Avengers Annual #1 pits the full team against Agatha Harkness, and Tony Stark being annoyed about magic is giving me life

(Image credit: Marvel Comics)

Marvel's Contest of Chaos is coming to an end with The Avengers Annual #1 next week, and we've got a look at the first four pages of the climactic clash between Earth's Mightiest Heroes and Agatha Harkness's cadre of brainwashed superheroes.

If you're not up to speed with Contest of Chaos, it started back in June with Scarlet Witch Annual #1, which saw a returning Agatha Harkness stirring up a heap of trouble for the whole Marvel universe. In the spirit of the classic Contest of Champions miniseries, that trouble takes the form of a whole lot of fights between various Marvel heroes.

The story concludes in The Avengers Annual #1, as the titular hero team tracks Agatha down to the only place that makes sense: the Bermuda Triangle. The preview pages below - fully inked, colored, and lettered - offer the setup for the stakes in this final confrontation. The highlight for me is watching Tony Stark be forced to deal with all this magical nonsense, with lines like "I trust my gadgets far more than your glowing red fingers, Wanda." Which, like, honestly fair.

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Taking place over a series of annual specials for various series over the past few months, writer Stephanie Phillips has taken the lead for most of the Contest of Chaos story arc, and has penned the full script for this finale. Interior art is by Alberto Foche, with the cover handled by Paco Medina.

Avengers Annual #1 goes on sale September 27.

Who is Agatha Harkness? You can follow that link for a breakdown of the character's comic book history.

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.