As Marvel’s wild Infinity Watch crossover begins, Marvel has revealed jaw-dropping art of arch-villain Thanos leading the Avengers into battle. The most iconic enemy of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Thanos despises Earth’s heroes and considers them his lessers in intellect, power and ambition. However, with a new threat on the horizon, even the Mad Titan can’t make it through alone.

In recently released solicit information from Marvel, fans get to see Salvador Larroca’s cover art for Avengers Annual #1, which will conclude the Infinity Watch story. The art shows Thanos leading the Avengers into battle, with Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Captain Marvel, Black Panther and the Vision following behind. Thankfully, the issue’s summary offers a clue as to what threat could bring these longtime enemies together.

The revealed info suggests that Thanos will join the Avengers to battle Star, who will either be leading the other Infinity Stone bearers or have stolen their powers. Currently in Marvel lore, each of the Infinity Stones has bonded with a living ‘bearer,’ with Thanos on a mission to claim their power for his own ends. However, it seems the bearer of the Reality Stone Ripley Ryan (aka Star) will prove herself a match for the Mad Titan. The event’s reading order is as follows:

Thanos Will Seemingly Unite with the Avengers Against Star

Infinity Watch Is Uniting the Infinity Stone Bearers for the First Time

At the conclusion of Marvel’s 2018 Infinity Wars event, Adam Warlock gave the Infinity Stones the ability to choose their own wielders, claiming it was the one thing that hadn’t been tried to stop villains like Thanos using them for his own ends. Over the last few years, Marvel has gradually revealed the bearer of each Infinity Stone, exposing the fact that most of the Stones remained on Earth. Now, Infinity Watch will see Thanos attempting to reclaim the Stones that once made up his Infinity Gauntlet, bringing the bearers into conflict with both the Mad Titan and a host of heroes including Spider-Man, Moon Knight and the Avengers. The current Infinity Stones bearers are:

In current Marvel lore, the Infinity Stones work as a circuit, with each enhancing the power of the next when in close proximity. So far, the Infinity Stone bearers have never been gathered together, and while they’re powerful, they are far from godlike – Spider-Man was even able to resist the Reality Stone’s power when it was wielded by the inexperienced Star. The closest Marvel has come to gathering the bearers was in 2021’s Giant-Size Black Cat: Infinity Score (Jed MacKay and Carlos Fabian Villa), where the Black Cat tricked the Reality Stone bearer Star into proximity with Overtime and Quantum so that she’d be powerful enough to cure her mother’s cancer.

Marvel has promised fans that not only will the Infinity Stone bearers finally all meet, but that a new version of the Infinity Watch team will be born as a result. The previous version of the Infinity Watch assembled under Adam Warlock, with each person protecting one of the Infinity Stones from falling into the wrong hands. Warlock even trusted Thanos to work with the team, believing he had no desire to reassemble the Infinity Gauntlet. At the time, Warlock was right, but with the recent debut of the Death Stone, Thanos has a brand new purpose for the Stones.

Thanos Wants the Infinity Stones for a Very Different Reason to Infinity Gauntlet

Thanos Is Trying to Control His Newly Forged Death Stone

In the recent Thanos miniseries (Christopher Cantwell and Germán Peralta), Thanos discovered that Death had made the decision to live on Earth as a mortal, with the Illuminati helping her experience human life as Roberta Marshall. Outraged that Death was betraying her cosmic purpose, Thanos ‘killed’ Roberta and trapped Death in an artificial Infinity Stone he forged in the heart of a black hole. This paid off years of teasing that Thanos would soon create a new, seventh Infinity Stone, with Marvel confirming this new artifact is an official ‘Death Stone.’ However, the Infinity Watch saga just revealed the Stone isn’t as Thanos intended.

In Thanos Annual #1 (Derek Landy and Salvador Larroca), the Mad Titan just discovered that because of Death’s hatred for him, she won’t manifest her power even when he wields the Stone. In response, he sets out to gather the other Infinity Stones, intending to use them to break Death to his will and turn the Death Stone into the ultimate weapon.

Thanos famously collected the Stones before in 1991’s The Infinity Gauntlet (Jim Starlin, George Pérez and Ron Lim), using them to wipe out half of all life in the galaxy. While Thanos claimed at the time this was a tribute to Death, he quickly proved that he was actually more concerned with his own power, insisting on courting Death only as her superior. This time, Thanos is being far more honest about his motivations, wanting the cosmic power of the combined Infinity Stones to force Death to be exactly what he wants her to be. Thankfully, this time the Infinity Stones can fight back.

Who Is Star and How Is She So Powerful?

Captain Marvel’s Rival Has Become a Threat So Big, Even Thanos Is Joining the Fight

A former reporter, Ripley Ryan volunteered for experimentation by the Kree scientist Minn-Erva, facing off against Captain Marvel. Her defeat at Carol Danvers’ hands caused Ryan to reflect on her life and the lack of control she had over its events. This deep yearning for a different life attracted the Reality Stone, which bonded with Ryan and gave her reality-warping abilities. While Star isn’t a total monster, she is a deeply immoral person, rejecting multiple opportunities to seek redemption. Since she gained her power, Star has fought Captain Marvel and Spider-Man, defeated the Children of Thanos, and worked alongside the villainous Thunderbolts.

Unlike when the Reality Stone is at full power, Star can only alter reality in a localized area and finds it far easier to influence her victims’ thinking than to change the world itself. However, as fans saw in Giant-Size Black Cat: Infinity Score, this is only the beginning of her power. In Star #3 (Kelly Thompson, Javier Pina and Filipe Andrade), fans got a look at Star’s potential future, with her taking the form of a glowing ‘god’ every bit as terrifying as Thanos.

Thanos has always been a cold, calculating genius, and he used the Infinity Stones in that spirit. If Infinity Watch is heading for Star gaining all the Stones’ power, it will be fascinating to see a version of an all-powerful villain who is far more opportunistic in how they wield infinite power.

This Isn’t the First Time Thanos Has Joined the Avengers

In Fact, Marvel Has Hinted He Might Still Be Redeemed

Thanos leading the Avengers shows how serious the threat of Infinity Watch will actually be, however it’s not totally unheard of. Thanos’ most recent team-up with the Avengers came in Avengers Mech Strike (Jed MacKay and Carlos Magno), where a younger version of Thanos worked with the Avengers against Kang in a time-spanning battle. This Thanos had never met the Avengers before, but his positive relationship with the team isn’t necessarily confined to the past. When Sunspot and Cannonball traveled into the future in Avengers World #9 (Nick Spencer and Stefano Caselli), they were shocked to find out the Mad Titan was remembered as the “best Avenger that ever lived” following a seismic battle with “the Kang Corps” – though sadly they got into a bar brawl before fans learned more.

Even Thanos seems to be aware his destiny could lie with the Avengers – in Thanos #10 (Jeff Lemire and Germán Peralta), the Mad Titan finds himself tempted with a vision of an ideal life by the power of the God Quarry, which is trying to trap him within an attractive illusion. Within his dream, Thanos is the beloved leader of the Avengers and Earth’s premier protector. While Thanos fights his way out of the illusion, the fact that the God Quarry chose this life suggests there’s a big part of Thanos that really would like to be a hero.

It’s unlikely Thanos will ever be a hero, but it’s entirely possible that he could become an Avenger, especially if Earth’s Mightiest Heroes need help against a foe with the power of a cosmic god. The introduction of the Death Stone and the resulting alliance of a new Infinity Watch has shifted the power structure and alliances of the Marvel Universe, creating a new status quo where it may actually make sense for the Avengers to recruit Thanos.

The Avengers Annual #1 is coming September 25 from Marvel Comics.

Source: Marvel