“In the Marvel Universe, gods walk the Earth.

Some side with heroes.
Others spread dread and despair.
One god cares for neither.
He is the Chaos King.
And he will stop at nothing to end everything with
Chaos War.”

Thus, with typical Marvel bombast, Greg Pak and Fred van Lente of Action Philosophers! and Comic Book Comics fame introduce the 2010–2011 “Chaos War ” storyline.

In many ways, “Chaos War” is a classic superhero comics event. It has the mandatory brawls between heroes who then become allies. It has the brains versus brawn tension and the triumph of ingenuity over smashing things that Marvel comics so often employ. It is also, like so many comics events, a massive weave of intertextual references: as always, it connects with established continuity in too many places to count and references to film and literature similarly abound. By virtue of the advanced age of many of the characters involved, there are a number of historical references (such as Sersi remarking to Thor that one fight “[k]inda reminds you of the siege of Paris by the Danes in the ninth century, huh, big guy?”). And, given its focus on gods, godlings, and pantheons, it also makes numerous implicit and explicit references to myth, story, and (what we can somewhat anachronistically label) theology.

But many of these references are arguably superficial. In most cases, “Chaos War” provides enough information for the reader to situate a specific god within the religious tradition from which it is appropriated, but there is not much of what we can call substance in those references. They have names that can be traced to one pantheon or another and an appearance that gives them the flavor of a place and (in most cases) a time, although there is a preponderance of gods in superhero-style garb. Thus, they are all interweaved and largely undifferentiated. The gods co-exist, they know each other, and some have banded together before the story begins, while others do so after. This mix gives the impression of a divine melting pot where all deities are superheated to become alike, so as to better fit the genre in which they appear. In this respect, it is significant that Amadeus Cho tells Hercules that he has “hooked [him] up with all-father powers” and that the hero is called a supergod more than once; even godhood follows the logic of power-levels and -types in the Marvel Universe. Continue reading Review: Marvel’s CHAOS WAR, an Epic (of Sorts) →