Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2019 June 21 • Friday

It's the first day of summer so let's look at that ultimate "summer movie", The Avengers: Endgame.

Actually, let's not. Like every Russo brothers movie, it's good enough to be disappointing.

I enjoyed it up to a point but it seemed like a wasted opportunity to me. And so I went back to check out the original comic book storyline involving the Infinity Gauntlet.

I never read The Avengers and by the time this rolled around I don't think I was reading any Marvel or DC comics. Not that I remember, anyway.

There are a lot more characters in this than there are in the movie and it draws considerably more on what came before. As a comic book it's magnificent and also totally bonkers but I don't think it would make a great movie.

And why should it? It already exists in a visual medium.

But I would have liked to see more coherence and chutzpah in the movie version's storytelling. You get both in truckloads the comic book.

The first glimpse of Thanos in the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe (to which the "MCU"-tagged uniforms of the Mutant Containment Unit in the X-Men: Dark Phoneix movie were perhaps slyly referring) came at the end of the first Avengers movie and has, uh, someone telling Thanos that to invade Earth or fight the Avengers or both or something else would be "to court death" and this makes Thanos smile.

In the original comic Thanos is trying desperately to win the love of Death herself, an actual character here, and this is the reason for snuffing out half the life in the universe, not some hare-brained notion of creating balance.

(My eleven-year-old son pointed out to me that this wipes out half the consumers but also half the producers so doesn't change anything. And it's also just one of many possible solutions to a problem of limited resources. Especially, you know, if you have an infinity gauntlet.)

So in the comic book Thanos is trying, somewhat pathetically, to make Death love him, and despite having limitless power over literally everything, is failing.

Other characters include Eternity, Order, Chaos, Mephisto, Love, Hate, Kronos (Time), Thanos's brother Eros and even Wolverine. (Thor is here but apparently he's not really Thor. This isn't really explained. You had to read some other issues to know what that's about.)

And lots of other Marvel characters. Even Doctor Doom joins forces with the good guys because he's not into this whole Thanos thing.

It's also a nice touch that when half the life in the universe disappears, the Krees assume that the Skrulls are responisble and the Skrulls assume that the Krees did it.

It's a really fun read. And Trump's Atlantic City casino gets destroyed, which would probably definitely happen if this were a real thing.