The Infinity Gems have been destroyed, marking the end of an era for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s also the most high-profile adaptation of the general Infinity Gems story yet, which has been one of the go-to plotlines for Marvel-based media for almost 30 years. Since their introduction as a set in 1990’s Thanos Quest miniseries, which led into the famous 1991 crossover Infinity Gauntlet, the Gems have been a faithful go-to plot for Marvel’s cartoons and video games.
The MCU has definitively wrecked the Gems, taking them off the table for the foreseeable future. Without them to drive the films’ plots, it’s time to look forward and consider what might happen next. The MCU has a wide-open road ahead of it, and could do just about anything it wants, including a wholly original storyline. For its next phase, though, Marvel has nearly 60 years of comics that the MCU can mine for its next years-in-the-making crossover film. Here are six comic picks, from the obscure to the obvious, that would be amazing to see in live-action.
(Also, it should go without saying, but as the MCU moves forward, it should make a habit of cutting these characters and storylines’ original creators in on a share of the profits. That’s the one thing that the DCEU objectively does better than Marvel: it gets comic book writers and artists paid for their work.)
Dozens of alien civilizations exist in the Marvel comics’ universe, and most of them have noticed at this point that for a comparatively low-tech, backwater planet, Earth gets up to some nonsense. While Earth’s conventional forces are no threat at all to the average spacefaring culture, its superhero community has had a dramatic effect on galactic history, including that time Cyclops’ younger brother took over the Shi’ar Empire for a minute. (Don’t ask.)
Aliens being wary of Earth has led to several stories over the years, but none of them have a better hook than Kurt Busiek’s Maximum Security, which ran across every book in Marvel’s line in 2000 and 2001. Simply put, aliens decide to start treating Earth’s solar system like the British treated Australia.
Out of revenge for years of Earth’s superheroes getting up in aliens’ business, the Kree lead a motion among galactic society to turn Earth into a prison planet. As far as Earth is concerned, it’s minding its own business one day when several thousand random aliens come out of nowhere and start tearing up the place.
While the MCU’s Earth doesn’t have as rich a history of destabilizing alien civilizations yet, it ought to be developing a reputation already. Carol’s staredown with the Kree fleet at the end of Captain Marvel would be enough on its own to justify a Maximum Security storyline, but on top of that, the Avengers reversed the Snap, SHIELD fed a dead Kree into a juicer to create the TAHITI project, and Earth’s forces killed Thanos twice. There’s plenty of basis for the MCU’s galactic civilizations to be getting increasingly wary of what Earth might do next.
Maximum Security would make a good excuse to drop a bunch of crazy alien villains directly on Earth as an easy source of antagonists for future films, and to get strange tech into human hands, creating the next generation of superhumans. The finale, where the same Kree who came up with the plan to make Earth a prison also turn out to have a secret agenda, can send a big team of superheroes out into space for an enormous fight against an approaching armada. If the MCU is lacking one thing, it’s a good old-fashioned superheroes vs. spaceships protracted punch-up.
Among long-time Spider-Man fans, the words “Clone Saga” are profanity. This dates back to an infamous, seemingly endless crossover in the ’90s, which began with the sudden revelation that the Peter Parker that fans had been reading about for over 20 years was actually a clone, and the original had returned to New York to take his life back. Thanks to creative infighting, editorial interference, and a lack of organization, the whole thing quickly descended into craziness both in- and outside the comics. It’s no exaggeration to say that Spider-Man as a character was almost permanently ruined.
The Ultimate Clone Saga, on the other hand, is a decent read. It began in issue #97 of Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man and ran for seven issues, touching briefly upon several of the base elements of its source material before spinning off into its own direction. It’s a clear-cut case of a talented creative team spinning (tainted, radioactive) straw into gold.
The short version is this: the Ultimate line of books is a reboot of Marvel’s characters as if they were introduced around the year 2000, in what was then the present day. In the Ultimate continuity, a lot of characters’ origin stories relate back to various attempts to recreate the super-soldier serum that turned Steve Rogers into Captain America. One of them, the OZ formula, accidentally created the spider that bit Peter Parker. As this represented a sudden and uncharacteristic success for any super-soldier experiment, various parties began to experiment with samples of Peter’s DNA. Hilarity ensued.
While it’s admittedly very 2000s, the basic idea behind the Ultimate Clone Saga – weaponizing superhumans’ DNA, as the first step in an imminent genetic arms race – is a solid basis for an MCU arc. It’s another good source of origins for supervillains, allows for the development of creepy powerful secret organizations and scientists in a post-HYDRA world, and for extra points, could be tied into the experiments of long-running X-Men villain Mr. Sinister.
The Skrulls have been reliably villainous in Marvel’s comics since 1962’s Fantastic Four #2. They’re a race of alien shapeshifters that have been at war with the Kree for longer than humans have been walking upright. While a handful of Skrulls have jumped the fence and become allies, sidekicks or heroes in their own right, they’re traditionally antagonists. It was a truly enormous swerve in Captain Marvel to make the Skrulls generally sympathetic war refugees, which dramatically changes their potential role in the MCU.
One thing that the Skrulls from the comics and the MCU have in common is that their original homeworld’s been destroyed. That, and the massive losses the Skrulls took in the 2007 miniseries Annihilation, spurred the events of the 2008 crossover event Secret Invasion. To sum up, the Skrulls turned out to have been infiltrating Earth for years, replacing many B- and C-list heroes and supporting characters, as part of a drive to turn Earth into their new homeworld.
The comic is a mixed bag. It introduces a few interesting new details to the Skrulls’ society and religion, but as a whole, it’s jumbled. Even so, the concept—a religiously motivated splinter faction of the Skrulls gradually infiltrate human society, taking advantage of SHIELD’s absence and the post-Snap confusion to slowly establish a base of power—is an excellent fit for the general espionage-influenced tone of the MCU. It can be an excuse to revisit older characters, reverse a couple of deaths, patch a few plot holes, and eventually, lead to a massive brawl against the Skrulls’ army of power-infused Super-Skrulls.
The original Inferno was a X-Men and New Mutants story that had been on a low boil for years by the time it actually started, and once it did, it grew out to affect all the other books in the Marvel line at the time. Many of its long-term effects have been undone or worked past by this point, but it’s well-remembered by fans on the basis of its introduction of high-weirdness horror into Marvel’s New York.
Inferno‘s full setup requires a major deep dive into Marvel lore all by itself, and interested parties are encouraged to check out episodes #106 to #112 of the “Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men” podcast for a lengthy breakdown. To summarize it briefly: Illyana Rasputin, a.k.a. Magik of the New Mutants, is a dual-class mutant/sorceress and the ruler of a hell dimension called Limbo. (It’s important to have a side hustle.) While she’s distracted, her two demonic lieutenants mount a coup in order to invade Earth. Monsters subsequently invade Manhattan, corrupting and possessing whatever they can reach. Also, one of those lieutenants has been steadily working to turn Madelyne Pryor, Cyclops’s ex-wife and ally of the X-Men, against the team, and succeeds to a much greater extent than he ever could’ve hoped for.
With a new emphasis on the magic side of Marvel thanks to the introduction of Doctor Strange, as well as the eventual arrival of the X-Men in the MCU, a horror-influenced supernatural arc within the films could be a lot of fun. A big part of how well the original Inferno has aged is the sheer glee that many of the individual creators had with the concept, adding killer elevators, monstrous dentists, police cars made into organic battlemechs, and more to the streets of Marvel’s bizarre, demon-possessed New York.
Make no mistake: even a mildly faithful adaptation of Inferno would be a continuity nightmare, which makes it slightly concerning that Josh Boone wants to shove it into a future New Mutants film. It would require an Endgame level of buildup to work at all. That being said, this is mostly a recommendation on the basis of the cool monster designs that are all over the original comics, because humanity deserves a summer blockbuster in which Spider-Man has to fight a possessed mailbox and an army of department-store mannequins.
Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth miniseries has fallen into relative obscurity in the last few years, but it’s one of the better reads from Marvel’s experimental period in the early 2000s. Inspired by the Tuskegee Experiments, Truth is the story of a regiment of black soldiers in World War II who are forced to become test subjects for the super-soldier serum that would eventually be used on Steve Rogers. By the end of the war, the regiment has only one survivor, Isaiah Bradley: the first Captain America.
The final issue of Truth, when Steve Rogers visits Isaiah’s family’s home, features a two-page spread of photos of Isaiah with figures from throughout American history, suggesting that he spent some of the post-war years operating in secret, on his own. The story of Isaiah as a sort of “secret Avenger,” fighting throughout the ’60s and ’70s, is a nearly irresistible hook for one or more big period pieces, with intermissions in the present day for heroes like Sam Wilson to finish up some of Isaiah’s adventures.
This also has the useful side effect of introducing Isaiah’s family to the MCU, which would include his grandson Elijah. As Patriot, Elijah Bradley is a founding member of the Young Avengers, a team that’s been begging for a live-action adaptation since the MCU started. The groundwork’s already been laid for a couple of those characters—Cassie Lang’s already here, and Kate Bishop is reportedly in the Hawkeye show on Disney+–so it’s time for Elijah to make his debut.
Just for maximum confusion, this isn’t the 1984 Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, its rightfully-derided 1985-1986 sequel, or the 2015 Secret Wars that effectively restarted the Marvel Universe. This is Brian Michael Bendis and Gabriele Dell’Otto’s 2004 miniseries, which also introduced Agents of SHIELD‘s Daisy “Quake” Johnson to the Marvel Universe. (She’s really blatantly drawn to resemble a young Angelina Jolie, but hey, designs evolve.)
The Marvel Universe has, over the years, introduced a huge number of low-rent supervillains, many of whom have a bunch of high-tech toys despite being both kind of dumb and constantly in and out of jail. When Nick Fury decides to look into where these guys keep getting their hardware–why a bunch of bank robbers are using millions of dollars in experimental weaponry to knock over jewelry stores–he stumbles onto a terrorist conspiracy that leads directly back to the nation of Latveria.
Marvel fans will immediately think this is a Doctor Doom plot, but at the time Secret War came out, Doom was off the board for a while. (He was stuck in hell. Comics, right?) Instead, Latveria was being run by Prime Minister Lucia von Bardas, who turned out to be funding all of these independent operators for reasons of her own. Fury recruited a black-book team of street-level superheroes to deal with von Bardas, but in so doing, got every one of them in over their heads.
While Secret War isn’t particularly well-remembered, it set up a lot of plot threads that Bendis would continue to explore throughout the rest of his time as a writer at Marvel. It could serve the same role as the basis for a new phase of films in the MCU, by setting up a central mystery, establishing a population of new villains, and providing a new big bad for the MCU in Lucia von Bardas.
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