Thanos Rising #4

Thanos Rising was a 2013 Marvel NOW! five-issue title that acted as a prequel for both the original Thanos appearance in Jim Starlin's super-historic recreation of Captain Marvel from the Watergate-era 1970s as well as the recent Infinity blockbuster crossover event.

In a nutshell, Jason Aaron, Thanos Rising's writer, crafts a tale of a young, bloodthirsty sociopath, Thanos, who, after vivisecting his mother, leaves his home world of Titan and roams the cosmos as a space pirate, fucking, propagating offspring, accumulating power. At a certain point along the way, Thanos returns to Titan and the young woman who was instrumental in unleashing the murderer in him when they were both school children. She promises Thanos her love if he will seek out each child he has sired across the galaxy and slaughter it (hence, the tie-in with Infinity, which has Thanos returning to Earth to slay his last remaining son, Thane).

The six scans below are from Thanos Rising #4. The pencils are by rising star Simone Bianchi; the inks and inkwash, by Simone Bianchi and Riccardo Pieruccini; the colors, Ive Svorcina. The art is beautiful. The beguiling young lady Thanos is obsessed with reveals herself to be Death itself. This reprises the original "reveal" from the first substantial Thanos narrative, Captain Marvel #26-#33. Also, Aaron taps themes he explores in the Gorr arc of Thor: God of Thunder, namely, death, like religion and all the appurtenances of deity creation, is a projection of the self. Aaron has a lot in common with the German idealists.

Infinity #6

Recently another blockbuster Marvel Comics crossover event came to an end. Infinity was a sprawling (spanning a dozen different titles) and ambitious (I think too much so) saga of inter-galactic creation, destruction and warfare between superheroes and supervillains. Penned principally by Jonathan Hickman, it factored in Thanos, the mad Titan butcher, in a way that never seemed organic to the main narrative (which was interesting and had do do with the Builders, the primary originators of the universe).

Hickman introduces new characters, both heroes and villains, along the way; Thane, son of Thanos, for instance, whose special powers are unleashed with the detonation of a Terrigen Bomb by Black Bolt and who will likely figure in the present Marvel blockbuster crossover event, Inhumanity. You see, one crossover event gives way to another.

The point of these crossover events is to make money for the parent corporation. The reader is sent on a spending spree in a largely vain attempt to keep abreast of the narrative, scattered as it is over many different comic books. A feeling of immersion in or presence with the story is almost never achieved. The feeling is rather always one of deferral or difference. But in this I guess you could say, in true Derridean fashion, that Marvel is treating its readers to the essence of writing.

Below are ten scans from Infinity #6 covering the climactic final battle between the Avengers -- Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Thor -- and Thanos. But it is Thanos' son Thane that ends up conquering the evil Titan, freezing him in a cube of "living death" that conjures up images of Thanos' demise in his original appearance in  the Captain Marvel of the Watergate-era 1970s. Jim Cheung is the penciler.