Thanos Rising #1

I say I couldn’t wait for something’s quite a lot but this when it was announced I put aside money to get it I was really excited for this as Thanos is my all-time favourite villain he just always has been one of my favourites and I’ve missed him so when this was announced and the Infinity series I knew this was going to be a good year.

Plot

Thanos returns to his home on Titan to his mother’s grave.

Years ago Thanos is born but is born wrong and when his mother sees him she tries to kill him but his father saves him. Thanos is at school and some kids come to talk to him.

Review

This was a great opener to the limited series and this looks to be a very good limited series and should hopefully be worthy of the character but I do still have a few problems with it that hold it back from it being perfect. This looks to shed a lot more light on Thanos’s backstory which while the story that Starlin put out was really good and helped you to understand Thanos well enough there is still a lot more that could be explored and there were a few gaps and this appears to fill in those gaps and help you to understand Thanos better for the upcoming Infinity event and of course his involvement in the Avengers film that is really the reason this series was even conceived because he appeared at the end of the Avengers it may also be due to Infinity but the major reason is because of the film and yes this sounds like a money grabbing scheme but I don’t mind really this just got me so excited that I didn’t really care about the reasons behind why it was created.

If you have read any of the Marvel cosmic #1s that have come out recently you’ll know that there is 2-3 pages showing the vastness of space and how big it is and this is no exception I’m not exactly sure why Marvel are doing this but I suppose there hinting at how big an influence the cosmic universe will have on the Marvel U but I like it and it’s a different way to start off the book and it does make for a nicely drawn spread in this book and I definitely think this is hinting at a bigger involvement for the cosmic part of the Marvel U.

This issue doesn’t actually start off in the past there is a short scene at the beginning in the present while this scene really achieve anything it’s a nice scene and it makes for a good transition to the past and well when Thanos appears he certainly makes a presence with a splash page that makes him look very powerful. Then in the past we see his birth and you begin to get an idea of why he might be like this due to how he was born and how he was driven to become what he is today and that is a theme throughout the issue with Thanos coming over as a nice character but dropping subtle hints as to his darker side like him drawing a picture of a carcass of an alien lizard this is a theme through the issue and it’s one of the most interesting parts of the issue showing what Thanos will be while showing how well nice he is now and that’s another point.

Thanos in this is a bit shy and a kind person while you get to see an idea of what he will be on the surface he’s a nice person in this a bit shy and well a nerd I can understand why this would happen I do not recall that this period of Thanos’s life has ever been properly explored so who’s to say he can’t be a lot nicer when he’s younger it is weird to see this character who would one day wield the Infinity gauntlet being so generally nice and well shy but with what happens at the end and the hints that are dropped it isn’t really a problem but still it’s weird even though this looks to only last a bit longer.

One of the aspects that is explored in this issue is the fact that Thanos doesn’t fit in entirely sure people are nice to him but still he doesn’t fit in throughout the issue and there is one character who tries to exploit that and she seems to be a big player in this mini-series and while I’m not sure who she is I suspect I know what’s going to happen in the end but this could make for an interesting point of the story with what she could do and well what she does helps to influence Thanos.

Simone Bianchi’s artwork is good and bad it is good because it looks amazing it’s atmospheric and detailed with some interesting panel layouts and his style is very unique and I think he did a good job on how Titan looked and the splash page with older Thanos looks amazing and makes him look very powerful. The colours of the book are nice making everything look nice enough and I especially liked how it looked on metal and in the darker places on Titan. The bad part is the facial work some of the faces just look downright off some of them look a bit twisted and the mouths look weird some of the faces look really good and so do the characters but on a few panels it is noticeably odd. Young Thanos though is the one character who consistently doesn’t look great he has way to many lines on him so that his face looks a little twisted also his eyes also are a little weird and a bit big at points so young Thanos did look a little weird at points.

The verdict

Yep this is a promising start to the mini-series and I will gladly pick up the next issue while I still have a few problems with Thanos’s look and the art this is a strong book and story even though I’m not sure where Aaron will go with after this in 5 issues but after this promising start I think this will be a great limited series and a great origin for Thanos and hopefully this will do him justice.

4 stars