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This Week’s New Avengers Makes It Clear The New Secret Wars Will Connect To The Original

By Nick Tylwalk

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(Note: this post contains SPOILERS for New Avengers #29, which came out this week. Reader discretion is advised, but if you’re okay with the final few pages being revealed to you, by all means, read on.)

I think it was Newsarama that said the “dude on the cover” of New Avengers #29 who appears to be torturing Yellowjacket looks a lot like the Beyonder. As it turns out, there’s a reason for that.

The gist of this issue is that the three groups Jonathan Hickman has been following in his Time Runs Out arc — the Illuminati, the S.H.I.E.L.D. Avengers (led by grumpy Old Man Rogers) and the New Avengers (led by Sunspot) — get together to discuss the fact that while there were once an infinite number of universes, there are now only about two dozen, give or take.

That sounds bad. On the plus side, Reed Richards says the main Marvel Earth is probably going to miss all the remaining Incursions except for the final one, and if you’ve been paying attention to any of the coverage of the upcoming Secret Wars, you already know that he’s talking about Earth-616, the regular Marvel Earth, and Earth-1610, otherwise known as the Ultimate Universe’s Earth.

So we have the set-up for Secret Wars pretty much laid out for us. But there’s another big question to answer, and that’s whether anyone knows who or what is behind the end of everything. Right on cue, the man who the Illuminati sent out to figure that out returns. It’s Hank Pym, sporting his Yellowjacket costume.

As it turns out, he didn’t locate the Destroyer, the being known as Rabum Alal, but he did track down the so-called Ivory Kings, and they are … the Beyonders!

Here’s where an appreciation for Marvel history comes in. The Beyonder (singular) was the immensely powerful being responsible for creating the Battleworld and organizing the contest between heroes and villains during the original Secret Wars. Though he claimed to be his entire universe in concentrated, sentient form, he turned out to be less than he was claiming (though not before we had to wade through the overly long, slightly goofy Secret Wars II), and he was later revealed to be either half of an incomplete cosmic cube or some kind of mutant Inhuman, depending on what you believe.

But wait, we’re not done! Later stories established that there was an extradimensional race of beings called the Beyonders since they existed outside or beyond anything inhabitants of our reality could comprehend. Because they are fascinated by change and evolution, they worked through alien agents in the Marvel Universe to study it, resulting in things like the Savage Land and the Cosmic Cubes. The original Beyonder learned he was not one of them but of them, and he ended up fusing with Molecule Man to become a full Cosmic Cube — though it’s possible that the story where that happened has been retconned away.

This is all a long-winded way of saying yes, the guy on the cover is almost certainly supposed to be the Beyonder, which in turn symbolizes the role that the Beyonders play in Time Runs Out and the new Secret Wars. Maybe they’ve just decided the grand experiment in the Marvel Universe reality had become too unwieldy and it was time to end it or take it to another phase.

There’s a few more months before Secret Wars begins, and with Hickman playing this story out in Avengers and New Avengers, there’s bound to be a few more revelations to come. It’s just nice to know Marvel didn’t just slap the name of its original event series onto a new one. They’re directly connected, likely in a much more direct way than many expected.

Next: All the news from the Secret Wars Live Kickoff

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