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Summary
Earth is knocked off its orbit, leading to a new Ice Age, while superheroes launch a brutal assault on Thanos with devastating consequences.
Thanos’ granddaughter, Nebula, steals the Gauntlet and reverses all the chaos caused, including a battle on Earth and an attack on the Kree Empire.
“How Can I Explain?” is a feature where I spotlight inexplicable comic book plots. This time around, we look at what, exactly, happened in to the Marvel Universe during the Infinity Gauntlet storyline.
As you all know by now, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) had a decision in Avengers: Endgame as to how to adapt the Infinity Gauntlet storyline from the Marvel Universe, and the MCU decided to have the half of the universe’s population that was wiped out by Thanos be gone for five years before the Avengers returned everyone to life, but with the five-year gap still in place (so if there were, say, 30-year-old twins, and one was erased by Thanos, and the other wasn’t, when the first twin returned five years later, they’d still be 30, but their twin would be 35). This is why we’re only now catching up to the timeline of the MCU in real time (the Hawkeye TV miniseries, for instance was set during the Christmas season of 2024). While you can agree or disagree with that decision, at least it was a straightforward answer as to what happened after Thanos “snapped” away half of the universe’s population. Five years passed, then everyone who had been erased returns.
Now, in the Marvel Universe’s version of Infinity Gauntlet, the situation was handled much differently, and the approach that Marvel took has led to a bit of a confusing situation when it comes to “What happened during the period when half the universe was erased?”
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What happened in the actual Infinity Gauntlet miniseries?
In Infinity Gauntlet #1 (by Jim Starlin, George Perez, Joe Rubinstein and Tom Christopher), Thanos tries to impress Mistress Death by snapping his fingers and erasing half of the universe’s population in an instant…
An interesting thing about these early issues is that Starlin introduces some concepts that he really doesn’t follow up on, and that I can only think that he must have been intending for Ron Marz to address them in the pages of Silver Surfer (Starlin was the writer on Silver Surfer where he brought back Thanos, and set into motion the story that became Infinity Gauntlet – it was originally going to just be a Silver Surfer storyline!) In any event, here he has the Skrulls assume that the “Snap” was caused by the Kree Empire…
In the second issue of the series, we see that the Kree Empire also thinks that the “Snap” was the cause of the Skrulls, and both empires ready for a massive war against each other…
In that same issue, in a fit of pique, Thanos unleashes a deadly cosmic sort of force blast, that wrecks planets throughout the cosmos, including Earth. Iron Man is horrified to see California slide into the ocean (like the mystics and statistics say it will)…
And there are other terrible events thoughout the issue on Earth, like Thor reporting that Japan has been completely destroyed…
The most devastating thing, though, was that Earth had been knocked off of its orbit, and was falling away from the Sun, setting up a new Ice Age that would never be fixed. People tend to concentrate on the whole “half the population of the universe disappears,” but the whole “Earth was wrecked by a LATER Thanos attack” doesn’t get as much attention.
In any event, a selection of the world’s most powerful superheroes (plus Wolverine) launch an assault on Thanos, and it is brutal, as he slaughters almost all of them in a graphic battle in Infinity Gauntlet #4 (by Starlin, Perez, Ron Lim, Rubinstein and Bruce Solotoff)…
Okay, so this all sets up a big cosmic battle that leads to Thanos being distracted long enough that his granddaughter, Nebula, steals the Gauntlet from her granddad, and SHE becomes the most powerful being in the cosmos!
In the final issue of the series, Nebula taunts Thanos, and thinks about one of the things that she could do that would mess with him the most was to reverse all of the stuff that he did, and so she uses the Gauntlet to reverse what had occurred in the last day (yes, this all took place in a single day)…
We see that the Earth is put back into its orbit, and no one remembers the crazy stuff that had happened to everyone the previous day…
Well, not NO one, of course, but you get the picture, everything was reversed (Nebula forgot that 24 hours earlier, she had been in a really bad position, being tortured by Thanos, but she quickly fixes that problem).
Okay, so, well, what happened to all of the stories that were set DURING Infinity Gauntlet?
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So what happened to events that occurred during Infinity Gauntlet?
As I noted recently, the writer on Silver Surfer before Starlin, his old 1970s Marvel colleague, Steve Englehart, finished out his run with a long parody of Marvel’s then-new Editor-in-Chief, Tom DeFalco, who Englehart was not on the same page with at all. So Englehart had a storyline where a character named Clumsy Foulup (who now became based on DeFalco) took over the Kree Empire even though he didn’t deserve it.
In Silver Surfer #53 (by Ron Marz, Ron Lim and Tom Christopher), set during Infinity Gauntlet, we see that Foulup is not handling the crisis very well at all…
During one of his ridiculous addresses to the Kree people, though, the Silver Surfer seemingly attacks, aligned with the Skrulls (remember before when Starlin set up the two empires blaming each other for the “Snap”?)…
Surfer then kills Clumsy Foulup in front of the entire Kree public…
Two Kree generals, Ael-Dan and Dar-Benn, then arrive, and they kill Silver Surfer, thus avenging the Emperor in front of everyone. They then take control of the Kree Empire…
(That, of course, was a Silver Surfer robot, not the real Surfer).
Okay, so since this happened during the events of Infinity Gauntlet, then it should have been reversed, and never happened, right?
And yet, in Avengers #346 (by Bob Harras, Steve Epting and Tom Palmer), during the “Operation: Galactic Storm” crossover, Ael-Dan and Dar-Benn are the leaders of the Kree Empire!
So the events of Silver Surfer #53 still did happen, even though it couldn’t….so, yeah, I’ve got nothing, it just doesn’t make sense.
If anyone can think of a good inexplicable comic book plot, write me at brianc@cbr.com!
“}]] In their latest look at inexplicable plots, CSBG shows that what happened in the Marvel Universe during Infinity Gauntlet doesn’t really make sense Read More