Top 10 Marvel Comics Events Of All Time

8. Avengers vs. X-Men (2012)

Why it was good: You don’t really need much of an explanation as to why this was a slam dunk of a high concept. Comics fans love to pick sides, and this series put the question of which team is better right up front. Naturally, it wasn’t just a big team versus team slugfest, but they definitely threw down, and to paraphrase the great De La Soul, the stakes was high. The question of the Phoenix Force has always been a thorny one, and both teams had distinctly different views on how it should be handled once it set its sights on Earth. Toss in some shifting loyalties for some additional drama (because Wolverine was an X-Man and an Avenger, and he wasn’t the only one) and a main story that was easy to follow, and you can see why it sold like hotcakes.

Why it didn’t rank higher: In a series with so many incredible characters on both sides, it leaned a little too heavily on one that only X-Men fans really cared about, and even then maybe not all of them: Hope Summers. On top of that, while Cyclops was certainly acting in character at the time, he went pretty far down the road to becoming a villain here. Whether or not Scott Summers should ever get to the “by any means necessary” philosophy to protect mutants is a topic for a column of its own, but it was hard to see him essentially end up as the Big Bad here. That never really sat right.

How it had lasting effects: It hasn’t had tons considering the magnitude of this event. Namor and Black Panther are never going to be BFFs given what went down while the Sub-Mariner was part of the Phoenix Five, but it’s hard to imagine they’d ever be hanging out in each other’s kingdoms knocking back brews anyway. The biggest consequence was the distrust this conflict sowed between the two teams, which rippled into the creation of the Avengers Unity Squad in order to get them back on the same page. It worked, but only with a lot of misery in the pages of Uncanny Avengers. The guess here is that we’ll continue to see some threads from this story picked up later.