New Thanos novel will answer all your backstory questions if you ignore that it’s not canon

Marvel is getting a new novel that reveals all about Thanos’ backstory before Infinity War. But the novel comes out well after Infinity War’s release.

Comic books, step aside. Thanos’ backstory will now be revealed by the way of a new novel set to shed some light on the events before Infinity War.

For years in the MCU, Thanos has been silently operating in the background as the Mad Titan bent on gathering the Infinity Stones for a barely known purpose. All we’ve come to gather so far is that he’s the father of Gamora and Nebula, and he might just want to destroy half the universe.

Now, in the novel Thanos —Titan Consumed by Barry Lyga, there’ll be more to learn about just how and why Thanos became fixated on destroying the universe in the first place.

The caveat, however, is the book technically has “no canonical ties to the MCU.” This comes from  io9, in which the novel’s publisher, indicated that the book would technically be separate from the MCU. Does that mean the novel isn’t worth reading? Not necessarily. Lyga revealed to io9 that he and the people at Marvel worked really hard to create a good book with sustenance.

“My editor and I had a lengthy conference call with the folks at Marvel Studios,” Lyga said. “They started off with a sort of outline of who Thanos is and what he means to the movies, and then I got to ask my questions, some of which were worthwhile, some of which were impertinent.”

Thanos: Titan Consumed book cover. Image: Little, Brown and Company via io9.

Saying that it’s not 100 percent canon compliant should be taken with a grain of salt. The novel is still a way of explaining how Thanos came to be before Infinity War nonetheless. Lyga wanted to make sure that there would be some kind of context to give moviegoers.

“I really hope that certain bits in the book will make people go, ‘Oh, so now that cool scene from that one movie is even cooler!'” he said. “I really wanted to reverse-engineer those moments we’ve all seen already — in Guardians, in Avengers — and show how we got to them.”

It seems like Lyga had the same idea as directors Joe and Anthony Russo when it came to writing Thanos. Most importantly, he wanted to make Thanos a villain who you can understand where he’s coming from, regardless of how ruthless his actions might be.

On that subject, Lyga explained: “I wanted those logical leaps to fall into place. For his path to be so rational and so sensible that you would read the book and say, ‘Well, I personally don’t want to kill half the universe, but I completely understand why Thanos does, and it makes perfect sense, and I don’t see how he could turn out any other way.’ A sense of inevitability, really.”

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The novel is set to come out on November 20. So while you won’t be able to read it before Infinity War comes out, it’ll likely be out in time for the Infinity War home release.