Warhammer 40,000: Marneus Calgar Review (Kieron Gillen, Jacen Burrows)

Marvel acquires yet another licence: Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000, and I HAD to check this one out because it was pushing my nostalgia buttons hard - I was a huge fan of all things GW when I was a teen. I spent wayyyy too much money on the severely overpriced tiny models and spent hours, sometimes entire weekends, painting them and even playing the actual games with them on occasion. Also Kieron Gillen sometimes writes a good comic and Jacen Burrows’ art is always good. So was Marneus Calgar good? Unfortunately not.

To be fair to Gillen, Warhammer 40k (and every GW franchise) is a board game about war: two or more armies battle and that’s it. Fight fight fight - it’s like the Itchy & Scratchy Show! Whenever anyone tries to adapt a game into a proper story, the results are always bad: from board games like Battleship or Clue, to video games like Plants vs Zombies, Tomb Raider, and so on - mostly because you don’t need a story to play them as the appeal lies elsewhere.

“In this grim darkness of the far future, there is only war” reads the tagline - too right! In the present, Marneus, head of the Ultramarines, fights heretics; in the past (because b-story), kid Marneus fights heretics. Hmm. Quite limited, isn’t it? And he’s unstoppable too - ol’ Marneus is a killing machine, literally! Where’s the excitement supposed to come from when he effortlessly mows down everything in his way?

I would’ve liked to have seen more of the other types of armies that make up the Warhammer 40k universe: the Tyranids, the Eldar, the Orcs, even some of the different marine factions (I always thought the Ultramarines were a bland bunch - go Dark Angels!). Some Chaos Marines show up but it was still a poor showing for what could’ve been.

Gillen’s story is just plain boring. The training that goes into becoming an Ultramarine was uninteresting and the characters were so unimpressive that when a bad guy shows up at the end, I wasn’t sure if he was significant to Marneus’ past or not. It’s unengaging, one-note, dreary sci-fi from start to finish.

Still, Jacen Burrows’ art is fantabulous. Calgar and the Ultramarines look damn cool, and the action is beautifully detailed and coloured so well. It was nice to see so much familiar stuff from my yoof (chainswords!) and the James Stokoe covers were a welcome surprise too.

An inauspicious start to Marvel’s Warhammer line then, unfortunately. Next is something called The Black Altar that I can only hope isn’t also being written by Gillen and features a wider selection of characters from the 40k universe, but we’ll see. It’s a feast for the eyes but don’t expect to be gripped reading the snore-y of Warhammer 40,000: Marneus Calgar.