It's been a turbulent 6 years for the Marvel U, and now it's time to cool down. What started with Brian Michael Bendis dissassembling the Avengers eventually turned into House of M, Civil War, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign and Seige. As fantastic as some of these stories have been, readers are feeling exhausted and alienated. Anyone who hasn't read Marvel books in the past 5-10 years (see my middle-aged coworker) isn't going to recognize any teams and just dismiss the whole thing as not being the kind of comics they used to read. As someone who has been keeping up with it, even I'm fed up. Time to step back and enjoy some stories.

That's where Heroic Age comes in. Starting May 2010, Marvel has changed some gears to balance out "classic" stories without sacrificing some of the progress they've made. Unfortunately, there will still be multiple Avengers teams: Avengers (traditional heroes), New Avengers (Luke Cage's vigilante team), Secret Avengers (Steve Rogers's black ops team) and Avengers Academy (successor to Avengers Initiative). There will be team crossover and the other Marvel stories will acknowledge it, but hopefully this will mean that things get back to normal, without conspiracies and wars. What I would really like to see is the X-Men line stop having so many events, but that's never going to happen. Basically, if you haven't read X-Men books since before 2005, you're out of luck.

Will Heroic Age save Marvel from a nonsensical self destruction and finally allow new readers back? Here's hoping so, but those inflated issue prices aren't very welcoming. If you can spare $3 a pop, feel free, but you may need to wait until it comes out in trades. If you've got an iPad, however, I strongly recommend you get your books there.

Note: Feeling left out and can't pay to catch up? Go to the Marvel Database and spend your sleepless nights finding out who was really a Skrull.