The Masters of Evil is a team of villains considered to be classic Avengers enemies, but the new version of the team threatens the entire multiverse.
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers from Free Comic Book Day Avengers/Hulk #1, available now from Marvel.
The Avengers have faced many powerful enemies over the years, but among the most deadly is the team of villains who call themselves the Masters of Evil. This group banded together specifically to take down the Avengers, not unlike how the Avengers themselves joined forces to stop a powerful enemy.
The Masters of Evil have undergone various incarnations, changing up their membership many times over the years. In Free Comic Book Day Avengers/Hulk #1 by Jason Aaron, Iban Coello, Brian Reber and VC’s Cory Petit, the newest version of the Masters of Evil debuted with a whole new roster and they are a threat to the very existence of the multiverse.
The story opens on a world called the God Quarry that exists inside a black hole at the heart of the multiverse. Within that world’s Avengers Tower, a mysterious person called Avenger Prime detects a major disturbance that is sending shock waves rippling through the multiverse, threatening the existence of all space-time. Avenger Prime commands a group of Deathloks, undead cyborg soldiers designed to travel through time and between different realities. Each Deathlok is sent to the Earth of a different universe to analyze (and hopefully prevent) whatever it is that’s causing these cosmic disturbances.
One of the Deathloks is sent to Earth-10222, an oceanic world where Atlantis never sank beneath the waves and instead became a powerful global empire. However, even as the Deathlok travels through space-time, he is intercepted. A feral, demonic version of Wolverine tackles him out of the sky, slashing and mauling him and making him crash onto the planet below.
He should be on the watery ocean world of Earth-10222, but instead, the Deathlok lands on a rocky barren desert. The flaming severed skull of a Ghost Rider lands near him, tumbling in the dirt, then explodes, destroying the Deathlok in the blast.
In addition to the feral collared Wolverine, some of the more recognizable members include Doctor Doom, a younger version of Thanos, a Ghost Rider-esque Goblin with a flaming green skull atop a Goblin Glider. a version of Madame Masque with a mystical aura and the Asgardian self-propelled armor called the Destroyer. Most concerningly, one of the villains present appears to be the Black Skull, the Venom symbiote-wielding Red Skull from Marvel’s recent Heroes Reborn event.
This team seems to be responsible for destroying whole universes by tampering with the timeline in some way. While today’s Masters of Evil are most famous for defecting from a villainous mission to become the Thunderbolts, the team looks to reassert the Masters as one of the most fearsome forces in the Marvel Multiverse.
Some of the new team’s members, such as Thanos and Doctor Doom, are among the most powerful villains in the Marvel Universe. If these new Masters of Evil are even more evil variants of the villains, they truly may be among the most dangerous entities in the entire multiverse. And if Wolverine and the other supervillain variants surrounding are half as terrifying as they look, this could easily be the most dangerous incarnation of the team yet.
While Deathlok was able to send a warning about the threat they pose before shutting down, the Avengers will need a lot more than a fading warning to get ready for the most dangerous villains of the Marvel Multiverse.
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