From what I've read online, Marvel's big 2012 will be THE AVENGERS vs THE X-MEN. From what I can gather, AVENGERS: X-SANCTION #1 could very well be the start of the whole thing.
**SPOILERS** DON'T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK.
Ok. Your funeral.
There's not much to tell really. The Avengers are interrupted fighting what appears to be the Lethal Legion, when suddenly FALCON is shot out of the sky by assailant unknown. Captain America breaks off from the team and follows Redwing to a remote warehouse where he discovers CABLE (yes, NATHAN SUMMERS...thought dead after the X-Events of the last year) who starts right in on Cap and informs him that in order for the future to live, the Avengers must die. Apparantly Cable's daughter "Hope" doesn't make it to see the future and thus, the future is in ruins. And that's basically the jist of it.
I don't know if I've become numb to Jeph Loeb's somewhat rudimentary storytelling as of late or if Ed McGuinness just isn't doing it for me anymore, but this issue felt like it had more eye candy than substance. Don't get me wrong. I LIKE seeing ANY X-CHARACTERS interact with the mainstream Marvel Universe, but this feels like a story we've already read. In fact, it feels very much like a story we've already read by this very creative team...in the first 6 issues of DC's SUPERMAN/BATMAN. Didn't an alternate version of Superman come back in time to kill his younger self in issue #1 of that series? Then in the next few issues, the main characters run a gauntlet of various characters to see resolution? Loeb has truly become an ARC writer. Perhaps at the end of this series, we'll see Apocalypse rising from the sewers proclaiming there's a Crisis on the horizon, too. But I digress.
Again, this wasn't a terrible book. It just seemed dull and disinteresting. It doesn't help that RED HULK has topped my list for Most Useless Character of 2011...a character also courtesy of your friendly-neighborhood Loebman, so I REALLY am gonna have to pick up issue #3 *snorts*. That's sarcasm.
Now that's LOTS of variant covers to this issue, but the COOLEST one is the ComicCollectorLive.com official variant, limited to only 500 copies and available on CCL for the bargain price of only $5.00 until the end of the year! Just head on over to CCL, hit the library search and type AVENGERS X-SANCTION in the search box. It's a mutant-instigated massacre, Marvel style.