Warhammer 40,000: Marneus Calgar #5 - Marvel Comics

WARHAMMER 40,000: MARNEUS CALGAR No. 5, April 2021

Firmly fixated upon the titular character’s final battle against two of the traitorous trainees he once fought when he was universally known as just lowly Tacitan, this twenty-one page periodical’s plot certainly can’t be described as being unexciting or actionless. But whilst Kieron Gillen’s storyline for Issue Five of “Warhammer 40,000: Marneus Calgar” contains plenty of pulse-pounding power fist-based pugilism and several bucket loads of gory blood, its opening scene depicts the Chapter Master of the Ultramarines in such a dire predicament that arguably any plausibility that he could single-handedly survive the Khorne threat on Thulium Minor is immediately lost.

For starters, having endured his Thunderhawk’s horrific crash the Lord of Macragge finds himself stood facing both the double-headed, physically-fused incarnation of his former acquaintances, as well as a good half a dozen able-bodied Chaos Space Marines. These formidable enemies are all within spitting distance of Calgar, yet seem to make no effort at all to close the gap between them, preferring instead to ineffectively fire at the retreating Adeptus Astartes as he withdraws deep inside a nearby mining facility. 

True, as Marneus points out to his accompanying tech priest, the Lord Defender of Greater Ultramar is “a small army” in his own right. But considering that he is literally also just a stone’s throw away from the incredible firepower of a gigantic, super-heavy Daemon Engine of Chaos, it is difficult to believe even he could survive such close proximity to a great cleaver of Khorne, or a Skullhurler, or even a Daemongore cannon, if the “grotesque battle construct” had attacked him from this comic’s start; “Unleashing a torrent of burning filth at all that lies before the Lord of Skulls. It is capable of reducing whole armoured divisions to molten slag.”

Instead, the British writer pens a bizarrely unambitious conclusion which sees Jacen Burrows proficiently pencilling the Primaris Space Marine besting a mere handful of the Blood God’s most loyal acolytes within the ruins of a long-downed World Bearers vessel, before apparently being both outmanoeuvred and subsequently outfought by his heavily mutated main adversary. This climax is debatably made all the worse by having the Ultramarine willingly have one of his hearts pierced by the semi-naked Chaos Champion’s sword in a clichéd effort to get his hands on his opponent after deciding his Power Fists alone didn’t give him the reach needed to do the job.

The regular cover art of "WARHAMMER 40,000: MARNEUS CALGAR" #5 by James Stokoe