THE END Vol. 3

This volume is the third book in the officially licensed Marvel series THE END and contains the chapters collected from the six-issue miniseries Marvel: The End, written and drawn by Jim Starlin in 2003. The story begins with the Heart of the Universe, an ancient source of power: a group of alien explorers forms the Celestial Order to use this force to impose order on the universe by force, and their chosen agent on Earth is the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. The power corrupts Akhenaten, who descends upon the contemporary Earth and conquers the world with the might of the Heart of the Universe, and many heroes fall as a result. Under the shadow of doom, Doctor Doom tries to travel back in time to eliminate Akhenaten before he becomes a god, but fails; Thanos, a demigod, perceives the existence of the Heart of the Universe and gathers the surviving heroes, including the Defenders and Captain Marvel, to strike back at the Celestial Order. This volume continues the narrative of that ultimate crisis, bringing personal grudges, a gallery of heroes and destruction on a cosmic scale to the fore. It should be noted that Marvel officially positions the series as a "non-canon" story, through which the author reflects on the convention in superhero comics that "death is always undone"; the Chinese edition is printed in 16-mo volumes, of which this is the third in the series, and it is best read together with the volumes before and after it.