Last year, in one of their regular misguided attempts at Multimedia Synergy TM, Marvel decided to do a comic called Infinity Wars to coincide with the film Infinity War. They'd already done the singular in the comics, you see, though the film was really more based on its predecessor, Infinity Gauntlet. Since Infinity War they'd also done Infinity Crusade, Infinity Watch, Infinity Abyss, Infinity Revelation, Infinity Relativity, Infinity Entity, Infinity Finale and (oh, you thought Finale must be the last one? Sucker!) Infinity Siblings. Not to mention one called just plain Infinity, which unlike that last lot, I have actually read. Infinity Siblings was itself meant to have a further two sequels, until Thanos' creator Jim Starlin got pissed off with Marvel allowing other teams to duplicate his Thanos plotlines, a curious complaint given how often he'd duplicated them himself, but there you go. This is all aside from Thanos popping up every ten minutes in various other comics, each time making him a little less credible as any kind of cosmic threat, and in any case the comics version was never as good as the screen take anyway, what with fundamentally being a whiny prick lashing out because girls wouldn't talk to him. So you can see why a) they were running out of meaningfully different titles and b) things for Thanos to do. So for a bit of a twist, they offed Thanos at the start of Infinity Wars, and let someone else do something a little different with the stones – the universe's population got halved, as per, but not by killing anyone – instead, they all got merged, two souls to one body. Basically like the old Amalgam comics, but without the risk of getting cooties from the state of modern DC.
Now, possibly the main Infinity Wars comic (which I've also never read, and don't intend to) explained why this should result in a bunch of mergers where all the characters not only share a species and gender, but are also attached to other superheroes, so you get Stark Odinson, the Iron Hammer; Stephen Rogers, Soldier Supreme; and so forth. Same for their supporting casts. But that's how the first three stories here run. Personally, I would have been much more interested in the possibilities of a comic where Captain America was fused with a Shanghai housewife, Iron Man with a Glaswegian binman, and Spider-Man with a Labrador, but no. Yes, there are certain interesting correspondences in the stories, especially the Iron Hammer one, which was written by Al Ewing, generally Marvel's best current writer, and the only reason I was reading this farrago in the first place. Though this is not just at the inessential end of his Marvel work, it's creating a whole new Extremely Inessential Annexe somewhere out beyond his earliest 2000AD efforts. Mainly, these stories serve to remind us that superhero secret origins tend to have way too many similarities, particularly when they're the work of Stan Lee and chums, and this is why the films always do best to avoid them.
Fortunately, the second half is markedly more interesting. Rather than laboriously combining characters from one hero's supporting cast with those from another, Weapon Hex goes a little wilder and wider, giving us appearances by the likes of Elsa Bladestone. Plus, the way Sandoval draws Laura when she's little is adorable. Similarly, Ghost Panther doesn't just mix T'challa with Johnny Blaze but mixes Killmonger with Killraven for a proper twist to the mythos, not to mention having a powerfully stylised look courtesy of Jefte Palo. And finishing up the book are some really short entries, some of which don't cohere and far too many of which are by Jim Zub, but which do also include delightful glimpses of the likes of Kamala Kang, Moon Squirrel and Tippysaur, and the alarming but fabulous Punisher Pack (which doesn't even make mathematical sense, but is still too good a gag to resist). It's still very much the product of a genre's decadent phase, comics about comics without even the refracted substance of that mode at its best. But at least it demonstrates the occasional spark of fun.
On the whole, though, I'm left hoping that with their departure from the MCU, the comics will now also leave the Infinity Stones alone for a decade or two. Please?