Infinity Omnibus by Starlin & Hickman collects Infinity Gauntlet nos. 1-6, Infinity nos. 1-6, New Avengers nos. 7-12, and Avengers nos. 14-23 written by Jim Starlin, Jonathan Hickman, and Nick Spencer with art by George Pérez, Ron Lim, Jim Cheung, Jerome Opeña, Dustin Weaver, Mike Deodato Jr., Stefano Caselli, Marco Checchetto, Marco Rudy, and Leinil Francis Yu.

Starlin and Pérez’s original six-issue miniseries is a masterpiece of comic book storytelling and space opera with a relatively self-contained plot that features Marvel’s most well-known characters at the time and touches on epic themes. Starlin and Pérez portray Thanos the Mad Titan using the Infinity Stones to make himself a god in a bid to win the love of Lady Death. The Avengers and other allies from the Marvel Universe must team up to stop him, recruiting cosmic heavyweights in the process who similarly wish to prevent Thanos from altering the power balance in the universe. Readers can easily jump in at the beginning and follow along, understanding the main characters’ motivations and reveling in the epic story.

Hickman and Spencer’s storyline is something else entirely. It involves Thanos, the Avengers, the X-Men, and others from the Marvel Universe, but the beginning is disorienting as it feels like an extension of several other event storylines and, without context, the reader is left to fend for themselves. The art, while more realistic than Pérez’s style, lacks the heart of Pérez’s work, trading realism for the ability of comic art to portray essential truth through caricature. The story itself involves a war between Wakanda and Atlantis, the threat of an invasion force heading to Earth and attacking various alien empires along the way, and Thanos seeking the whereabouts of his son among the Inhumans on Earth. It draws upon nearly all of Marvel’s alien empires and brings in both current and past Avengers as well as Marvel’s Illuminati. Amid all of this, Hickman and Spencer tend to lose focus in telling a coherent narrative. The story itself is certainly epic, but even the ending feels like something that serves to set up the next event crossover rather than tell a coherent, self-contained storyline.

The majority of this volume – twenty-two of the twenty-eight collected issues – features material from the big, publisher-wide summer event crossover Infinity. The original six-issue miniseries is a classic of comic book storytelling and for good reason, but it has only a passing connection with the newer story and it’s hard not to feel that the two were included because this omnibus would sell better with Starlin and Pérez’s story than if it were just the modern “Infinity” storyline. As it is, I primarily purchased this because I wanted the Infinity Gauntlet storyline and it came signed by Jim Starlin for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. ( )