After a few teasers last week, one of which included a version of Wolverine that looks set to fight Naruto using the Six Paths of Pain, Marvel has finally lifted the lid on just what the heck Heroes Reborn 2021 is. And surprise, it’s not a return to the most EXTREME decade in comic books! Heroes Reborn builds on a different thread from the original 1996 event. Instead of a world where the Avengers and numerous other heroes fell in battle against Onslaught, Heroes Reborn takes a hard swerve left into a reality where Earth;s mightiest mortals never existed in the first place.
Tony Stark never built his signature suit of armour, Thor’s an atheist with a grudge against hammers, and Captain America is still frozen in ice as no Avengers team managed to locate and thaw the star-spangled hero from his cryogenic slumber. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a superteam ready to save the day though!
The Squadron Supreme of America, which exists as Marvel’s homage to DC’s Justice League but without having to worry about a lawsuit, is active and regularly faces threats from a weird mash-up of familiar villains. Doctor Doom wields the power of Cyttorak and is now known as Dr Juggernaut, the Silver Witch throws some enchanting chaos into the mix, and Thanos wields the Infinity Rings.
There’s only one person who remembers the Marvel Universe as it’s supposed to be, and that person is…Blade. Yup, the vampire hunter who has a remark about mother-lovers wanting ice-skate uphill, is on the hunt to discover how reality got shifted.
“Maybe the wildest story I’ve ever put on paper. I got to cut loose on this and release my inner comic-reared child in a really profound way, and together with a cadre of immensely imaginative artists, we built a world that I’m pretty confident in saying is quite unlike any version of the Marvel Universe you’ve seen before,” Heroes Reborn writer Jason Aaron said on the Marvel website.
It grew out of the pages of my Avengers run, but kept getting bigger and bigger as it went, and the more pieces I put in place for this Reborn world, the more gleeful and excited I became. This project really stoked the fires of my love for comics in all the right ways.
As for art, Ed McGuinness is handling that heavy duty. Explaining how his job involves designing old characters with new spins on their appearances and origins, McGuinness said that he’s having the time of his life so far:
I’ve been having an absolute blast designing and drawing some new spins on old favorites Jason Aaron has brought to the table. They are all with a purpose story wise which makes them really cool to get into from the art side of things. He may be the maddest scientist of all!
The first issue of Heroes Reborn drops in May.
Last Updated: January 26, 2021
