As we see the present-day Avengers – complete with a refreshed line-up – battle Kang once more, the story of a long-past Avengers team also unfolds before us. Captain America leads a trio of reformed criminals – Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver – to take on continued threats to Earth while his fellow founding members break from the team.
Writer Mark Waid teams with penciller Barry Kitson to tell an Avengers story of old that will intertwine with the adventures of the current team. We grabbed the two of them for a chat to see what we could learn about this new and unique series.
Marvel.com: How did the idea come about to run these parallel stories of an early Avengers team alongside the current team battling Kang?
Mark Waid: I've been itching to tell this story for a long time. I love, as I did with Captain America: Man Out of Time, to be able to tell flashback stories within continuity, and I've forever been fascinated by whatever untold story lay behind how the world came to accept Cap's Kookie Quartet as a viable replacement for Iron Man, Giant Man, Wasp and Thor.
Marvel.com: A still-recently-thawed Captain America is joined by three heroes who have their origins as villains. What prompts this particular group to come together? What threats are they teaming up to face?
Mark Waid: The original Avengers, as per established continuity, were all facing personal issues that demanded a break from the team, so Iron Man put out the call for new members--and these are the ones who showed up...at first. But not the ONLY ones, as we'll soon see. As for menaces, the Frightful Four and the Stranger are two--and that's only the beginning of the list!
Marvel.com: What about working with the Marvel universe of the past has been most exciting for you? Has working in this time period something you’ve wanted to do for a while, or a wholly new opportunity?
Barry Kitson: For me this encapsulates a childhood dream becoming fully realized. This was the era of Marvel that I first began reading and lead me to fall in love with US comics rather than the very cartoonish British fare I had been used to. I was reading these stories when I was five or six years old and already dreaming of drawing these characters for a living – so for me it is the perfect realization of that dream – despite all the time that has passed I feel like that little kid again getting to work with the characters I most loved in the incarnations that first drew me to them. I’m sure Mark will bear witness that when he approached me about doing this series – I had agreed before he had managed to get beyond saying it would focus on Cap’s cookie quartet... I may also have threatened terrible retribution on him if he let any other artist get anywhere near this particular series!
Not only does the series feature the Avengers line-up that I feel most personally connected to, but also a whole cast of characters from the era that I have always longed to draw – I’m not sure how much I can give away but there are guest stars and villains aplenty that I think anyone who loves this era in Marvel history will thoroughly enjoy! (As you have probably gathered I could ramble on about how excited I am for some time!)
More on Marvel.com: http://marvel.com/news/comics/26842/marvel_now_hear_this_-_avengers_point_one#ixzz4MpffSgFi