New Avengers #23 Review: Even The Illuminati Get It Wrong Sometimes

The Illuminati is composed of some of the smartest men on Marvel’s Earth. Much of the current run of New Avengers has focused on whether they are making the right moral decisions in almost impossible situations due to the Incursions, but what about when they’re simply misinformed or incorrect in some of their assumptions?

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That, in a nutshell, is what New Avengers #23 is all about. The members of the Illuminati have been so laser-focused on the task at hand — understandable when it involves trying to prevent the premature death of the entire universe — that it never occurs to them that they could simply be missing something. I mean, a group with Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and Hank McCoy couldn’t miss any detail, right?

Not in a scientific or theoretical sense, no. But what Jonathan Hickman explores here is a one-two punch of the group believing what has happened before will continue to happen and failing to account for the unpredictability of human (or superhuman) behavior. Along the way, we get some nice character moments with every character, though not all of them are happy ones.

Kev Walker also does good work in an issue where he has to convey a bunch of different emotions: regret, hopelessness and dismay among them. It all climaxes in one big, “Oh crap …” moment right at the end, where the day might be saved but at a cost that no one on the team had even considered.

I haven’t been reading this book religiously, but I jumped back in here because of the sense that this series is going to be increasingly important to whatever Hickman is cooking up for next spring’s Marvel event, and I wasn’t disappointed. Find out more after the following warning …

SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT!

We begin with bad news of the worst kind. Another Incursion is on the way, and both Mr. Fantastic and Black Panther agree they can’t destroy another world to stop it. So … that’s the end, I guess! Thanks for stopping by, everyone!

The old “What would you do if you have only a few hours left to live?” thing is in full effect, with each Illuminati member handling it differently. Banner looks forward to freeing himself of the Hulk, Beast and Doctor Strange get well-deserved tellings off from people close to them, Iron Man considers the bottle hard, Black Panther has one last fling with Storm, Mr. Fantastic visits his daughter and Black Bolt hangs out with Lockjaw and cries.

And then, nothing.

While everything still existing is good, Panther suggests that if they were wrong about their working theory, that would be extremely bad, because it would mean they killed another world for nothing. Leave it to Black Bolt to point out what the rest might have missed, namely, that they kicked Namor out of the group, so … yeah.

Namor has indeed taken action, gathering his own version of the Cabal to proactively destroy other Earths to save the main reality, beginning with Earth-9004. As you might imagine, there are some not-so-nice people in this group: Maximus, Proxima Midnight, Terrax, Thanos, Corvus Glaive and Black Swan. That’s going to make things a little more complicated, one would think.

Favorite moment: Kids, don’t ask Doctor Doom if you can stay up late on a school night!

Final thought: Now the remaining members of the Illuminati are going to have to fight the Cabal to prevent it from doing something they’ve done themselves. When the only road to redemption involves hypocrisy, that kind of stinks.