It's saying something, I think, when the opening page of a comic is the god Apollo flying his horse-drawn chariot down a Manhattan street in the middle of the day. We look at the mythic times recounted in the stories of early civilizations as something called the Age of Miracles, an epithet that encompasses not only the Classical past, but also the ancient Biblical past as recounted in the Judaic and Christian testaments. That we no longer see things like angels or burning bushes is explained away in that we no longer live in the Age of Miracles. It seems to me, however, that a superhero universe is a way of envisioning what the world would look like in a new age of such wonders, or a continuation of the old one, depending on the history of said universe.
Which is to say that the miraculous can now, in some cases, be explained through science, through extraterrestrial technology, and through genuine spiritual power. And this is not only in superhero universes, really. Our technologies make the miraculous the mundane on a fairly regular basis. That I can talk with someone, in real time, who is thousands of kilometers away from me, is really nothing short of miraculous. We're just jaded, is all.
Captain Marvel is still stranded in space, but she's showing some creative thinking as far as using her powers to find her way home...somehow. Meanwhile, the rest of the Avengers are drawn to the Savage Land by strange forces, only to be confronted by the giant world conqueror Terminus. He's a villain who resurfaces in the early 90s in one of the annual crossover events (in that they take place in the yearly annuals, not that it's a yearly event, though for a while it is that too!), but that's about all I know about this guy. Looking forward to finding out more tomorrow.
To be continued.
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