A crossover event that started 2005 with the Drax the Destroyer mini and ended 2007 with the Annihilation: Heralds of Galactus 2-parter that showed what happened to some of the big fish who crossed Galactus path. The whole events, mostly orchestrated by Keith Giffen was intended as a showcase for some of the cosmic heroes of the Marvel universe. The big threat was the old F4 foe Annihilus, who sees his universe threatened by our own and begins to invade ours. Interestingly, despite not the focus of Marvel marketing, the whole series is well collected. All minis and essential issues have been collected in three volumes.
The first volume collects the Drax the Destroyer mini, the Annihilation: Prologue one-shot and the Annihilation: Nova mini. These are actually my favorite parts of the whole series, especially the Drax the Destroyer mini. Despite being somewhat negligible concerning the bigger plot, it has excellent art and an ingenious implementation of a pretty generic plot. A ship with alien prisoners crashes in a backyard town on earth and the aliens try to enslave the humans until their ship is repaired. Brilliant dialog, especially everything the Skrull says and does and the banter between Drax and Cammi. Like I said, it’s not important in the bigger scheme of things, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. The Nova mini by Abnett and Lanning is also pretty good, if a bit more conventional.
The second volume collects the Silver Surfer, the Super Skrull and the Ronan mini. Of these I liked the Silver Surfer mini the most, but the other two are okay too. It’s all cosmic adventure, but hampered by the fact that all lead into the Annihilation mini, which is collected in the third volume together with the Heralds of Galactus 2-parter. I say hampered, because I actually didn’t really enjoy the main Annihilation 6-part mini. While I like Giffen in general (see the Drax the Destroyer mini), the joining of all the minis into a big, coherent space opera epic never really worked for me. It felt too fragmented, the narrative too disjointed by trying to give each character some space.
This sadly meant none of the characters had enough space, enough characterization like in each of the minis. Another problem was the nature of the threat. A big wave of interchangeable enemies meant that most fights were quite boring, as squashing bugs isn’t as much fun as battles between heroes and recognizable enemies. It’s still an okay read, but just not as enjoyable as I was expecting (and lead to believe by so many gushing reviews of the whole event). Basically, good start, but fizzles out toward the end. And some of the most interesting stuff either happened off-screen or in issues not collected (like Galactus and Silver Surfer’s imprisonment).
It also has hilarious bad science (apart from the obvious comic stuff). There’s no center of the universe where the big bang originated. That’s just wrong. No edge likewise.
The Entropy Pump 