Source material
What are incursions?
What are incursions in Marvel comics? The universe-colliding event from Jonathan Hickman's Avengers - and why it's the engine behind Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars.
The word Doomsday has to mean something - and the most likely answer comes from a comics concept called the incursion. Understand this, and you understand the engine of the entire two-film climax.
What an incursion is
Introduced in Jonathan Hickman’s New Avengers (2013), an incursion happens when two parallel universes collide at a single shared point - typically Earth meeting Earth. The physics are brutal:
- When two universes touch, both will be destroyed.
- The only way to save your universe is to destroy the other Earth before the collision completes.
- If you refuse, everyone in both universes dies.
It’s a trolley problem the size of creation: murder a world, or lose two.
Why it’s so devastating
The horror of the incursion is moral, not just physical. In the comics, Earth’s smartest heroes (the Illuminati - Reed Richards, Iron Man, Black Panther and others) are forced to weigh genocide against survival. It breaks them, and it breaks their friendships. Some build weapons to destroy other Earths; some can’t bring themselves to do it.
How it ends the multiverse
Incursions aren’t a one-off. They cascade - more and more universes colliding, more Earths dying, until the entire multiverse unravels. That slow-motion apocalypse is what leads directly into Secret Wars (explained here) and the countdown known as Time Runs Out.
Why the films need it
Incursions give the MCU a clean, cinematic doomsday clock:
- A ticking threat that escalates naturally.
- A reason for variants and other universes to crash together - handy for uniting the Avengers, X-Men and FF.
- A path to the multiverse’s collapse and rebuild (will the multiverse collapse).
Bottom line
An incursion is two worlds forced to kill or die. It’s the most likely meaning of Doomsday - the crisis that pushes the saga toward Battleworld and a reset.