Marvel Comics is known for having a vast events that span the lengths and depths of their universe. Annihilation, Annihilation: Conquest, and War of Kings form a loose trilogy of sorts that are among the company’s best cosmic stories. Annihilation shakes up the status quo of the Marvel Universe while not touching Earth at all as Marvel’s space heroes such as Nova, Quasar, and the Silver Surfer must band together to stop an invading force from the Negative Zone. Conquest picks up in the aftermath of that bloody battle focusing more on the Kree. And both of these lead into War of Kings. The Shi’ar, one of Marvel’s most powerful alien races, find themselves caught in civil war with ties to the X-Men. Cyclops’ brother has assumed the thrown and returned the empire to its old ways of violence and conquest. The weakened remains of the Kree empire unit with the Inhumans to stop them.
The great thing about War of Kings is that while it does feature a lot of the X-Men, it also focuses on characters who don’t normally get a lot of attention like Gladiator and the Imperial Guard, the Starjammers, the Inhumans, and Ronan the Accuser. War of Kings also approaches its story in a much more Star Wars/Star Trek type of SF style. The omnibus is filled with massive fleet battles, high tech weapons, and interstellar politics.
The writing in War of Kings is fantastic as is the art. Though reading Annihilation and Conquest make its story more meaningful, a reader can jump directly into this omnibus and still enjoy it greatly. Marvel’s cosmic stories truly don’t get any better than War of Kings and the omnibus collects the core series of the event and all of its tie ins inside one gigantic, hardcover book. While not the most comfortable to read, the omnibus is the complete story and looks beautiful on a bookshelf.
