Carrie is preoccupied with worry when her brother fails to show up for work. Then Nikos Spirakis, the king of the transport industry, appears before her. He informs her that her brother has run off after getting Nikos’s sister pregnant, and in revenge Nikos wants Carrie to have his baby. She’s repulsed by his arrogance…but unexpectedly drawn to him at the same time!

Ares - the God of War! His relentless brutality and his bloodthirsty drive to attain victory at any cost earned him only scorn from his fellow gods in the Greek pantheon, and exile from Olympus. After thousands of years living as a man and fighting in man's bloody, petty conflicts, Ares joined the ranks of Earth's mightiest heroes - the Avengers. Now Norman Osborn - the new head of the corrupted Dark Avengers and director of the paramilitary intelligence agency H.A.M.M.E.R. - wants the finest fighting force the God of War can provide. He charges Ares with hand-picking an elite squad of soldiers and beating them into the hardest, sharpest warriors ever to wield an M-60 in each hand. And that's exactly what Ares will need, when the goddess Hera provides him with a fighting chance to regain his standing in the pantheon's eyes. And Ares is taking his men with him into the battle of their lives! Collects Dark Avengers: Ares #1-3, and Thor #129.

THE DARK REIGN IS HERE! Who are the Dark Avengers? Who is the Iron Patriot? The answers will shock you! From the fan-favorite creative team of Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato Jr. Collects Dark Avengers (2009) #1-6.

The Marvel Universe's greatest villains make their final move against the hallowed halls of Asgard! It's the last piece in Norman Osborn's insane bid to seize control of the world, but is the siege of Asgard the proverbial bridge too far for the former Green Goblin? And will his machinations with Loki be the thing that loses the war...or wins him the world? Plus: the New Avengers are on the run! Driven underground by the Superhuman Registration Act, the Avengers battle Osborn, and his new crime kingpin the Hood, behind the scenes--taking on a gauntlet of the Hood's lethal cronies. COLLECTING: SIEGE: THE CABAL, SIEGE PROLOGUE SIEGE 1-4, SIEGE 1 DIRECTOR'S CUT; NEW AVENGERS (2005) 61-64; DARK AVENGERS 13-16.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is gone, the Avengers have fallen. All that stands in defence of the world are its greatest villains, the Dark Avengers, in this high-octane adventure from the Marvel Untold line Under Norman Osborn’s jurisdiction, the Avengers have been secretly re-formed with a cabal of deadly super villains. This is Osborn’s chance to finally put the Green Goblin behind him and become the Iron Patriot the world needs him to be. But villains aren’t easy to wrangle into the place of heroes – doing damage control for his new line-up constantly puts his empire at risk. When S.H.I.E.L.D. loyalists break into Avengers Tower and steal the secret list of replacements for his team of maniacs, the threat to his reign becomes intolerable. Osborn unleashes the worst of the worst to crush those responsible… It’s hard to be a hero!

A new team of Avengers has assembled but with the Scarlet Witch on the scene leading them to their destiny, and Hank Pym perhaps going a little too far in his tribute to his deceased ex-wife, is there something sinister lurking beneath this heroic undertaking? Featuring the Hulk, Iron Man, Quicksilver, Hercules and more of your classic Avenger favorites! PLUS: The Unspoken speaks - and a world trembles! The Inhumans recently escaped to the stars to fight the War of Kings, leaving behind a secret that will consume the world in terror. Find out the true nature of this dark, terrible secret.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is gone, the Avengers have fallen. All that stands in defence of the world are its greatest villains, the Dark Avengers, in this high-octane adventure from the Marvel Untold line Under Norman Osborn’s jurisdiction, the Avengers have been secretly re-formed with a cabal of deadly super villains. This is Osborn’s chance to finally put the Green Goblin behind him and become the Iron Patriot the world needs him to be. But villains aren’t easy to wrangle into the place of heroes – doing damage control for his new line-up constantly puts his empire at risk. When S.H.I.E.L.D. loyalists break into Avengers Tower and steal the secret list of replacements for his team of maniacs, the threat to his reign becomes intolerable. Osborn unleashes the worst of the worst to crush those responsible… It’s hard to be a hero!

Dark Avengers 175-183

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values—honor, loyalty, love—reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.