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The mention of Avengers: Disassembled in the announcement of 2026 Marvel Comics storyline Armageddon is something that might worry fans of certain superheroes, given the death toll of that earlier 2004 storyline. Turns out that killing off so many heroes — and so many high-profile Marvel characters, at that — wasn’t necessarily writer Brian Michael Bendis’s original plan.

For those who weren’t reading comics in 2004, Avengers: Disassembled was a four-part storyline in which the Avengers have what Bendis described as “the worst day in Avengers’ history” — a day that results in the destruction of longtime HQ Avengers Mansion, the deaths of members Jack of Hearts, Ant Man, The Vision, and Hawkeye, and the discovery that the Scarlet Witch’s mental instability led to her making all of this happen (albeit unknowingly). The storyline ends with the team disbanding.

Don’t worry; a new Avengers formed a couple of months later, in a comic book series sensibly titled The New Avengers. In fact, The New Avengers had been the point all along, with Avengers: Disassembled created as a bridge between the Avengers of old and the new all-star team that included Spider-Man, Wolverine, and other best-selling characters intended to raise the profile of the team. The storyline was pulled together quickly, and intended to have a big impact to get fans’ attention — but even the writer of the comic was surprised how far Marvel was willing to go to make that happen.

“I was sitting there cooking my moments and instead of pitching a bunch of deaths, I go, ‘Can I have a list [of characters I can kill]?’ And they came back to me with a list that shocked the shit out of me. I would never have asked for The Vision. Hawkeye shocked me,” Bendis revealed in SKTCHD’s 2024 oral history of Avengers: Disassembled. “These were not asks. They were offers.”

“There wasn’t any debate over [killing] Ant-Man or Jack of Hearts any of those guys for the most part. Even The Vision. They’re not going to be in the new book. They have to go somewhere,” added editor Tom Brevoort. “So, the place that they’re going is potter’s field, and that means it’s explosive. Not to be gauche about it, but obviously death in comics sells. People turn up when superheroes go belly up. And so, the idea that they kill off a bunch of these characters was exciting.”

As a way of grabbing attention, it worked; Disassembled was the start of a significant sales renaissance for the Avengers as a franchise, catapulting the team back into the collective attention of fandom in a way it hadn’t been in decades. All of which should make fans of current day Marvel superheroes a little bit nervous — especially given that there’s now a Macguffin in the Marvel Universe to create new versions of old heroes pretty easily…

Armageddon starts June 2026.

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