‘Avengers Dismember’: Wolverine, Conan join the ‘Savage Avengers’

A new “unsanctioned” group of Avengers will slice and dice their way into comics in May, as Marvel has announced Savage Avengers by the creative team of Gerry Duggan and Mike Deodato Jr.

The Savage Avengers’ members will include Conan, Wolverine, Venom, Elektra, Brother Voodoo and Punisher.

“It has to be something that visually makes sense to you, and I think it does,” Duggan, who is also writing Savage Sword of Conan for Marvel, told Entertainment Weekly. “Mike Deodato Jr. is illustrating this book in both worlds. We envisioned a threat, a magical green zone where the evil wizards of Conan’s world are trading spells with the Hand in Japan. Conan is on a very Conan-like mission; he’s heard a tale of an amulet so he’s chasing it, and the evil magic sorcerers are doing something that would be a Marvel Avengers problem. It feels like we have found some very fertile ground that is a Venn diagram between those two worlds.”

“Savage Avengers is just what it says on the label—it’s all of the biggest badasses of the Marvel Universe brought together uneasily in one explosive series—and with Conan as a wild card,” Executive Editor Tom Brevoort explains. “It’s big, it’s brash, it’s explosive, it never slows down—the only scenes in Savage Avengers that involve a table is when somebody is being thrown through one.”

This won’t be the first time Conan encounters heroes from the Marvel universe — he’s supposed to show up in Avengers: Long Road Home, which kicked off this week — but it is the first time he’s become a member of an Avengers team, even an unsanctioned one.

“The Marvel heroes have not quite seen the likes of Conan before, but when you turn it around and look at Conan viewing this, he’s very skeptical of a lot of it because he’s so magic-averse,” Duggan said. “His interpretation of the Venom symbiote, when he first sees it, is that it must be an evil genie. There’s real fun to be had there. At one point Conan believes that Logan hails from somewhere called Pabst, and that’s a well-earned miscommunication. That’s where a lot of fun comes from. Conan is a fish out of water, but everyone will come to respect the skills they’re all bringing to the fight.”