The Infinity War Review (Jim Starlin, Ron Lim)

Because story, Magus - the evil manifestation of the evil-sounding but actually good Adam Warlock’s personality - is somehow free and trolling around… trolling for POWAH! And what says more powah than the Infinity Gauntlet? That’s right, it’s another Jim Starlin comic starring Thanos with Infinity in the title, involving a bad guy after the Infinity Gauntlet and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes out to stop him - it’s time for The Infinity Gauntlet 2 aka The Infinity War.

Infinity War is a great movie - the best Avengers movie and one of my favourite MCU films. The Infinity War comic is nowhere near as good - nor does it have anything to do with the movie (bar some very broad similarities in plot).

The book actually starts well. The premise is intriguing with evil doppelgangers of the heroes appearing out of nowhere - ooo, what could this mean?? Classic Ron Lim art looks great - all the heroes look like how they should, and the (many) splash pages are epic. Similarly epic is how Starlin ropes in all the great Marvel villains for this event - not just Thanos but Galactus, Doom, Kang - and a bunch of the rarely-seen Celestials like Eternity, Infinity and The Living Tribunal.

But Starlin’s ambitious scope turns out to be too big and collapses in on itself past the opening. The story becomes hopelessly convoluted really early on, despite the simplistic arc of goodies vs baddies. There’s really nothing to this besides heroes fighting villains until the page count nears its end and the villains inevitably lose. Amidst all of that is just bad writing and plotting involving Doom and Kang trying to do some dumb thing, Galactus doing whatever - essentially doing the supervillain equivalent of spinning their wheels.

Starlin did it better in The Infinity Gauntlet and his rehashed version of it here is, ironically, a pale shadow of that better comic, much like the doppelgangers of the characters. Magus just isn’t as great a bad guy as Thanos was in Gauntlet - he may as well have a pencil-thin moustache to twirl and a top hat; that’s how hammy his scenes were.

Honestly, the only reason I read this was to read all the characters I see all the time when I play Marvel Snap, the free to play mobile card battle game which is by far the best thing with the Marvel brand on it from the last five years.

And that’s really my recommendation after reading The Infinity War: check out Marvel Snap instead! Or read The Infinity Gauntlet if you haven’t already - besides that and this book’s title, Jim Starlin didn’t write much else that’s nearly as essential or impactful to the Marvel Universe or pop culture.