Avengers Academy #60 - "Untold"

[warning: please read issue #60 before reading what follows - Marvel has informed me that if you're so moved, emails to mheroes@marvel.com are welcome to them and appreciated by me - if nothing else I'd like if our creative team got their deserved flowers.]

And so we come to the end.

It has I confess come upon us sooner than we thought and more sudden than we hoped – but that, I suppose, is the nature of all life’s endings.

Thank you to all my tremendous collaborators on this project for all your genius, enthusiasm, and generosity: our regular artists Carola Borelli, Bailie Rosenlund, and Pablo Collar; our colorists KJ Diaz and Ruth Redmond; our letterists Ariana Maher and Joe Caramagna; as well as our numerous and astonishing guest talents – who all brought their own vibrancy, weirdness, and life to this book. Thanks too to our shepherding editors, Lindsey Cohick, Sidney Stubbs, Wil Moss, and founding editor and first risktaker Sarah Brunstad – all of whom worked and fought with all their might and joy for this project, helping to unfold it from a small corner of the Marvel universe to become a relentless and undeniable (kid?) juggernaut. Time and again this book redefined what could happen, how it could look and read, and above all who could be in a superhero comic, and I could not be prouder. Working with each of you to tell these stories, to create fresh characters and examine, twist, and find the depths so many others, was the pleasure and honour of a lifetime.

And, with great admiration and profoundest appreciation, thank you to the Avengers Academy community: the readers and re-readers, the midnight-drop enthusiasts, the bingers, the theorists, the fan-artists, the fic writers, the cosplayers, the wiki-editors, the podcasters, the scholars, and the reviewers. You made us a runaway hit to the end, and week after week your joy and enthusiasm and (charming) anxiety and affection fueled us and filled us. It was the adventure of a lifetime. I wish I could stay at the Academy forever.

Comics will mend your heart, if you let them. When I was a scared, lonely, closeted kid, the Marvel universe’s heroes were there for me when very little else was. That is a debt I can never pay back, but one I’ve tried with great travail to pay forward. I want to believe we have afforded a little of that same refuge to those who sought it. I hope you saw yourself; please know you were seen. Til we all meet again (and may it be soon), may you find each other. May you find yourself. Remember that there’s always time – but waste no time. And what is broken is still beautiful.

Above all, remember love. It is all that lasts.

Anthony Oliveira

@meakoopa

Avengers Academy: Marvel's Voices Infinity Comic (Marvel Unlimited App)