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The Internet Time Travel Database

Avengers Annual #2

. . . and Time, the Rushing River . . .

by Roy Thomas, Don Heck, and Werner Roth
After the Scarlet Centurion waylays the Avengers on their way back from the 1940s, they find themselves in an alternative 1968 where the five original Avengers stayed together under the thumb of the Scarlet Centurion.

The story includes flashbacks and previously unknown explanations of the team’s previous trip to the ’40s in Avengers #56, and at the end of the story, Goliath uses Dr. Doom’s Time Platform to banish the Scarlet Centurion back to his time—and we think this is the only time travel that actually appears in the story (apart from the flashbacks). We don’t know what happens to the alternative 1968 (now known as Earth-689, but the traveling Avengers return to the universe that we all knew and loved in the 1960s (a.k.a. Earth-616), with their memory of the whole affair wiped by the Watcher.

— Michael Main
Time is like a river! Dam it up at any one point . . . and it has no choice but to flow elsewhere . . . along other, easier routes!
DEBUT
“. . . And Time, the Rushing River . . .,” in The Avengers Annual 2 (Marvel Comics, September 1968).
VARIANTS
1 English variant
TAGS(SPOILERS!)
Time Periods Timeline Models
  • Branching Timelines: We don’t know whether all of the Marvel Earths are branching timelines, but Earth-689 appears to have been intentionally created as a branch by the Scarlet Centurion.
Time Travel Methods Themes
  • Cannot Return to Time Where You Already Exist: Cap does exist twice in the 1940s, but Black Panther says, “Time is like a river! Dam it up at any one point . . . and it has no choice but to flow elsewhere . . . along other, easier routes!” And Hawkeye says, “When we became solid [back in the ’40s], Cap threw the laws of time all haywire . . . by existin’ in two places at once!”
  • Memory Wipes: The Watcher is the wiper.
  • Self-Visitation: Giant Man and the Wasp
Fictional Tags Groupings
TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY (SPOILERS!)
  1. From Doom’s Earth-689 castle, 1968 ⋙ to the Scarlet Centurion’s (original?) future. Note: We believe that this time travel at the end of the story is the only time travel that’s not flashback or implied.