New Avengers (Vol. 3), Issue #5 – “Black Swans”

* Part 5 of 6 of the Everything Dies storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: New Avengers (Vol. 3), Issue #5 – “Black Swans”! In the previous installment, with Captain America out of the picture, the New Avengers team prepares to try to blow up the incursion event or look for the alternate reality Infinity Gems or something, I forget what they actually settled on. They have only five hours, and if that doesn’t work, Stephen Strange has a backup plan that’s so horrible that he won’t even talk about it. He’s planning on staying back and dying.

All well and good, but upon arrival on the doomed alternate Earth they discover Galactus destroying New York City, and some blowjob named Terrax who tries to reason with the Avengers team. The Avengers team can’t be reasoned with, so a big time-wasting battle ensues.

These Illuminati guys are deceptively dumb. Maybe Tony Stark will fall on his dick, hit a button, and activate the “Stop Incursion Forever” sequence.

New Avengers (Vol. 3), Issue #5 [June, 2013]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“Black Swans”

Is that a BUTT that I see on the cover? Nice!

“So you’re finally ready to hear real answers.”

That’s Black Swan, still captive in Necropolis, talking to a desperate Reed Richards.

“But do not come to me like this, a keeper to his captive. If you want my help, you have to ask me properly. Or not at all.”

Ha! Who’s got the upper hand now, bitch? Richards tries to play it cool, but I can tell inside that he’s absolutely seething with testosterone-fueled defensive white guy rage. “I do want your help. I have no ego about these things, and I have no trouble asking…”

Feh! Black swan says “Feh!” at you sir. There have, in fact, been two incursions since he’s been held captive here at the dumb Necropolis, and everyone lives to tell the tale! And living is pretty good! She’s in it for the living. No strings attached. Just the not dying in a catastrophic colliding universe calamity part is all she asks. She proves this by punching a crack in the Prison Cube! Rawr!

Get me one of them little bone-shaped dog tags.

Good enough! You passed the test! Richards and T’Challa let her out of the Giant Ice Cube. “Cracking the cell wall was impressive,” compliments T’Challa, “you’re stronger than Reed estimated.” Well, yeah, Reed is the dumbest guy she’s met on Earth so far!

T’Challa puts a leash on her and tells her to be good, so we all know how that will work out for everyone. She scoffs, says she can not be kept like *points to a guy on a stone throne* this knucklehead over here.

The guy on the stone throne is that Terrax guy. He looks like he’s waiting patiently for something.

I guess we’ll see how that fight from the end of Issue #4 played out. That was already a week ago! I guess no one died. They all look quite determined to murder one another. That’s cool.

Terrax cleaves Iron Man right in the face with his scythe, which would kill anything, but Iron Man gets right up and takes a nice, long drag from a cigarette. Off panel. I’m sure.

Next, Terrax flings Richards off his back. Then T’Challa leaps on him and tries to stab his upper back with a knife, but Terrax flings T-Challa off of him as well!

And, hold up, he’s not fucking done with Iron Man yet. Want more scythe to the face, Robot Boy?

I will slice and dice you with my comically large and non-aerodynamic butcher knife!

Take some of that, you soused alcoholic smarty man!

Terrax prepares another blow while Ironing Man revs up his blasty hands. Before Terrax can take another swing, the strong, silent Black Bolt grabs his arm, twists him around, and…yells in his face really loudly? I gotta be honest, I don’t know the first thing about Black Bolt. He’s powerful and he can’t talk, that’s all. OK, so I know the first two things.

Anyway, Black Bolt’s huffin’ and puffin’ sends Terrax flying to the ground. He looks hurt.

Galactus stands in the center of a giant, red, smoldering crater that was once Bizarro New York City.

Beast gives everyone a thumbs-up, and the Avengers team flies/hovers back to their own Earth.

And I guess they all just jerked off for the next seven days before bugging Black Swan for help.

“Are you holding out hope that a servant of a World Eater is going to tell you how to save a planet– to save your planet? Is that why you brought him back with you?” Black Swan asks, face punchable with smugness and self-satisfaction.

HERE’S WHAT I KNOW: Galactus is a World Eater. Terrax is a servant of a World Eater. The Avengers are a team of smelly humans. Black Swan is a Black Swan. None of this means anything to me.

Black Swan tells the full team that, for starters, they all have no fuckin’ clue what it is that they are actually dealing with.

“Why don’t you tell us, then?” says Strange.
“Who is this man?” Black Swan asks with utter disdain. lol.

Doctor Stephen Strange stands up with crisp dignity as if it’s his time to shine! He introduces himself and lays out his boring credentials. “PTOO!” spits Black Swan, literally. You go girl!

Fuckin’ A, lady. The rest of them suck, too, you’ll see soon enough.

Namor pops a boner. “Seems she’s got you pegged, Stephen. I like her.”

Finally, after several pages of wheel-spinning, Richards demands that she just tells them what she knows they don’t know so that they can know it and move on already.

But, the wheels still spin. “Heh. A virtually infinite amount of knowledge in the multiverse and you want to know what you don’t know…” she laughs.

Looks like Issue #5 is a big bottle episode, my friends.

Richards tells her to start at the beginning. She seems to understand this. Let’s go.

“There was everything.” Picture of a star.
“Followed by nothing.” Star explodes.
“A swirling, gaping maw that swallowed life-giving suns.” Swirling cosmic drain.
“And then…we cowered in the night.” Blackness.

Cool fucking story. Hey, we have like ten minutes before everything is ruined. Do you need to go back in your Cube?

Well, Richards asked for the beginning, and the beginning he certainly got. Now, Black Swan moves onto her beginning. She was four years old…

Aha! Now we’re finally getting somewhere!… maybe

The Keeper of the Great Key, huh? Sounds positively important! “The key unlocked the city’s – our planet’s – greatest treasure, a library of worlds. A gift from Sinnu Sarrum, the Ivory Kings.”

So this Dadingra kid, Black Swan’s bro, he had the key. He could open the door. But he couldn’t navigate the library. Only the trained can navigate the library. Dewey Decimal System and all that.

“Legend said that only the Great Ladies – whom none of our people had ever seen – could find their way through the twisted paths between worlds.”

Apparently, this kid used the key to open the door every single day hoping these “Great Ladies” would appear. Probably because he thought he’d get a little action too, baby. Nothing more alluring than a door that leads to some great ladies.

But then, one day, the dang sky turned red. These mofos, known as the Black Priest, descended from the sky and slaughtered the whole lot of ‘em! Everyone! Except the Black Swan. She ain’t dead yet.

So how did Black Swan Yabbat Ummon Tarru McNulty Fauntleroy get away with it? She took the key, opened the door, and she saw a few Great Ladies!

Squid-Head doesn’t seem that great to me.

The Great Ladies give Blackie Swan the skinny: her world was an offering to the Great Destroyer, Rabum Alal. I told myself during my Issue #3 rundown to make a note of that name because it might be important. Good for me!

So these three Great Goddamn Black Swans raise the little ugly duckling into the beautiful Black Swan you see before you, gentlemen. And furthermore, sh–

“Wait. Swans. There are more of you?” Richards rudely interrupts right before she gets to the good part (arguably). Don’t interrupt, fool. Anyway, duh. And second of all, it doesn’t matter. “The Swans scattered.” The library of worlds is destroyed.

BOOOOORRING! Tony Stark is bored now! Tony Stark is gettin’ cranky! “Your bad fiction skipped several billion years, give or take. What I want to know is what caused all of this to happen?”

OK, well, sir, she already mentioned Rabum Alal. He was born. That’s what caused all of this to happen. “At his birth, the early death of everything began. So we offer him his Earths, an offering, that the many may live for a season longer. Wardum Uggae.”

Namor’s turn to get pissed. “Those are not answers. It’s gibberish,” he whines. Fairy tales for children. Namor is no child, no matter what everyone says! “Tell me something real.”

Black Swan says it’s all real. Every last fucking fairy tale is true. “The incursions never stop, not until your world dies– not until everything dies. This is all there is.”

Yeah dummy. Pay attention.

However, contrary to literally everything that’s been said so far, stopping these incursions is actually pretty easy lmao. “Simply evacuate this world and then destroy it completely. It has been done many, many times before.” Easy peasy! Evacuate this dumb Earth. Elon Musk is trying to colonize Mars, start lining people up.

“YOU,” she turns to Beast, sizing him up. “The Beast is a name well known in the great game of worlds.” Apparently, in every universe that ever exists, Henry McCoy is the key! How very important. Good thing Professor Xavier died. Beast has an opportunity to take the “eighth option” to end the incursions. It’s a coward’s way, this eighth option, but the New Avengers are nothing if not useless cowards. This option is called “Shading the Apocalypse”, which is my favorite yo-yo trick.

Mr. Richards, always one to waste time, wants to try the other seven options first! T’Challa speaks up for the first time during this whole conversation. He doesn’t like this monochrome lass one bit. “I watched you kill a world,” he says accusingly, which obviously really weakened a once strong trust. Black Swan moves on, unphased by Black Panther-related stalling.

She calls their little palm tracking devices cute. A good start. She has something similar too, IN HER GODDAMNED EYEBALLS. So she can see incursions coming a million miles away! And guess what, fam? The next incursion is happening in only a few minutes. Good thing y’all spent an eternity talking about a whole lot of nothing.

The Avengers all look at each other with vapid “well shit” expressions.

Black Swan’s special incursion-sensing contact lenses already detect Rabum Alal’s presence.

The Avengers stare at their palms and attempt to triangulate the location. And they discover it. And it means nothing to me, but it’s the cliffhanger of a lifetime for some people I bet.

“It’s Latveria.”