Jason Aaron goes full-on Oprah mode and writes "You are the Phoenix, You are the Phoenix, EVERYBODY is the Phoenix!", the end. In case you've missed it, Marvel editorial is utterly and completely dead, so its no surprise that we keep getting the same brainless character-verse storyline every year, they're easy to write, easy to bait, easy to forget. At this point, Jason Aaron is basically trying to see how much he can get away with, and you can sign me out of this absurd hyperbolic drivel.

Uninspired verbose boring and quite useless tournament to design the next Phoenix. At least art is good.

I can't believe this is the same person who wrote stuff like Thor, Ghost Rider and Wolverine & the X-Men.

Another globe-spanning adventure gives us the backstory of yet another of the Avengers of One Million B.C. The origin of the Stone Age Phoenix is intercut with a tournament in the present day to decide who will be the newest person to merge with the Phoenix Force. There are tons of guest stars plus Aaron visits the many super-teams he has been juggling since the start of the series: Winter Guard, Squadron Supreme of America, Legion of the Unliving, and Defenders of the Deep. So many characters!

I love the Phoenix, and I enjoy this team of Avengers.....but this...this right here. Is a waste of a story. This was straight-up garbage.

Graphics ok. The story? Horrendous.

I’m a big fan of Jason Aaron. He’s the author of some of my very favourite comicbook runs; most notably his truly epic run on Thor. He does occasionally slip up and produce a clunker, though… his short run on Hulk, for example, was truly awful.Unfortunately, I found this volume of Avengers to be another dud. I thought it was an uninspired Contest of Champions-type setup featuring some guest stars that I really don’t care for being included for no good reason at the expense of some of the main ca...

Yikes... pretty messy all around. I started off liking the Phoenix background, that went away pretty quick. The whole phoenix battle was a huge mess and pretty lame for me. The idea that everyone gets the powers was watered down to me and takes away from the power itself. The outcome was very underwhelming. Even the Blade mini story was kinda lame, but better than the rest of the book. Namor getting his arms ripped off, that was very cool though.

Ugh! The worst story of Aaron's run so far. An unimaginative Contest of Champions for the Phoenix set. Just nonstop fights hidden behind so many flaming Phoenix effects that it was difficult to even follow the action. It's hard to believe this is the same guy behind a brilliant run on Thor and the creator of Scalped.

COLLECTS AVENGERS (2018) ISSUES #39-45Much like "Secret Wars" or "Contest of Champions," a group of heroes and villains have been abducted by the Phoenix Force and forced to fight each other in various one-on-one match-ups. The winner of each contest moves on to fight again, and the last person standing will be gifted with the power of the Phoenix. I haven't loved all of Jason Aaron's "Avengers" run, but this volume really worked for me. It started out a little slow, but got good fast. I'm also

It starts off as a sudden emergence of Phoenix powers among various heroes and they fight not among themselves but with others in some other landscape and so you have Cap, BP, Wolverine, Red widow, Namor, She-hulk and others fighting and the whole volume is a series of fights happening and its not that exciting tbh until you get the origin of the first host of Phoenix but then the retcon with Thor was so bad and forcefully inserted but regardless it comes down to a series of fights between BP an...

The Phoenix is back, and it's ready for a new host. But instead of choosing for itself, it's holding a tournament of heroes and villains, so that they can prove who is the worthiest of holding the mantle.This was fine? I didn't have half as many problems with it as most people did, it seems. It's mostly just fight scenes for the majority of the book, which isn't a bad thing considering it's meant to be a battle tournament, but it's all a bit stale in terms of character work. There are a few stan...

Is iconoclasm, defeated in religion over a thousand years ago, rearing its ugly head, but this time in comics? Apparently so! What might have been an amazing story with great art is rendered pointless with all the pandering to what we shall politely call “contemporary issues”.

I might be the only person left in the world who still likes Aaron's "Avengers" run, but I'm not afraid of being right. The previous two volumes focusing on Starbrand and Moon Knight didn't quite grip me as much as I wanted them to, but this tournament arc played to all of this series' strengths in an extremely satisfying way.

Honestly? One of the worst volumes of Avengers ever. Avengers: The Crossing Omnibus as more amusing. I am so glad that I moved the series to library-reading only. I just don't know what happened: Jason Aaron used to be a good author, but it's been a decade since his heights for Scalped and Wolverine and the X-Men and now ... this. I mean, it's bad enough that the volume is mostly pointless fighting for the Phoenix power held as individual contests. But it's also largely incoherent, as we move ba...

Jason Aaron must have a giant roadmap for his Avengers run. Since issue #1, it's been a methodical uncovering of the history of the Prehistoric Avengers. Origin stories galore! Great stories, just erratic pacing and large bits of filler.This collection has the payoff of Namor's call to the Phoenix Force. It's back to choose a new champion. I don't think anybody saw this one coming.Bonus: we get a Phoenix force origin story and more about Thor, Odin, and the Phoenix.

This was better than the last volume.Instead of Secret Wars this should have been called Phoenix Wars. It’s roughly the same story. Giant cosmic entity forces the heroes and villains of the Marvel Universe to fight each other for supremacy. It’s okay. Essentially just a bunch of Marvel heroes imbued with aspects of the Phoenix Force fighting each other without really any consequences. Some good stuff there, but with Phoenix controlling the battles and not really letting anyone die or ultimately

Anyone who knows me knows about my obsession with Jean Grey and the Phoenix. I even have a huge phoenix firebird (with Jean's Phoenix chest symbol, and her body outline from Uncanny X-Men #125) tattooed on my left inner forearm. So... when it comes to anything Phoenix related, I am biased and usually love it. That being said....After showing how the first Phoenix came to be (in Avengers BC era), we see that the cosmic Phoenix entity needs a new host (since Jean rejected it after her resurrection...

Not very good. Turning the question of who will be the next Phoenix into a battle royale doesn't really make sense and makes for a kind of boring series. Never mind that there's no reason to have a Phoenix at all, or that I don't care for the thrust towards making the Phoenix unquestionably destructive, it's a random collection of characters, some of whom aren't acting like themselves. And wasn't this happening around the same time as the battle royale over in X of Swords, or at least very short...

Why is it, despite a seemingly unending stream of (what should be) bonkers ideas and (what could be) a fascinating cast of characters bouncing off each other, the best reaction I can muster for Aaron's AVENGERS run is "Meh"? I will say this in its favor: it is *compulsively* readable. It's my first pick every time it shows up on Marvel Unlimited, and despite my best judgement, I picked up the fist 12 issues as the HC collection that was recently released. But man, it should be SO MUCH BETTER tha...