Warning: this article contains spoilers for Juggernaut #4!
Last year, a war of mythological proportions erupted onto the Marvel Comics scene. The War of the Realms event assembled superheroes from all over Marvel’s Earth under Thor’s banner, as well as beings from across the Ten Realms led by the evil Dark Elf King Malekith. MCU fans may remember Malekith as the primary antagonist of 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, played by Christopher Eccleston without the malicious glee of the original comic villain. Regardless, Malekith’s return to the world of comics was big and bold, and worthy of a being bearing the title of King of the Dark Elves of Svartalheim. But big deeds have serious consequences, and it turns out the Marvel Universe is still seeing fallout from this conflict.
By the end of Malektith’s bloody and cruel campaign, the only realm left standing was Midgard, aka Earth. In classic Marvel fashion, his forces invaded Manhattan and quickly overwhelmed the champions of Earth. The planet was then divided up between Dark Elves, Draugrs, Fire Goblins, Trolls and Frost Giants. Ultimately, the tide turned after the forces of Earth regrouped and Malekith was decisively defeated by Thor. However, as readers of Fabian Nicieza and Ron Garney’s Juggernaut series discovered this month, even villains who weren’t direct allies of Malekith benefited from his actions.
In Juggernaut #4, Nazi mad scientist Arnim Zola returns to comics in a new and improved android body. More than that, his new underground lab is well fortified – equipped with state of the art technology – and he has reclaimed the liquid android Primus as a bodyguard. But it isn’t Hydra bankrolling his recent upgrades – instead, Zola has been making money selling, and experimenting on, the creatures of legend he captured during War of the Realms. Though Zola is desperate for high-bounty mutants, he explains: “Recent skirmishes have filled my coffers with Trolls and Elves and that ilk…” His lab is filled with specimens from the War of the Realms in cryogenic stasis, with Juggernaut acknowledging his collection has bought him a “new and improved garbage can, but the garbage is still inside.”
Perhaps even more unsettling than Zola’s collection of mythological creatures is his assertion that since the formation of Krakoa, mutants have become increasingly isolated, and therefore harder to come by. It’s a small detail, but it certainly illustrates the extent to which mutantdom has been covertly under attack for all these years. In fact, mutants have become so valuable a commodity that someone has been mind-controlling villains like Quicksand, Primus, and Zola to capture one.
Thankfully, it doesn’t matter how powered-up Zola’s new android body is; he’s no match for the combined force of Juggernaut and D-Cell. Though they discover that Zola has also been mind-controlled by their mysterious adversary, the reality remains that there are an unidentified number – considering the scale of Malekith’s invasion it may be astronomical – of mythic beings and creatures either in captivity or being harvested for nefarious reasons all over the globe. Though the various trolls and goblins in Zola’s possession arrived in Midgard as part of an evil army, it’s highly disturbing to see them treated in this way. Hopefully Thor’s new position as All-Father puts him in a position to recover those beings currently being traded as commodities, even if he does have more than a few problems of his own waiting in Asgard.
