Synopsis
Story 1 NYSE (framing story interpolated between the others)
Writer Nick Spencer. Artist Luke Ross. Colours Lee Loughridge. Letters Clayton Cowles. Editors Tom Brevoort, Lauren Sankovitch, Jake Thomas.
Head of SHIELD Maria Hill has pulled Nick Fury Jr and Phil Coulson from the Leviathan Operation for another job. A mystery man caused havoc in the New York Stock Exchange during the day by consistently making perfect choices and causing every other broker to follow his lead. SHIELD arrested him and learned that he's from 100 years in the future. And he insists on only talking to Fury, but Coulson joins the interrogation too. The man tells them that in general the USA is going to fall apart, and the problems aren't the ones SHIELD is currently worried about. In particular he mentions troubles from space.
Story 2 Guardians Of The Galaxy
Writer Brian Michael Bendis. Pencils Steve McNiven. Inks John Dell. Colours Justin Ponsor. Letters Cory Petit. Editors Stephen Wacker, Sana Amanat.
This is an origin for Star-Lord set 25 years ago in Wisconsin. Young Peter Quill gets home from school and his single mom notices he's been fighting. He says he was defending a girl who was being picked on by a boy. She accepts his explanation and sends him in for dinner. But before she can shut the door lights appear from the woods and she thinks it's someone she's been long expecting. But it's 2 aliens (Badoon) who kill her with ray guns in the cause of eliminating the Spartoi bloodline. Peter sees them and runs to his mom's bedroom where he know she keeps a double-barrelled shotgun hidden on the top shelf in her closet. He kills the aliens but finds a strange handgun also in the closet. More lights appear and he runs out of the house with the gun as a spaceship destroys it behind him.
Story 3 Diamondhead
Writer Jeph Loeb. Pencils Ed McGuinness. Inks Dexter Vimes. Colours Marte Gracia. Letters Albert Deschesne. Editors Stephen Wacker, Sana Amanat.
New Nova Sam Alexander is zooming across the skies of the US from New York, exhilarated because Thor asked him to be an Avenger. He's heading home to Arizona but as he crosses Monument Valley a guy with a jetpack rockets up and punches him in the face. This is the villain Diamondhead who expects Nova to recognise him. But on the other hand he believes all the Nova Corps are dead so who's this 1? They slam into a mesa and both survive (DH because of his diamond body, Sam because of his Nova helmet) but the jetpack doesn't. This may be a new Nova but DB still wants revenge for stuff. The newbie is losing the fight until the villain threatens to take the helmet, which is all that Sam has of his dad's. He emits a (temporarily) blinding flash and flies off, leaving DB to find his own way home.
Story 1 continued
The mystery man from the future comments on what Marvel are calling the (post Dark Reign/Siege) Heroic Age and how the heroes spend most of the time fighting each other. Outside the interrogation room Maria Hill is getting impatient for actual facts, and asks her SHIELD staff to bring her everything they've got on time-travellers. The man mentions just 1 actual prediction, the Ascendant (who will be a hero group in the Avengers World series as part of SPEAR, the Chinese equivalent of SHIELD, but not until 2014). But then he talks more generally about young heroes.
Story 4 The new world
Writer Kieron Gillen. Artists James McKe;lvie, Mike Norton. Colours Matthew Wilson. Letters Clayton Cowles. Editors Lauren Sankovitch, Jake Thomas.
America Chavez is on Earth-212 in flying to a Korean Barbecue restaurant in Manhattan to reluctantly meet Kid Loki, who tells her she needs to return to Earth-616. She refuses to explain why she doesn't like that Earth, nor why her Teen Brigade team there broke up. He shows her a vision of teen Billy Kaplan/Wiccan, 'son' of the Scarlet Witch and with a destiny she knows about, and he suggests that for the good of the multiverse Billy should be removed from it. Angry America commences beating him up but he escapes using Runic magik. She warns him that she'll be watching both him and the boy to make sure Loki doesn't harm him. And then she flies away. But Loki ticks her off on his list of prospective members of the Young Avengers (he's already added himself as a member), and he breaks the 4th wall to remind us that putting Avengers together is Loki's greatest hit.
Story 5 It's art
Writer Matt Fraction. Artist Michael Allred. Colours Laura Allred. Letters Clayton Cowles. Editors Tom Brevoort, Lauren Sankovitch, Jake Thomas.
We start with a flashback to Scott Lang with his young daughter Cassie, trying to explain why Marcel Duchamp drawing a moustache and beard on a postcard of the Mona Lisa was art. Her response is to similarly decorate a photo of them both.
Then we skip forward to the end of Avengers: Children's Crusade where teen Cassie as Stature of the Young Avengers has just rescued him from having been killed in Avengers Disassembled, but then she herself gets killed by Dr Doom.
And now as Ant-Man he's sneaking into an art show at the Latverian Embassy. He's mite-sized and clinging to an eyelash of pop star Darla Deering who's there with her boyfriend Human Torch. After fighting off some Demodex mites he enlarges himself a bit and exits the eye on his Micromag Rig which causes her some discomfort. But the Embassy's nanosecurity detects him and sends a horde of tiny hunter/killer drones after him, until he lures them into bored Johnny Storm's yawning mouth. The duo leave and Ant-Man shrinks down to microbe size and flies to do what he came for.
Later we see police investigating the crime of a moustache and beard having been drawn on a self-portrait of Doom.
Story 1 continued
Coulson and Fury are getting fed up with these seeming irrelevancies. The man says that even if he told them important stuff they wouldn't believe him. And anyway the disasters of their past were almost always obvious beforehand but still nobody tried to stop them. But he reminds them that there's at least 1 other man from the future around currently, with an eyepatch like Fury.
Story 6 Crazy enough
Writer Dennis Hopeless. Artist Gabriel'Hernandez Walta. Colours David Curiel. Letters Joe Sabino. Editor Nick Lowe, Jordan White.
Forge is digging his way through the ruins of his base on Wundagore Mountain, and literally talking to himself and telling himself he's not insane. Then he comes to a large machine made of a mixture of clockwork and other technologies. He's sure he never built it, but he's equally sure he can make it work. But that of course means 1st taking it apart. However the machine starts closing in on him as if trying to stop his interference. But fix it he does, and whatever it's meant to do it begins doing it. Then he hears a noise from behind some metal panels. Which burst letting out an enormous quantity of brain folds. He's not capable of fixing brains so he runs away past ever increasing amounts of brain matter to a big lever. He moves the lever and metal panels move to suppress the brainstuff.
A voice greets him and tells him that the machine he 'fixed' was his own brain. This voice has an actual person to go with it, and it's a somewhat physically damaged Cable (as usual with an eye-patch and a big gun) asking if Forge can fix *him* now.
Story 1 conclusion
The man from the future senses that the news about Forge and Cable has stirred the hornet's nest, and when he adds the word Kobik armed troops enter the room. But Fury and Coulson simultaneously call out to the listening Commander Hill that "It's not him, it's inside him". And a soldier shoots the man, and then another shoots *him*. It becomes difficult to tell who's shooting who and why, until Phil Coulson shoots 1 soldier and it all stops. Whatever was inside the man had been taking over the soldiers, leaping from 1 to the next. But Coulson had noticed pupil dilation as each takeover happened, and had killed the next man it happened to. Hill enters the room and Fury wants to know what Kobik is. She ignores the question and says his next mission will involve the Avengers Initiative.