‘Avengers Epic Collection: The Gathering’ sets some multiversal precedents

A fitting account for the Avengers in the early ’90s: massively uneven, but endlessly interesting.

August 23, 2023

Ten years before the first appearance of Morlun and a whopping 23 years before the events of the first Spider-Verse, another grim hunter stalked the multiverse.

Created by Bob Harras and Steve Epting, Proctor was a mysterious muckety-muck lurking around the edges of early-’90s Avengers, and his story sets some strange precedents for the multiversal malaise through which we are currently struggling. First, he was hunting a very specific Avenger: the Eternal, Sersi. Secondly, he acknowledges these various Sersi with the now-accepted term of “variant”. Finally, he’s just a big ol’ mixed-up variant himself, who brings a crew of variants to do his dirty work.

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You see, on his home Earth (Earth-374), the Black Knight was tied to Sersi by way of a sort of Eternal mindmeld known as Gann Josin. This mindmeld is a bit like forcing a person into soulmate slavery, an Eternal exerting emotional will over their short-term beloveds. In an immortal lifetime, however, an Eternal is bound to get bored; Earth-374 Sersi bounced, leaving Dane supernaturally dumped.

Instead of writing a handful of breakup songs or getting way, way into craft beer, this Dane did the only rational thing: using his Earth’s Watcher as a multiversal vehicle, he set about to kill every Sersi in the multiverse.

The Avengers have a pretty remarkable history of toxic relationships (the Swordsman and the Celestial Madonna, Hank and Jan, Clint Barton and everyone), but the curious case of Dane Whitman and Sersi might very well take the cake; you see, in our world of Earth-616 Sersi and Dane are engaged in (dun-dun-duuuunnnnn) Gann Josin.

This story comes to its close in The Gathering for which it is named, but it’s not the most exceptional story in the book.

By 1993, X-Men books were undergoing an everlasting chain of crossover events – there had been five since the decade started. Bloodties, which kicks off this collection, might be seen as a minor footnote in that legacy. It might more accurately be described as a coda of sorts, wrapping up the events of the monumental Fatal Attractions. In that story, Magneto was cataclysmically mind-wiped by Charles Xavier, and Bloodties is a sort of accounting of Mags’ insufferable little cadre of worshippers, the Acolytes.

Fabian Cortez – best known by X-Men fans as the actual worst – kidnaps Quicksilver and Crystal’s child (and Magneto’s granddaughter), Luna, and hotfoots it over to Genosha to stoke the fires of a race war. None of this sits well with Exodus, who becomes the major force confronting the Avengers and X-Men.

The Gathering is a piecemeal collection of mostly solid parts, featuring a bizarre roster of heavy hitters and absolute duds. The stories swing to the opposite ends of quality, with a handful of tedious fill-ins bookending the collection, which means the whole thing averages out to a medium-quality read. It’s a fitting account for the Avengers in the early ’90s: massively uneven, but endlessly interesting.