Infinity Wars #1 from Marvel, written by Gerry Duggan, with art by Mike Deodato Jr. hit this week and it looks to be a wild ride. Capitalizing on Avengers: Infinity War hitting the stream and Blu-ray, this is Marvel marketing doing its job. We’ll get to that later though.
Let’s start out by saying that the art is gorgeous and the story is one that will reel the reader in from the get-go. The set up is that the Infinity Watch (those heroes who guard the stones) must decide whether to take them all off Earth or not. A certain “villain” has one, but don’t ask me his history because at this point I couldn’t tell you. This was the first time I’ve seen this crime boss before.
Anyway, the heroes are trying to convince him to go into space with the stone he has, so they can keep them all hidden from Thanos. That’s when the big reveal, not so big reveal (it was already made public) comes out that Thanos has been killed (decapitated to be precise), and that a new player is coming for the stones. The reveal of that new player happens in the ending pages and a shocking moment takes place that will leave Guardians of the Galaxy fans reeling.
I have to wonder though, with all of the trouble the infinity stones have caused in several events now, wouldn’t it just be easier to destroy them? If they come back, then destroy them again. When I think of the story aspects of it, while it looks interesting, we are still talking about a story involving the same old infinity stones and we’ve done this before. Sure this is a sequel but what happens when it is announced that Alf is coming back with a sequel TV show? Everyone rolls their eyes because we want something new. I do hope that Marvel finds a final resolution for the infinity stones and moves onto something new after this because it’s enough already.
As far as marketing this, there is no better time than now, when the Infinity War movie is as hot as ever. However, this book comes at a premium of $5.99 for 38 pages. The next 5 issues in this series are $4.99 and seem to be hitting 35 pages. Then you have the tie-ins to this series which hit several independent characters in a one-off Infinity War book or series of 1 to 3 books each.
Those prices are going to add up quick for any collector who is already getting a regular pull list. This, of course, leads to the whole issue of the market being saturated, and I do think handling an event like this is one of the big reasons that it occurs. For myself, I’m still debating whether I’ll pick the rest of this series up monthly or just wait for the 6 month lag on Marvel Unlimited for them to be released there. This event doesn’t really touch the Spiderverse books so I’m pretty safe in that regard as those are the main Marvel books on my subscription list.
Wrap Up
Is this event worth the entry fee? That’s going to be an individual answer based on your collecting. For those who want to get into comics and enjoyed the movies then I’d say, go for it. The story and the art is looking like they will make a great event, and with luck, people buying in will find characters they gravitate to and then hopefully they will start collecting the ongoing series that those characters are in. For the current collectors that already have a maxed out pull list to money ratio, I’d say that it isn’t a necessity if you have a Marvel Unlimited subscription to read it later and certainly not worth dropping books you are already enjoying to follow along.
