Marvel's current event, Infinity, has the Avengers deep in space fighting the Builders - who seem to be the original architects of the universe - while the mad Titan, Thanos, attacks a seemingly defenceless Earth. There's a lot more to this event as it appears to involve the fall-out from Age of Utron, Uncanny Avengers and New Avengers. For a lot of casual readers Infinity is too rich, too complex and involves far too many characters. It requires a good deal of concentration and - like many of Hickman's titles - the payoff may be a little time coming. It has an incredibly fast pace and draws on long-running cosmic history that goes right back to the early 1970s.

It's not the first time that Marvel has involved its universe in an all-out cosmic war. Perhaps the first one was the Kree-Skrull War in the pages of The Avengers in 1971-2. In the 1990s the various Infinity  conflicts involving Thanos and Adam Warlock plunged regular Marvel heroes into vast intergalactic events.

The big question for me, someone who wasn't reading Marvel at that time, is whether the 2006 Annihilation storyline and its 2007 sequel are connected to what's currently happening in the Marvel Universe. Over the next few weeks I'm going to discuss the various titles that constituted Annihilation and ask the question: does it stand up today as a decent comic series worth reading?