Review: Thanos: Titan Consumed

MARVEL's Avengers: Infinity War: Thanos: Titan Consumed by Barry Lyga
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'd say Barry Lyga's a pretty equal-opportunity fanboy. This book couldn't be any less like Lyga's Flash trilogy: not only is it Marvel, but it's a pretty epically crushing secret origin for Thanos. Following the Mad Titan from his birth onward, we get a glimpse of how great a world Titan used to be, until all that prosperous veneer came crashing down in the end, as we all knew it would.


And of course, that's not the end of the book there. Even as an adolescent, Thanos is already proposing what Itex Corporation in Maximum Ride would've called the By-Half Plan. Already there's a lot of sympathy for Thanos going around in the real world, with people focusing on what remorse he shows even when he tries to squash that down, his utter devotion to his schemes, and his complete sense of justification. But this book explains Thanos so well as only Lyga, prototypically one of the darkest writers in all of YA, can do.

It all goes back to his childhood, when his mother was nowhere to be seen because she was locked away in a psychosylum (yeah, Titan already ain't perfect, ain't it? Kinda get some shades of Omelas there), his father would literally buy him friends (and, at one point, even suggested buying his son some pleasurable company to, uh, "unburden himself," as Mr. Robot would say), and Thanos was himself severely ostracized and forcibly hidden from most of society due to a combination of racism (his purple skin is exceedingly rare, and despised because the Titans consider it the color of death) and ableism (I hate to say it, but Lyga's characterization of Thanos is very autistic-coded to me - though rather than being offended, as an autistic person, I applaud Lyga for adding that detail into an already complex character and making him, even for a moment or ten, actually super bloody relatable.)

When Thanos is eventually exiled from Titan, he manages to find his way into a new band of travelers, and from there starts the ball rolling on his involvement with all the forces of destruction he'll come to bring against the rest of the universe. He travels from world to world like a dark, twisted second coming of The Little Prince, at first struggling to reason with leaders who refuse to listen to him any more than the leaders of Titan, and then as a warlord of increasing might. And that's before he finds his adoptive daughters in Gamora and Nebula, before he gains a bunch of extra-dangerous acolytes, and before he learns of the Infinity Stones' true abilities from a trolling Lorekeeper.

I gotta say, the Lorekeeper scene is the single greatest thing Lyga ever wrote. I seriously wish that scene would be filmed for real, even if it winds up being a secret Easter egg featurette on the Endgame Blu-ray 3D 4K UHD digital download edition or something.

It seems like every January I find at least one backlist book from the previous year that, had I read it the year before, would've made the Top 5 in the Pinecone Awards for sure. It's a grand tradition including such examples as Victoria Schwab's The Archived, Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff's Illuminae, S.A. Chakraborty's The City of Brass...and now, Barry Lyga's Thanos: Titan Consumed.

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