Warning! Spoilers for Heroes Reborn #4!
Marvel’s epic King in Black event may only be a memory now that Heroes Reborn has arrived, but its biggest reveal about the origins of Knowhere was clearly a mistake – and Marvel seems to know it. Cutting the head off a Celestial is all fun and games until the villain that did it turns out to be less iconic than originally expected.
Touched on briefly in the opening pages of Heroes Reborn #4, “The Most Hated Man In The Heavens” by Jason Aaron and James Stokoe, sees a different origin of the mysterious place called Knowhere. Playing space cop in this new Heroes Reborn reality, Doctor Spectrum is basically an entire Green Lantern Corps folded into a single man that wields untold amounts of power in the depths of space.
Single handedly taking out Thanos’ actual hand to rid the galaxy of his next Infinity Ring-related plot to destroy the universe, Doctor Spectrum tosses Thanos back into the familiar spot of Knowhere to keep him from enacting any more evil ideas. Originally a mysterious and intriguing little wrinkle in Marvel lore, the recent King in Black event that saw the God of Symbiotes, Knull, viciously attack the universe with his symbiote dragons, revealed that Knull was responsible for Knowhere’s creation; a dangling thread that fans have waited a long time to see answered.
Murdering a Celestial at the beginning of time via relieving its head from its shoulders, Knull set up shop inside the floating skull and used it as a temporary base of operations as he planned his epic retaliation against all things living. Later on, and after Knull was long gone from inside, a city was built within the cracks and crevices of the head, turning the once living being into a sort of scientific station for numerous races across the cosmos.
But now, in this altered Heroes Reborn universe, Marvel has backtracked a bit on that specific reveal as Doctor Spectrum is now seen to have been the one who took a Celestial and, “…tore the head off of one and built a black-site prison inside it.” No stranger to altering the origins, looks, characters and lore inherent to the original Marvel universe, Heroes Reborn is the immediate follow-up to King in Black, and now with its over-powered, two dimensional villain losing a lot of his mystique and the ability to be a consistent reoccurring villain, it seems as if Marvel is quietly getting fans ready for a retcon that would make total sense since Knull has been downplayed in odd ways since his reign of terror began.
So while it’s true that Marvel has adjusted and changed a lot from what fans know to be “real” continuity – the King in Black event included – most of what’s different isn’t actually all that far off from what came before. Instead of full-blown alterations, things more or less took a wrong turn at Albuquerque for most of Marvel’s heroes, slightly morphing and modifying what fans have come to know, with this Knowhere reveal being one of the only few true changes to an origin that might not be the same once this Heroes Reborn event is over.
