Thanos #4 (of 6): Space Madness

Thanos #4 continues this miniseries’ stubborn insistence in being as safe and mediocre as possible. Writer Tini Howard and artist Ariel Olivetti have put together a package that is about as exciting as warm milk, but manages to stay just shy of being outright awful. But it is no doubt toothless.

Howard’s Thanos is a surface-level Thanos only, and a PG one at that. He isn’t particularly menacing, and with Olivetti’s lackluster art, has no imposition or physically threatening presence. Nor is his behavior very consistent. In this issue, he behaves like a child throwing a tantrum, blindly swinging his fists at the Magus’s telepathic projection; later, he savagely butchers some of the mutineers without a second thought.

Gamora doesn’t fare much better. She’s essentially a stock precocious child character, albeit one that isn’t shy about killing. There’s a nice little moment where she defies Thanos by not killing the Blood Brother who kidnapped her, showing off her independent streak, but it’s a moment – nothing more.

What this issue (and by turn the whole series) lacks is any real sense of stakes. Because of the by-the-numbers character development (or lack thereof) and stock plotting, there’s no sense that anything happening will be of any consequence. Thanos’ war with Magus is an uninteresting afterthought… as is most of this series. We all know the plot, and where the characters will ultimately land – but Howard isn’t giving us any reason to care about how they ultimately get there.