As of the end of the latest issue of Marvel's "Avengers Vs. X-Men," Earth's Mightiest Heroes find themselves with not one Phoenix-powered threat on their hands, but five.
Dubbed the Phoenix Five, Cyclops, Emma Frost, Namor, Colossus and Magik have all taken control of a portion of the destructive force that has been making its way towards Earth for the past several months, thanks to Iron Man's plan to stop the Phoenix Force causing it to split instead.
"The mutants are now the Earth's mightiest heroes, capable of doing all this cosmic-scale, epic (stuff). And the Avengers are scrambling to keep up and keep things in perspective," the issue's writer Matt Fraction told USA Today. "They're wildly evolving the world overnight. They're doing the work of a Phoenix, only instead of one there's five and each one has their own personality and thoughts, and things are great at first. But they're the X-Men. They're going to stop getting along at some point, and batten down the hatches."
"There's a specific reason it resonates that it would be these five," Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso added. "It has to do with what our master plan for these characters has been for some time."
As CBR readers know, this is merely one of several "game-changers" promised by Marvel to take place over the course of the AvX epic. Just last month, the publisher was teasing "No More Avengers" as of next month's "AvX" #6, and, as Tom Brevoort told USA Today, another event is set to occur at the end of Act 2 "that will clearly test both Avengers and X-Men alike as we get down to the nub of where this whole thing has been going all along."
