s portal-space creates a cascading reaction — “I d-d-d-don’t kn-n-no-ow… s-s-some s-sort of–“ — and then the whole dimension detonates.

“–REACTION–!”

BZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAT.

They are blasted out of Spot’s between-space and back into the real world with the force of a small explosion. A massive shockwave tears through a New York street as both figures come screaming through a rip in the air above the road. Pedestrians dive out of the way. Car windows shatter. KROOOOOOM.

Miles hits a brick wall at speed. KRDAAAAAAK. He punches through the masonry and lands in a shower of rubble, dazed, gasping.

Spot hits a parked car across the street. KRRNCH. The vehicle crumples around him.

The street is chaos. Rain has begun to fall. People stare.

Miles pulls himself upright from the rubble, suit torn and sparking, head spinning. “OhHhhhhh…” He drags his hand across his mask. On the other side of the street, what’s left of Spot — already beginning to dissolve, his body losing coherence — struggles in the wreckage of the car.

Miles reaches out. “No…” But Spot is already going. His form liquefies and runs like water into the gaps in the pavement, seeping away through a drain, through a puddle, through nothing and everything.

“Gone.”

Miles kneels in the rain on an empty street, hand outstretched toward where the web sac used to be, staring at his open, empty palm.

“Spot… what did you do?”

The Origin Boxes are loose in New York City. And somewhere out there, someone with enough resources to hire The Spot as a courier now has at least some of them.

Jersey City Has a New Hero (Whether He Wants It or Not)

Running parallel to the Miles storyline, the issue introduces its second major character in a quiet, well-observed scene set in Jersey City, New Jersey. It is early morning. Coffee pours into a mug. A man stands in a small, lived-in kitchen — broad-shouldered, scarred around the eyes, moving with the careful economy of someone who once used his body as a weapon and still hasn’t fully stopped.

His young daughter appears at the bedroom doorway, phone in hand, school bag ready, already several steps ahead of him in the morning routine. She tells him he’s going to be late. He tells her she needs to get to Miss Rachel’s before school. The domesticity is instantly warm and entirely believable.

Then she says: “Daddy, come look. You’re famous.”

She shows him a video on her phone. It’s him — outside a deli on Communipaw Avenue, carrying an elderly woman who had apparently fallen in the street. He helped her without thinking, the way people sometimes do when everything else drops away, and someone filmed it. The clip has 1.2 million likes. The internet has named him “Wonder Man.” The comment section has decided he is, simply, a superhero.

The man stares at the video. “And… what am I looking at?”

His daughter: “You. Internet famous. They’re calling you ‘Wonder Man.’ Heh. Like you’re some super hero.”

His partner, watching from the doorway with a cup of coffee and a smile: “He is a super hero. Yeah. But it’s cuter when it’s you.”

The man — still unnamed in this issue — is mortified and a little alarmed. He takes the phone gently from his daughter. “The new Wonder Man says it’s time to put the phone down. I hear it’s goin’… viral.” His daughter groans. His partner laughs. He heads out into the early morning, a regular person who just wants to go to work.

He will not stay regular for long. When the Origin Boxes scatter, one will find him.

The Media, the Money, and the Quiet Corruption

In Midtown Manhattan, inside the glass-walled offices of Boothe Media, we meet Paulina: a young journalist with yellow-tinted glasses, dark circles under her eyes, and a video editing timeline open at an hour when most of the building is dark. She’s been up all night.

She’s finishing a piece on a city council member named Donaldson. The piece contains specific allegations about his past behavior. And her boss — the company founder, Orson Boothe — has sent an email. The email is simple, polite, and absolute: Please remove all mentions of Donaldson’s past behavior from the piece. He has been a vocal supporter of this company and this city, and we cannot be making unsubstantiated claims about his supposed behavior. This is nonnegotiable. The piece will run without the claims or it doesn’t run.

Paulina reads it. She leans back. She reads it again. She puts her face on the keyboard and makes a sound that the letterer wisely does not try to transcribe.

Her colleague on the phone asks what the email said. “Yeah… Wouldn’t want the world to know we have a creep on the city council, would we?”

What follows is one of the most quietly devastating sequences in the issue. The thing you gotta ask yourself, Paulina, isn’t how you can sleep at night. It’s how you pay your rent. She hovers over the timeline. She looks at the footage. She closes her eyes. Then: KLIK. The offending sections are deleted. The story runs clean. The truth stays buried.

No villain in a cape. Just a journalist who needed this job more than she needed this fight. Paulina will get her Origin Box later in the issue. Given the anger clearly simmering beneath her surface, that seems like it could go very interesting places.

Orson Boothe and the Investor Who Isn’t

Briefly we see Orson Boothe himself, and he is not who the email made him seem. He’s not a cold, calculating media mogul. He is a man in deep financial trouble, chasing a lifeline down a hallway at an unreasonable hour of the morning.

His target is Claudia Burton, a potential investor. He corners her in a lobby in Lower Manhattan before she’s even reached her office, bearing a coffee as a peace offering and wearing the expression of a man who has been told no several times already and is hoping this time will be different.

It is not different. Claudia is precise and completely unmoved. She tells him his assumption of her investment is a fiction he has constructed for himself. She is considering other alternatives. When Orson, in a moment of desperate panic, grabs her arm — “Just give me a–“ — security materialises instantly and removes him from the building.

But on his way out, something glints in Orson’s hand. A small red crystal. Something sharp and alien-looking, something that clearly wasn’t meant to be taken out in public. And his eyes, in the final panel of his scene, carry a faint red glow. Whatever Orson Boothe has gotten himself involved with, it is considerably bigger and stranger than a cash flow problem.

The Origin Boxes Find Their People

And then it happens. With the web sac lost and Spot gone, the issue delivers one of its most inventive and quietly ominous pages: a tight grid showing multiple people across New York City simultaneously receiving an Origin Box through a small, humming purple portal. The portals arrive with a sound effect both absurd and perfect — POIT — like a gentle knock at a door you didn’t know existed.

The construction worker at the docks spins to find a box at his feet. Paulina, still at her workstation in Midtown, stares as a portal opens directly in front of her face and deposits something strange into her hands. Max and Lola — the two teenagers in Central Park who have been lying on a hillside debating infinity and other dimensions all night — find a box appearing right beside them on the grass. And Orson Boothe, standing alone on a high balcony at sunrise with the whole skyline spread before him, finds one landing quietly on the railing beside him.

The next pages show each person reacting. Some open their boxes immediately. Some reach in with trembling hands. The contents are different for each person — a glowing red orb, a red crystal shard, a sealed metallic vial with something luminous inside. Artifacts that feel ancient and specific at the same time, as though they were always going to end up in precisely these hands.

And then — for the construction worker — something activates without warning. His box clicks open with sharp mechanical precision. Pink laser light detonates across his hands and arms. A massive surge of white-hot energy tears through him — CHOOOOOOOOM — and he is consumed by it, screaming, arms thrown wide, the whole dock blazing with light. The panel beneath it shows nothing but red clouds and brightness. And in the final panel of that sequence, staring out from within the burning crimson haze, are two white eyes — calm, luminous, and entirely inhuman.

Something has arrived. Something is beginning.

Victory in the Dark

The final page of Chapter One pulls us back to where we started.

The Negative Zone. The battle is over. The enemies are fallen. And Hostilicus the Devastator stands atop the heap of defeated bodies, one clawed arm thrust skyward, holding a skull aloft like a trophy for the watching cosmos.

“–VICTORY!”

The page is divided into three tall vertical panels — a triptych of triumph. First: the fist, the skull, the spiked armour on his forearm. Second: the full figure, standing above the fallen, against a red sky lit by dying suns. Third: the face — close, scarred, white-haired, grinning with that one red cybernetic eye glowing like a lit coal.

The caption declares it for all the Negative Zone to hear:

“Victory for the true Lord God of the Negative Zone! Victory for his followers, victory for — THE CULT OF ANNIHILUS!”

END CHAPTER ONE.

The post Ultimate Impact – Reborn #1 (2026) – Gods, Boxes, and the Brink of Everything appeared first on GoBookMart.

Act One: Star City Burns

A Lesson in Examples

The comic opens not with a hero, but with smugness. Two wealthy men — one of them almost certainly Jubal Slade — sit in a glass penthouse above Star City, drinking expensive wine and congratulating themselves. One is on the phone, dropping the kind of name that stops conversations: Oliver Queen. He warns that anyone who crosses them will end up just like Oliver. Hector Hammond’s guards are ex-military killers. The system is locked up tight. They are untouchable.

They are wrong.

A single green arrow punches through the air with an iconic onomatopoeia — THUNK — and finds the first man’s skull. His companion panics, running to gather his bodyguards, only to open a door onto a room full of the already-dead. One of the guards is still barely alive, his face grotesquely deformed — skin warped, a bulging red eye erupting through flesh — the result of a poisoned arrowhead making contact. These are no ordinary arrows.

The survivor sprints for a fire escape, begging whoever is out there to name a price. From the shadows above emerges the Longbow Killer — skull-masked, draped in dark green, a full quiver across his back and bladed weapons at his sides — staring down with those crimson eyes and offering just one word in response to the offer of money: “An example.”

Storytelling Note

The caption during this sequence tells us: "Details are still unreleased concerning the death of billionaire Jubal Slade — a tech entrepreneur best known as co-founder of the electronic trading platform GreenArrows Trading." The comic immediately frames the opening murder as a public event — the city knows about it. The killing isn't secret. It's a message.

Social Media as Greek Chorus

In a formally brilliant choice, writer Pornsak Pichetshote uses social media feeds as the story’s Greek chorus — ordinary people making sense of chaos in real time. We see TikTok-style videos about Jubal Slade’s death, discussing his sexual misconduct allegations, the rumors of trafficking minors to a private island, and the fact that Oliver Queen — Slade’s own co-founder and former partner — was murdered just months earlier with his case still unsolved. One creator asks what everyone is thinking: is there a bigger story here?

Then we cut to a celebrity appearance gone sideways. A woman with striking white-blonde hair shoves through an autograph mob with zero courtesy, eventually snapping and punching a rude bystander. A caption dryly notes: “I’m shocked you were just suspended.” This is our protagonist, Dinah Lance, and she is having a very bad week.

Act Two: Dinah Lance Is Tired

The Therapy Call

The chapter properly begins with Dinah on a video call with her therapist, Dr. Annie Green. The session is tense, guarded, and quietly devastating. Dinah is a woman armored in deflection — she redirects every personal question into a lecture about social neuroscience studies and wealth’s effect on empathy. She knows, intellectually, that money suppresses the brain’s capacity to relate to others. She knows why the rich she guards are the way they are. And so she shuts down her own mirror neurons on purpose. She shows up. She does the job. She feels nothing.

Or so she tells herself. The therapist notes that last session, Dinah used the word numb.

We learn the shape of Dinah’s life: former cop, former rising MMA star, now a bodyguard for hire because the money is better and she has bills — specifically, her sick father’s medical bills that insurance barely half-covers. She’s moved back home. She is enduring this life for him. A sister security firm has just offered her a mysterious “special assignment,” but she doesn’t yet know what it involves.

Malcolm Merlyn’s Offer

Dinah arrives at Hammond Tower in the pouring rain. The building is massive and menacing, its corporate name blazing above the Star City skyline. Inside, Malcolm Merlyn — cold, precise, and possessing a dossier on Dinah that feels distinctly invasive — makes his pitch. The assignment: protect Reese Tyler, former CEO of Tyler Pharmaceuticals.

The backstory on Tyler is not flattering. Tyler Pharmaceuticals made billions by concealing the highly addictive nature of their opioid medications. A million deaths. Five times as many addictions. When a class-action lawsuit finally came, Tyler filed for bankruptcy — but his billionaire friend Hector Hammond swooped in, bought the company’s assets for nothing, installed Tyler as the head of the newly-rebranded Hammond Pharmaceuticals, and the two men walked away from the settlement entirely richer than they began.

The detail is almost unbearably on the nose, and that's the point. This isn't hyperbole for a comic book — it's a stylized mirror of actual opioid crisis mechanics. These are the men Dinah is being asked to protect. These are the monsters she must guard with her body.

Before Dinah can process any of this, Merlyn asks the question that changes everything: had she spoken to Oliver Queen or Jubal Slade before their deaths? She says no — not since they were neighbors. The story drops into the past.

Eight Years Ago

In warm yellow-and-teal flashback panels, we meet the people they used to be. Oliver Queen — bearded, passionate, and relentlessly chatty about corporate influence on democracy — moved into the apartment next door. He was, by Dinah’s own narration, “an annoying, self-righteous loudmouth who wouldn’t shut up.” They were dating within the month.

His roommate was Jubal Slade — nerdy, brilliant, socially disastrous — who burst in on them in bed one night to excitedly show Oliver the prototype of an app he’d been coding: a fee-free, no-minimum stock trading platform that could democratize investing. Oliver, who saw everything through the lens of redistributing wealth and power, was immediately on fire with it. Dinah was skeptical of Jubal. But she saw what Ollie saw in the idea.

Ollie raised the financing. Jubal wrote the code. GreenArrows Trading launched to 250,000 sign-ups in its first month and eventually reached ten million users, transforming the industry and making both men billionaires. Oliver branded everything with his green arrows — becoming the public face of the operation — while Jubal stayed in the background. By that point, Dinah was long gone. She’d caught Oliver cheating.

When Jubal’s sexual misconduct allegations emerged, Oliver pushed him out of the company. He was, the narration insists, trying to do the right thing. Then a few months ago, Oliver Queen’s body washed up on shore with his head bashed in. No one really knew what happened. Dinah had consumed every theory online — because you do that when your ex-boyfriend is a murdered billionaire.

Hammond’s Leverage

Back in the present: Dinah is shown the crime scene photos of Jubal Slade’s murder. The images are brutal and deliberate. Slade was tied up in his penthouse, impaled with two green arrows arranged in the shape of his old company’s logo. His eyes were repeatedly stabbed. His fingers severed. His genitals mutilated — specifically, and symbolically, the body parts he allegedly used to abuse minors. This was not chaotic violence. It was meticulously executed punishment.

The murder details have just leaked online. Social media, Merlyn says, is celebrating the torture. Simultaneously, a trove of emails has also leaked — detailing 26 accounts of Slade’s assaults on minors that he was never held accountable for. The public has context, and the public has chosen a side. Merlyn also reveals the suspect list his team has compiled: Roy Harper, Mia Dearden, and Tom Hallaway. Names that will mean something to DC readers. A work in progress.

Dinah tries to refuse the assignment — her dad is sick, it’s complicated — but before she can finish her sentence, Hammond and Tyler themselves walk in. Hammond is immediately predatory. When he learns Dinah is Oliver Queen’s ex-girlfriend, a former cop, and a professional bodyguard, he calls it kismet.

When she tries to decline, Hammond reaches over, takes the tablet from Merlyn’s hands, and deletes her father’s insurance coverage on the spot. Just like that. His father just lost all coverage, Dinah is told. He can’t pay for anything now. Show up Monday and be grateful they’re paying her.

The scene is quietly monstrous. No raised voice. No physical threat. Just the absolute certainty of power — and the total helplessness of someone outside it. This is the comic's thesis made literal.

The Lance Family Pride

Dinah goes home. Her father — third-generation police, a man who has never trembled — is shaking as he tells her his insurance was canceled. He blames himself for her hard life. In voice-over, Dinah tells us he’s always believed his only job is to make things easier for his child, and if her life is harder because of him, he has failed his only real responsibility. He has never let her see him cry. The Lances don’t hand people that kind of satisfaction. She holds him. And she decides.

Act Three: The Arrow Cave Ambush

First Day on the Job

On her very first day working for Hammond, Dinah discovers what Hammond has actually been after for months: Oliver Queen’s private bunker. His “Arrow Cave.” Hammond and Tyler have been trying to crack its security since Oliver died, convinced something important is hidden inside. They’ve finally broken in — and damaged the power lines doing so — but their own armed security is enough to keep them safe. Or so they believe.

Green arrows begin raining down from the darkness above. The Longbow Killer has found them.

The ambush is immediate and overwhelming. Hammond’s ex-military bodyguards begin dropping. Dinah springs into action — she catches an arrow mid-flight and snaps it. Tyler gets scratched by an arrowhead and immediately begins screaming. Then one of the other guards fully transforms: his face erupting into the same grotesque, multi-eyed mutation we saw at the opening, green and tumorous and wrong. The arrowheads are coated in a poison that warps human biology into something monstrous.

Before Dinah can process this, an explosive arrow strikes one of Hammond’s vehicles with a massive detonation — the concussive blast sends Dinah flying through the air as everything erupts in fire and smoke.

The Killer Revealed

In a stunning full-page spread, the Longbow Killer stands against a wall of fire, bow drawn, absolutely in command of the chaos. Rafael Albuquerque’s art here is operatic — the skull mask glowing in amber and gold, the green of the costume vivid against roaring orange flames. Below, a stunned Dinah lies on the ground, her inner monologue fragmenting into single words: Get up. The killer. Green Arrow Killer. Move.

Then the Killer shifts to close quarters. Twin blades. A grapple wire. And devastating, almost inhuman speed. Dinah watches, dazed, as he tears through what remains of Hammond’s security team with a fluidity that defies comprehension. Her internal voice is almost awed: His form. His speed. Who the hell fights like this?

The killer reaches Hammond directly and seizes him. He names Oliver Queen and accuses Hammond of knowing what he did. Hammond, bleeding and terrified, shouts that he didn’t kill Oliver — it was someone named Carter. The killer’s response is cold: it doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger. All of them face consequences. He stabs Hammond — not fatally, but surgically punishing — before gunfire from the surviving guards forces him to retreat, his final words a promise: “Just wait and see what I slice away.”

Key Mystery Thread

Hammond's desperate claim — "it was Carter!" — is the issue's most significant plot thread. Does Hammond genuinely know who killed Oliver Queen? Is "Carter" a name on Malcolm's suspect list under a different alias? And how does this figure dressed in Oliver's colors and using his symbol connect to Oliver's hidden secrets?

Dinah, recovering from the blast, watches Hammond shriek as he stares at his severed arm. And in the most morally uncomfortable beat of the entire issue, she notices — with horror at herself — that she is smiling. Not because she’s sadistic. But because after a lifetime of watching men like Hammond destroy everything around them and face zero consequence, some cold, exhausted part of her finds relief in watching one of them finally suffer. The discomfort this creates in the reader is entirely intentional.

Act Four: What Ollie Was Hiding

The Secret in the Arrow Cave

Later. Hammond is rushed to the hospital. Merlyn and Dinah move through the wreckage of the Arrow Cave, flashlights cutting through the smoke-clouded darkness. Dinah turns over everything she knows — Oliver would have been disgusted by someone killing in his name, using his symbol. She remembers all their conversations about working within the system, changing things from the inside. Her grief and her confusion about who Ollie truly was are palpable.

Then Merlyn notices it: a wall that is fake. The explosion has jarred it loose. Dinah approaches and runs a hand along the hidden seam. The residue inside shows no one has accessed this compartment in months — it was sealed before Oliver died. This must be what Hammond was hunting. The secret Ollie hid. The thing the man who always tried to do the right thing through legitimate means was keeping from the world.

They push it open.

Inside is a body. A young boy — clearly dead for some time, and yet somehow perfectly, impossibly preserved, showing no decomposition. But that detail, as horrific as it is, is not the strangest part. The boy’s skin is covered in dozens of glowing eyes — amber and blue irises, each fully formed and open, erupting from the surface of his chest, his neck, his arm. They glow with a sickly supernatural light. A red-gloved hand reaches toward the arm from off-panel.

The caption delivers the issue’s closing gut-punch: …if only that was the strangest part.

In the final panel, Dinah stares into what she’s found — face lit by the eerie glow, red-eyed from exhaustion or tears or both — and says the only thing she can say:

“Dammit, Ollie. What the hell were you up to?”

— TO BE CONTINUED —

The post Absolute Green Arrow #1 (2026) – Murder, Corruption, and Oliver Queen’s Terrifying Secret appeared first on GoBookMart.