Whoever knows fear burns at the touch of the Man-Thing Avengers!
At least that's how Marvel is adapting Man-Thing's classic catchphrase to introduce the, well, Man-Thing Avengers, a mash-up of members of Jason Aaron's contemporary Avengers team and, as if we couldn't say it enough, the mysterious multiversal swamp creature known as the Man-Thing times four.
The Man-Thing Avengers - who, from the image shown in Marvel's reveal, include Man-Thing-ified versions of Iron Fist, Doctor Strange, Phoenix, and Starbrand - will make their debut in Avengers Forever #5, also written by Avengers main title scribe Aaron. Avengers Forever focuses on a version of the team assembled from across many worlds of Marvel's Multiverse who vary from mission to mission, including plenty of other mash-ups of known Marvel heroes, like Iron Man/Ant-Man combo Iron Ant.
Man-Thing getting in on the title makes total sense, given the strange hero's role as the protector of the swamp known as the Nexus of All Realities, where the various worlds of Marvel's Multiverse touch and come together with the core Marvel 616 reality. Since Avengers Forever has a Multiverse angle built right in, it stands to reason how a Man-Thing/Avengers mash-up team could fit right in.
As for what else is going on in Avengers Forever #5, which is due out April 27, it all ties into the current storyline in which a Doom Variant known as Doom Prime is on a villainous quest to assemble a multiversal Masters of Evil and conquer all his duplicates from other realities.
Marvel has also revealed the issue's variant cover from Lee Garbett, which mashes up Spider-Man and Ant-Man as part of a series of variant covers mashing up Spidey and other Marvel heroes releasing across a variety of April Marvel titles.
Frankly, an all-Man-Thing Avengers is unlikely to join the ranks of the best Avengers line-ups of all time.
