As Marvel Comics’ Mightiest Heroes, the Avengers are the premiere team for the defense of the Marvel Universe. Both alone and together, the Avengers have saved the world countless times and are often considered the gold-standard for their fellow heroes. Unfortunately, they haven’t always been the best heroes to the X-Men, and one dark timeline highlights just how dangerous their negligence could end up being.
One more than one occasion, the Avengers have been confronted over mistakes they’ve made with the X-Men. The two teams have even come to blows during more than one conflict. And during Marvel Comics’ Age of X event by Mike Carrey, Jim McCan, and more, fans get a terrifying glimpse of an alternate version of the Avengers – one that’s comprised almost totally of murderous analogues of Marvel’s greatest champions.
The titular timeline of the Age of X event is ultimately an alteration of the main Marvel timeline caused by one of Legion’s alternate personalities disrupting history yet again. Painting the X-Men as the ultimate endangers species standing strong in the monumental Fortress X, the remaining mutants are set upon by all sorts of humans, including this timeline’s Avengers. Age of X: Universe #1 by Jim McCann, Si Spurrier, and Khoi Pham introduces these Avengers, and they are far from what fans may recognize. Iron Man is essentially a high-tech zombie that calls himself “Steel Corpse” while Jessica Drew is little more than a cold-blooded assassin and Bruce Banner’s Hulk is a bloodthirsty killer with a mad-on for mutants.
Only Captain America and the Invisible Woman bear some resemblance to their usual morality, and even then, Steve Rogers gets more than a little caught up battling the “Mutant Problem” before he can be reigned in by Sue. Ultimately, these two heroes manage to convince Tony and Jessica of the error of their ways, giving their lives in battle against their Hulk to defend what’s left of the mutants at the cost of their own lives. Although they ultimately die doing the right thing, their waiting until the last minute to help the X-Men and their fellow mutants is standard for the Avengers’ track record.
While the dark history of this version of Earth’s Mightiest pertains solely to this timeline, the fact that this is how Legion’s mind framed the Avengers in a personalized timeline says a lot about their general perception in the mutant community as well as the dark potential they have in the mainstream Marvel timeline. After all, time and again, the Avengers have been accused of doing far too little for the Marvel Universe and for mutants and the X-Men in particular. It’s not too far a stretch for one of the Marvel Universe’s most government-associated super teams to go along with said government’s mutant-hating initiatives in an alternate timeline – especially when the Avengers have done so little to dissuade or derail the vast majority of anti-mutant policies that have taken root within the main continuity of Marvel Comics lore.
Whether or not the Avengers are outward enemies of the mutants, it’s also well established that they aren’t exactly the best friend to each other, let alone the X-Men. Likewise, anti-mutant agenda aside, this is far from the first alternate-universe version of the Avengers that fans have seen become highly militarized. And if the circumstance ever right on Earth-616, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility for a sizable portion of Earth’s Mightiest to side with those in power just as they did during their initial Civil War.
The Avengers are Marvel’s greatest superheroes, but the Age of X demonstrates the danger they could pose to the X-Men if things went wrong. While they’ve saved the world on more than one occasion, they haven’t always saved its mutants, and it’s not impossible to imagine Earth’s Mightiest turning on Marvel’s Merry Mutants once again – especially with the secrets of Krakoan resurrection alienating the mutants even further. Age of X may have been an imaginary timeline, but it made one thing clear – Marvel Comics' Avengers have a lot of work to do to build trust with the X-Men.