That's just Spencer leeching off Hickman gain. AW has nothing to do with anything Hickman's writing.

Except Hickman co-wrote it Avengers World. Pretty sure he laid out the groundwork for the arc and Spencer wrote the scripts. He did that for two issues of the main Avengers series as well. Nothing new there. They are clearly friends based on their twitter pages and co-write well together. I bet Spencer knows everything about Secret War and probably has for some time.

I'm not just raining on your parade I'm offering you some discussion that goes beyond "oh yeah nice catch" and a chance to really explore your idea in full.

I get that, but you're also not allowing yourself to imagine what it's like to have a story that gestates that long. I mean, Brevoort essentially said that no matter what, the story was gonna happen anyways. I'm sure if he could have, this would have sprang out of his Ultimate work since I know he was keen on building that world all his own but was forced off the book too low sales. It probably would've been smaller in scale, just dealing with Ultimate and 616 universes, but like Brevoort said, it was probably still gonna be dealing with the planet colliding aspect. When the Ultimates didn't pan out he was offered a higher profile book with a bigger impact on the Marvel U.

My point being that no matter what happened, this book was gonna find a way to happen which just leads me to believe this is something Hickman has been working towards for a while, maybe since he was a small kid enjoying his first Crisis event. Who knows?

I personally liked this connection with it being father and son. It's more than just the matching captions. It's the legacy implied by it. Sure that's a thematic one for sure, but it could also allude to a connection with Howard Stark. I like to keep my eyes open for stuff like that so I can try and catch tricky foreshadowing.

As for joining in on the discussion; In regards to The Human Machine, in the back of one of the SHIELD issues there are two diagrams. One is labeled as the Foetus of God and depicts a variant Celestial that was born from Earths sun. Opposite of that diagram was one for something called "The Human Machine". This is later revealed to be a machine powered and piloted by 7 individuals. This machine was used to travel the hero team, consisting of Nathanial Richards, Howard Stark, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Tesla, Nostradamus, and The Star Child to the end of time where they plan to engage in a final battle with the Celestial and Isaac Newton (Typing that felt weird...)

Once there the forever man began setting up the Human Machine for it's final unknown purpose and then the series went on indefinite hiatus. We still don't know what the machine does.

What I found really interesting about the designs of this machine is that it shares a resemblance to the Avengers Machine layout that Steve and Tony use to form the bigger Avengers team.

I could just be seeing jesus toast, but it definitely looks similar, particualrily with the center part of the Avengers Machine layout and the Foetus of God layout. I'm open to some opinions on this matter.