The Strangest Consequence of Shared Universe Comics Just Ruined the Ending of Marvel’s Newest Event

Marvel Comics, and most superhero comics, for that matter, operate within shared universes. That means that all of Marvel’s characters exist within a single reality, letting them interact with each other and even crossover into each other’s comics. The biggest strength of this, obviously, is that it lets everyone’s favorite heroes and villains interact, fight, and star in spectacular stories together. The logical extreme of this phenomenon is when multiple books and dozens of heroes come together to stop a world-ending threat in a massive crossover event. Marvel is famous and infamous for their endless number of events, and there’s a ton to love about them, but also a ton to dislike.

Today, we’re not talking about the good or the bad parts of events, but the strangest outcome. See, Marvel puts out dozens of comics every week, and they can’t exactly stop the presses every time an event rolls around. If they did, they’d never get anything done, and we’d probably still be stuck in the days of Blood Hunt. That means that other storylines tend to continue on while the events walk to the finish line, which is great, but can create some strange circumstances. That’s exactly what happened in the pages of Thor #801, which spoiled Hela’s fate from the as-of-yet unreleased Queen in Black.

An Uncertain Fate Already Spoiled

So far, the pages of Queen in Black have been building up to a final, climactic confrontation between Hela, Knull, and Venom. Hela has raised her army of symbiotes bonded to aliens, cloaked with the power of death. Knull has fashioned a new army out of pure brightness with his new status as the God of Light. MJ and Venom, meanwhile, have bonded with the Earth itself to create Venomworld, ready and willing to defend the galaxy from the two gods’ tyranny. All three sides have been preparing for a battle that only one can walk away from, but before we even got to see how it happens, we learned Hela’s fate. After Sigurd Jarlson was thrown into Hel as his first step towards resurrecting Thor, he met Karnilla, who trapped her wife’s soul in Balder’s withering form.

Karnilla explained that she didn’t want to relinquish her throne to the former ruler of Hel, so she trapped Hela’s soul where Balder’s heart should be. Hela’s soul was said to have returned to her realm after her demise, which means that she is definitely going to lose the power struggle in Queen in Black. Not only that, but she is going to be killed and completely removed from her position, meaning that either Knull or MJ is going to completely cut her off from the symbiotes. The gigantic symbiote event is the culmination of Al Ewing’s multi-year Venom epic, so to see it spoiled in his other amazing ongoing is definitely confirmation of exactly what’s going on, but also a very strange situation.

The Dissonance that Ruins Endings

At the end of the day, we knew that Hela was going to be defeated. Heck, we already know that MJ and Venom are going to split up at the end of this event, given that Eddie is back in black one month after. It’s pretty common for upcoming comics to spoil how certain storylines go down, but the difference is that all of this information is avoidable. Solicits and announcements are things that the reader would have to look up outside of comics, so the onus to avoid these spoilers is on them. Good guys winning in the end, of course, is also the expected result, but the difference with Thor spoiling Hela’s fate is that it’s entirely different to know the heroes will win versus knowing the villain’s fate.

Learning that Hela is being junted back to her realm takes the wind out of the Queen in Black‘s sails. It completely strips the event of any tension it managed to generate. The more we see of the aftermath before the event begins, the less important the event feels. It also usually serves as a signifier of how much Marvel actually believes in the event. The best example is in Avengers: Armageddon, where they hid the fact that Colton becomes the new Miracle Man until after it happened. It helped build hype and made the reveal hit all that harder. Revealing the ending before it happens like this makes me wonder why we should care in the first place.

This isn’t an event-ruining spoiler or anything, but it does make it harder to engage with the finale the way it intends, which is to present Hela as a massive threat. This isn’t to argue that individual comic runs should feel the need to change their schedules or content to match more closely with events, but this definitely shouldn’t happen too often. Events have a hard enough time generating hype as it is, given how frequent they are and how little they tend to genuinely change things, so Marvel should hold spoilers for these stories with a little bit of a tighter hand.

What do you think of these types of spoilers? Are they event-ruining, or don’t matter and are just plain weird? Let us know in the comments below!

Thor #801 is on sale now!

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