The Avengers Never Paid for their Greatest Crime

The Avengers are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the most valiant protectors that the planet has to offer, but there is one dark sin hiding in their past. During the first Kree/Shi’ar War, one team of Avengers broke their most sacred rule and committed cold-blood murder on an intergalactic scale.

Operation: Galactic Storm is a 1992 crossover that puts the Avengers in the middle of a bloody war between two great galactic empires, the Kree and the Shi’ar. Earth becomes involved because its space is used as a midway point for hyperspace travel by both factions, which has the side-effect of destabilizing the Sun to potentially disastrous outcomes. The Avengers divide into three teams: one goes to the Kree Empire, one to the Shi’ar, and one remains on Earth. Their initial attempts to stop the war, however, seem to be futile, as the Shi’ar acquire the Nega-Bands, a powerful Kree weapon used in the past by the hero Captain Marvel, and retrofit them to build a Nega-Bomb, a weapon of mass destruction of unthinkable power.

Meanwhile, political turmoil is upsetting the Kree Empire. The Supreme Intelligence, a living supercomputer created by the union of the greatest minds in Kree history, manipulates the Shi’ar Deathbrid to kill the current Kree leaders and reassumes control of the Empire. The Avengers do their best to stop the deployment of the Nega-Bomb, but their efforts are foiled by the interference of the Skrulls, who are covertly manipulating the war in order to get rid of their hated enemies, the Kree. Shi’ar Empress Lilandra is persuaded to stop the attack, but due to the Skrulls’ interference the Nega-Bomb is triggered despite the heroic attempt of the Avengers Vision and Wonder Man to stop it. The resulting explosion is more than cataclysmic: 98 percent of the Kree are annihilated. Billions of people die in a matter of instants as entire planets are devastated. The Avengers are miraculously spared, but for many of them, this is the worst, most terrible failure of their lives, made even worse by the revelation that everything that transpired was the Supreme Intelligence’s plan. The Kree leader felt that his people had become stagnant, and wanted to “kickstart” their evolution by killing the majority of the species, leaving only the strongest to survive and adapt.

After hearing this, the Avengers are faced with a moral dilemma in Avengers #347 – by Bob Harras, Steve Epting, Tom Palmer, and Gina Going. Some of them want to punish the Supreme Intelligence for causing a genocide on such a scale. Others, including Captain America, believe that killing a sentient being is a line that should never be crossed. The first group is undeterred and stays faithful to the name of “Avengers.” Thor, Hercules, Sersi, Vision, Black Knight, Iron Man, and Wonder Man go hunting for the Supreme Intelligence, on the grounds that it is not a sentient being but a soulless machine. After a short battle, the Black Knight kills the Supreme Intelligence, despite finding out that the creature is both organic and cybernetic (thus technically “alive”). The Avengers (at least some of them) are murderers, who acted as judge, jury, and executioner.

To make things worse, the Supreme Intelligence (which managed to secretly survive this ordeal) is not just a living creature. At the time it was also the rightful ruler of a recognized political entity. The Avengers committed political murder on an intergalactic scale, and this action was supposed to “haunt them for a long time,” but this proved to not be the case. The internal strife caused by the split over the decision to kill the Supreme Intelligence was quickly overcome. The Avengers‘ actions during the first Kree/Shi’ar War were quickly forgotten, meaning that Earth’s Mightiest Heroes never paid for their greatest crime.

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