‘Avengers: Infinity War’: Ebony Maw Borrows Line Straight From Comics

With such a large stable of characters, places, and events, the powers that be at Marvel Studios are bound to draw all kinds of inspiration from the Marvel comics mythos.

Speaking in particular, Avengers: Infinity War drew on two major comics events in particular: Infinity Gauntlet by Jim Starling, George Perez, and Ron Lim and Infinity by Johnathan Hickman, Jim Cheung, and Jerome Opena.

Those runs influenced the movie so much, one of Infinity War’s opening lines was taken straight out of the comics.

Major spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War ahead. Proceed with caution.

As the typical opening Marvel logo scroll begins to roll, we instantly hear a distress signal coming from the Asgardians refugee ship we saw at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. Thanos and his adoptive children, the Black Order, have boarded their ship.

Unbeknownst to Thor, Loki had taken the Tesseract from Odin’s vault before Surtur destroyed their home and Thanos had come to collect it.

Loki eventually gives up the Tesseract to save Thor’s life and as Ebony Maw — one of the members of the aforementioned Black Order — handed the vessel containing the Space Stone to Thanos, he said a line taken straight from an Infinity Gauntlet comic.

“My humble personage bows before your grandeur,” Ebony Maw said as he handed the Tesseract to Thanos.

In the comics, as Thanos had began to assemble a team to help track down the Infinity Gems — as they were called at the time — Mephisto was ecstatic to be chosen as a part of the team.

The exact lines Mephisto said went:

“Within your grasp rests the infinite. My humble personage bows before your grandeur. I am proud to be your first acolyte and bask in the glory of your divine presence,” the demon says.

Prior to the debut of the movie, directors Joe and Anthony Russo went on record saying that Ebony had been an early fan-favorite character of those who had seen the test screenings.

“We’re trying to find the personality of those characters, the Black Order,” Joe Russo said. “We were looking for people to bring personality to these characters and he [Tom Vaughan-Lawlor] just brought this interesting, complex character that’s really popping with people that have seen the movie so far.”

Vaughan-Lawlor himself had previously talked with Inverse about his Infinity War role.

“I’ll have to sidestep the question unfortunately, and say he is an extremely exciting character to play, and he is a very special character,” the actor confirmed. “I’m really excited to see how people find him. All I can say really is that the experience was really incredible. It was an amazing thing to work with those guys. It was really special.”

What did you think of Vaughan-Lawlor’s performance as Ebony Maw? Was he your favorite character of the Black Order? If not, who did you like? Let us know in the comments below!