Jonathan Hickman's Infinity is really only half an Event comic - the Event half is a really cool story about Thanos and the Inhumans while the second half is basically just Hickman's Avengers and New Avengers series smooshed alongside it. And if you're not a fan of Hickman's Avengers work - and I'm not - then you're only ever going to partially like Infinity, with the best any given issue being able to offer to readers like me being half a good comic, which this issue achieves. Let's talk about the good stuff first. New York is decimated (isn't it always?) after the Inhuman King Black Bolt unleashes his awesome voice against Thanos who has come to Earth to kill his son, Thane, a member of the Inhuman race. The only thing of note from Jason Aaron's Thanos Rising mini-series was that Thanos sired a number of children on a number of planets and then went mad and decided to kill them all, and that explains what he's doing on Earth in this story. Except Black Bolt's power has detonated the Terrigen Bomb housed in the Inhuman floating kingdom of Attilan. A quick note about the Inhumans - they got their powers from something called the Terrigen Mist which activates any Inhuman cells in a person, turning them into a superpowered Inhuman. With the Terrigen bomb exploded, the entire planet is suddenly enveloped in the Terrigen mist and vast numbers of Inhumans begin popping up on Earth, tying Infinity #4 directly into the next Marvel Event, Inhumanity by Matt Fraction. It's a really cool sequence which turns Thane - initially an unremarkable ordinary human healer - into something else entirely, a being more suited for the son of Thanos. Black Bolt and Thanos then have an excellent fight with Black Bolt giving Thanos a run for his money - but that's it for this issue unfortunately.
The rest of the comic is, sigh, taken up with the Avengers fighting evil aliens, the Builders, in a galaxy far, far away. This is a storyline that I couldn't care less about. There are so many unknown alien species thrown into this plot that I can't follow what's going on. This is also the storyline where it seems most of the tie-ins have added to it because it feels like an entire war happened in between this issue and the last - and I haven't been reading the tie-ins. The Thanos/Inhumans storyline is more understandable because you only need to be reading the Infinity main issues to follow it (and it's also much more interesting anyway). So the Avengers are seemingly down and send in Thor as ambassador(!) who has a cool scene as he meets with a Builder to negotiate surrender, only to reignite the conflict in his own way. I still think it's weird that Cap is leading this space war, mostly because he's written as the man out of time, a character from the 1940s who can't figure out a 21st century coffee machine but is surrounded by insanely futuristic tech and is the unelected leader of fleets of spaceships - he just seems so out of place and unlikely to know what to do with these gizmos. I keep expecting him to get frustrated with touch screens like you see old people do. Like I said though, if you're a Hickman/Avengers fan, I'm sure you're getting a lot out of Infinity. If you're not, only half of Infinity is going to interest you, but that half in this issue was pretty damn good and, while I'm not crazy about Infinity, I'm looking forward to Fraction's Inhumanity which this issue is a nice early look at what we can expect from that series.
Published by Marvel Comics, Infinity #4 by Jonathan Hickman, Jerome Opena and Dustin Weaver is out now