Top 10 Marvel Comics Events Of All Time

5. Annihilation (2006)

Why it was good: It was a war saga, but set in space! A refreshing change of pace from most Marvel events (including everything else on this list), Annihilation combined the grittiness of a World War II story with the scope and power of the company’s cosmic characters. In the process, it brought a whole bunch of underused heroes and villains into the spotlight. Even better, because it was literally off in its own corner of the universe, there were few questions about where it fit with other books running at the same time. If you liked Annihilation, you read it, and if you didn’t, you were free to ignore it. Plus the writing team included Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, Keith Giffen and Simon Furman.

Why it didn’t rank higher: Considering the characters involved mostly didn’t have their own books, this event had an incredibly convoluted layout that featured a number of mini-series running alongside the main one. That’s not usually an issue as long as the important beats all take place in one central location, but that wasn’t the case here. You really did need to read some of the tie-ins to get the whole picture, and it’s tricky to read Annihilation even in collected form. The art was also a mixed bag as a result. And as great as the likes of Nova, Silver Surfer and the future Guardians of the Galaxy are, it’s hard to place an event without Marvel’s big guns any higher than this.

How it had lasting effects: If you read Infinity, you know that there were some seeds to that story that were planted here. In fact the Avengers’ space-faring allies considered another Annihilation Wave to fight back against the Builders, though they knew what that would mean. But forget about that. The big gain here was that it spun off the new Guardians of the Galaxy ongoing series that featured a lineup of heroes very close to the one you saw in movie theaters during the summer of 2014. The rest, as they say, is Marvel movie history. Without Annihilation, we never get that group of misfits, and that alone is a pretty nice legacy.