Avengers: Armageddon #1 Review

ZeeJune 10, 2026

Chip Zdarsky, Valerio Schiti, and co.’s Captain America is a book that I feel very complicated about. Back when I reviewed issue #1, I found myself cautiously optimistic, especially as someone who thinks Captain America is a character that just does not work anymore, especially not today. The more that the book progressed, the firmer I felt in that thought. Interesting questions were being asked, but interesting answers or discussions didn’t come out of it, rather playing more of the same answers that have essentially plagued Captain America for a long time. At times, it felt like there might be something more there, but there never was.

In the lead up to Avengers: Armageddon, we got Wolverine: Weapons of Armageddon, by Zdarsky and Luca Maresca, which left me a little hollow at the end of it all for two reasons, one of which was that it was 4 issues of purely set up, but also for another reason that also harmed Captain America for me:

The David Colton problem.

For context: David Colton is essentially “The Captain America of 9/11”. The essential framing of this character is that the horrors of participating in the Iraq invasion broke him, and it’s something he feels guilty about. The guilt making him want to take amends (such as by taking out scientists and labs still doing super soldier experiments) is probably a fine motivation for most people, but for the same reasons Captain America doesn’t work for me anymore:, Colton as a character also doesn’t work for me because it essentially perpetuates the same idea: that there are some evils that you can transform into ‘good’ eventually, that operates specifically from the perspective of America itself.

But even with all that, I was still excited for Avengers: Armageddon. For one, the past three paragraphs might frame this differently, but I do quite like Chip Zdarsky as a comics creator. For two, this new ‘era’ of Marvel (we all saw that (new) Avengers lineup) is appealing to my nostalgia as someone who grew up on the Bendis era. For three, it was nice to have a Marvel event flow from the last one (even though I didn’t particularly like One World Under Doom) and give it some connective tissue.

This makes it sound like I have Stockholm syndrome with Marvel. I digress.

Avengers: Armageddon #1 is effectively a setup issue. To its credit, everything here gives you what you need to know if you’re not reading Captain America or Wolverine: Weapons of Armageddon, so anyone can jump on. As someone who grows bored with a whole issue of setup before the real deal, I quite liked how they placed the pieces on the board for what’s to come. There’s some Minority Report in here in the same way there was in Bendis/Marquez’s Civil War II, mixed with the whole “what does it look like when we try to take a real-world angle to superheroes” present in Millar/Hitch’s Ultimates and Millar/McNiven’s Civil War. But of course, as of this issue, they are still only ideas, and I patiently await seeing how they manifest in the rest of this event.

Delio Diaz & Frank Alpizar are a powerhouse, paired with Jesus Aburtov on colors. Lots of great pages here with a good discipline on the panel-by-panel pacing of it all. Makes all the catch-up the book is trying to do never feel slow, which is nice, and at the same time good enough for me to not be bothered by the fact that the issue ends with something about to happen for the first time. And Cory Petit on letters is a treat as always.

I remain cautiously optimistic about Avengers: Armageddon. I hope this event excites me about the future of the Marvel Universe and carries the momentum from my excitement about the new Avengers lineup.