One of Marvel’s Biggest Bads of All Time gets the re-done origin treatment in “Thanos Rising” from the powerhouse creative team of Jason Aaron and Simone Binachi. There’s so much riding on this, though, that does the book rise on its own or sink under the weight?
Lets find out.
Written by Jason Aaron
Illustrated by Simone Bianchi• What comes after “Marvel NOW!”? Whatever it is, it starts HERE.
• The vile face left movie audiences in shock after last summer’s Marvel Studios’ “The Avengers” movie, but who is this eerily disturbing villain?
• Thanos rises as the unrivaled rogue of wretchedness in this gripping tale of tragedy, deceit and destiny. Where did this demi-god of death and destruction come from and…more importantly what does he want?
• The answers come from the incredible creative team of Jason Aaron (Wolverine, X-Men Origins) and Simone Bianchi (Wolverine, Astonishing X-Men) as they take you on journey that will not only change the course of one boy’s life…
…but will soon change the very nature of the Marvel Universe.
There seems to be this fascination as of late with making us understand villains. It’s a largely unnecessary addition to the comic world, because a villain doesn’t really need too much motivation; you understand his existence base on the necessity of good and evil in comic storytelling. Yet it’s an upward swinging trend, having really taken off a few years ago, and now we’ve got books like “Superior Spider-Man” or “Suicide Squad” that don’t try so hard to straddle a moral or ethical line — they’re simply books where the villain leads the charge, and we just have to decide how much we like or dislike a villain based on that.
To that end, “Thanos Rising” seems to be a Marvel version of something like “The Killing Joke,” the famous origin story of the Joker. Taking a character who is evil incarnate and turning back the sands of time, we’re given an insight into what shaped this character to make him so impossibly evil. Marvel has taken all the right steps in making sure this title will be a hit: giving a spotlight to a character who had a scene-stealing role in a record-making film, adding on a writer who can establish great pathos in his more vile characters, giving the book to an illustrator who is great at vivid realizations of dark storytelling and wrapping it all up in a pretty package for you to take home. It’s the sort of book that’s basically an easy hit-maker, one whose success you don’t have to track because it’s guaranteed, and it’s a book that Marvel is hoping will become one of their essential collections one day, as more movies are made and Thanos comes back in a big way for a Marvel event over the summer.
So the odd thing about “Thanos Rising” is, as good as the creative team ostensibly is, the basic entire premise behind the project is slightly dubious. “Thanos Rising” stars a very different kind of Thanos than the one we’re accustomed to as Aaron and Bianchi show us a more graphic retelling of his childhood, previously something just passed over — no mother, an aloof father, no social skills due to his appearance, etc. It’s essentially trying to make you relate to Thanos, because who hasn’t had an instance from their own childhood where they were shunned or left out? But here, it’s weird; humanizing villains, like I said, isn’t a new thing — it’s just a popular one, and one that becomes increasingly popular to as readers crave more violent and twisted stories. Yet taking a bad guy and giving him a relatable face only makes sense if you take a villain who may otherwise be reluctant in their role (something Marvel seems to want to do in their upcoming “Superior Foes of Spider-Man” series), someone who just robs banks or pulls heists — “the little guy,” as it were. By going after a Big Bad, someone who has been the instigating point of cosmic horror, trying to make him likable in a fashion beyond “I like him because he’s such a bad ass villain and stuff” is inherently an uphill battle.
Continued belowMarvel has skirted around this issue before when they published a Red Skull origin mini-series, attempting to give a human face to a Nazi monster, and Thanos is somewhat on a similar note. He may never have been a member of the National Socialist Party, but Thanos is a genocidal monstrosity, the ultimate nihilist villain, a demi-god who will destroy the universe just to impress this chick he has a crush on. Trying to add reason or logic to that seems largely unnecessary, even a bit futile, because it’s inherently already there. While Marvel obvious wants to boost the profile of the character so that people stop referring to him online as “the purple guy from the Avengers credits,” turning him into what reads as a victim of poor circumstance seems peculiar, because he doesn’t need one to be fascinating. What makes Thanos isn’t where he came from, it’s who he is and what he became; you don’t really need to see him as an innocent child or someone you’d like to have thrown a ball around or played tag with, because it puts him in this awkward place where the readers are forced to quantify his actions. “OK, yes, he’s trying to destroy the universe, but he had a bad relationship with his father and he couldn’t overcome it. I get that.”
Not that you’d probably want to read a story about a baby who comes out of the womb killing people either, but that would at least make a little more sense. And it’s not like this is the first time a writer has tried to make Thanos a little more affable; Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning certainly did it, and the short lived Jim Starlin ongoing made the same attempt, but none of them portrayed him as an innocent placed on a dark path, which is where it becomes inherently off-putting. He was still always Thanos the Mad Titan, Destroyer of Worlds, who has a cavalier opinion of every life that is not his own (and even then, his own life seemed not to be too important at times).
This isn’t to say that the work of Aaron and Bianchi here is bad. For what it is, for what it does, it’s good; Aaron’s writing does very much create a sympathetic character, which is the point, and Bianchi’s work is as impressive as always. Bianchi doesn’t explore the page as much as he’s known to do and the layouts are a bit more typical than what you’d generally expect, but his character work is strong and his young Thanos certainly establishes a more doe-eyed youngster, which matches Aaron’s foreshadowing narrative. You get the kind of solid storytelling you’d expect from this team and there’s no doubt about that, it’s just a matter of rationalizing an odd story that’s being told.
It’s early in the series so there’s still plenty of time to turn it around and into something a bit more recognizable in terms of the character. Aaron and Bianchi are the team for this book and if you have any affinity for their work or the character this is a can’t miss read. Yet at the same time, there’s definitely something off about it in the way that it attempts to create a sympathetic anti-hero, rather than just show off the dark journey of the most dangerous man in the galaxy. It’s certainly a mixed bag of a read, something that will be easier to judge when we know more of Aaron and Bianchi’s plan, but for now “Thanos Rising” has all the telltale signs of a book that will read better in trade.
Final Verdict: 6.0 – Pick up if you’re a hardcore Aaron/Bianchi fan, otherwise wait and browse
And, as a side note, ignore the solicit. I generally don’t like the whole “read this because it’s important to the fabric of existence!” type things. The book is sellable on the names “Aaron” and “Bianchi” alone!
