Annihilators is a 2011 four-issue Marvel Comics miniseries written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, with art by Tan Eng Huat.
In the wake of the Cancerverse invasion, the universe is in turmoil. The invasion was just the latest in a string of devastating interstellar conflicts, and Cosmo the Space Dog knows that something even worse could be lurking just around the corner. To prevent this, he assembles some of the most powerful beings in the universe: Quasar, Ronan the Accuser, Gladiator of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard, Beta Ray Bill, and the Silver Surfer. He dubs them the Annihilators, and tasks them with stamping out potential threats before they can grow to a universe-threatening level.
The team is quickly joined by Ikon of the Galadorian Spaceknights. Their first mission: to stop the insidious Doctor Dredd from releasing the imprisoned Dire Wraiths back into the universe!
A sequel miniseries, Annihilators: Earthfall, was released the same year. In it, the Annihilators head to Earth to thwart a plot by the Universal Church of Truth, coming into conflict with the Avengers in the process.
Both series have a backup storyline featuring the adventures of Rocket Raccoon and Groot. In Annihilators, Rocket is forced to delve into the mysteries of his own past after being attacked by a murderous clown made of living wood. In Annihilators: Earthfall, Rocket and Groot become the unwilling stars of Mojo's latest TV series.
Annihilators and Annihilators: Earthfall provide examples of:
- Absurd Cutting Power: Doctor Dredd has used his sorcerous powers to give himself a universal cutting edge. This lets him cut anyone and anything, even a Nigh-Invulnerable being like the Silver Surfer, without even having to make physical contact.
- Actually a Doombot: In Earthfall, the Mojo that's been antagonizing Rocket and Groot turns out to be a robotic duplicate, built by the Major Domo to run things in the real Mojo's absence.
- Arc Villain: Each miniseries has its own villain, with no connection to each other.
- Annihilators has Dr. Dredd, who plans to release the Dire Wraiths from their imprisonment in Limbo. He then plans to sacrifice them in a magic ritual to restore his own people, the Skrulls.
- Annihilators: Earthfall has the Magus.
- Army of The Ages: The Annihilators run afoul of of Immortus's Army of the Ages while in Limbo. It's made up of warriors and soldiers plucked from every age of human history, and its ranks include Roman legionaries, medieval knights, samurai, World War II-era infantrymen, Native American warriors, and various robots and cyborgs.
- Batman Gambit: Star-Thief sent the killer clown after Rocket, knowing that Rocket would investigate the clown and that the trail of clues would lead him back to Halfworld. Rocket's very presence on Halfworld would then allow Star-Thief to escape confinement and wreak havoc.
- Big Bad Ensemble: Each miniseries has separate villains for its main and side plots, with no connection between them.
- In Annihilators, the main plot's villain is Doctor Dredd, who plots to release the Dire Wraiths from their imprisonment in Limbo and restore their power. At the same time, Rocket Raccoon and Groot must contend with the Star-Thief, who tries to manipulate Rocket into releasing him from his imprisonment on Halfworld.
- In Annihilators: Earthfall, the main plot's villain is the Magus, who has possessed a huge chunk of the U.S. population after being resurrected by his followers in the Universal Church of Truth. At the same time, Rocket and Groot are captured by Mojo and made to star in his latest life-or-death reality TV show.
- Classical Anti-Hero: Quasar spends most of the first miniseries grappling with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. He's still shaken up by the fact that he died the last time he tried to save the universe and feels like he doesn't belong on the same team as all these famous cosmic heavy-hitters, whom he views as real superheroes. It isn't until Immortus tells Quasar that he must live because the future will need him soon that Quasar starts getting his confidence back.
- Cutting Through Energy: When Quasar tries to restrain Doctor Dredd with a cage made of quantum energy, Dredd just slices the cage to pieces and walks out.
- Dimensional Cutter: Doctor Dredd's universal edge lets him go anywhere he pleases by slicing open the fabric of spacetime.
- Eleventy Zillion: In the backup story for Annihilators: Earthfall, Mojo claims that his new TV show about Rocket and Groot is going to make him a "gazillionty thrillion" galactic dollars, "and that's a real number in actual math!"
- Enemy Civil War: The Church of Universal Truth has split into rival factions following the Magus's death in The Thanos Imperative. The Annihilators intervene in a space battle between two of these factions to stop them from sucking their worshippers dry to fuel their weapons.
- Enfant Terrible: In Earthfall, the Magus has been reborn in the body of a child, and is just as evil as ever.
- Environment-Specific Action Figure: Mojo's in-universe Rocket Raccoon toyline includes four of these. Camo-Attack Rocket Raccoon with gauss cannon and grappling hook! Sea-Ops Rocket Raccoon with laser harpoon and Aquatic Combat Vehicle! Virtual Mission Rocket Raccoon with Digital Armor and Flight Cycle! Gyro Captain Rocket Raccoon with Post-Apocalypse Hair!
- Evil Sorcerer: Doctor Dredd and the Wraith Queen are both powerful warlocks who use their dark magic in pursuit of destructive, evil ends.
- The Exile: The Skrull who would become Doctor Dredd was banished to a penal colony for the crime of practicing magic in a society that prides itself on super science.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In Earthfall, when the Magus imprints himself on a huge chunk of the U.S. population, the panels are laid out so that the people he possessed are all staring directly at the reader.
- Godzilla Threshold: In Earthfall, Ronan summons a fleet of Kree Sentries and makes it clear that he will order them to turn the U.S. mainland into a glass crater if that's what it takes to stop the Magus. Fortunately, it doesn't come to that.
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: The Dire Wraiths were once one of the most feared races in the universe, but the time they've spent imprisoned in Limbo has reduced them to a pale shadow of their former glory. The ones the Annihilators meet are sickly, starving, powerless, and effectively waiting for death.Quasar: Good lord. These are the Wraiths? This is the mighty race everyone is so scared of?
- Human Disguise: The Earth-based members of the Universal Church of Truth use holographic disguises to make themselves look human. They switch these off in order to throw down with the Annihilators, only to turn them back on just before the Avengers show up to make the Annihilators look, as Beta Ray Bill puts it, like "alien psychopaths battering the flark out of innocent humans".
- I Am Legion: In Earthfall, the Magus has found a way to imprint his consciousness on others, effectively turning them into extensions of himself. He starts out by controlling a few dozen children, then quickly expands to thirty percent of the U.S. population, and keeps imprinting on more and more people.
- Legacy Character: Doctor Dredd is really a Skrull named Klobok, who learned Dire Wraith sorcery from the spirit of the original Doctor Dredd and then assumed his identity.
- Let's You and Him Fight: In Earthfall, the Annihilators come to Earth to stop the Universal Church of Truth from unleashing a terrible evil on the cosmos. But from the Avengers' perspective, it looks like the Annihilators are destroying a city and attacking innocent people for no reason. The bad blood between the Avengers and Ronan doesn't help, and a fight quickly breaks out.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: The inmates of Halfworld are put into immersive VR sims designed to act as therapeutic fantasies. Star-Thief is eventually put into such a sim where he imagines himself as a normal boy, playing with his beloved dog Mr. Binky.
- Meaningless Meaningful Words: The Timely Inc. mission statement is full of meaningless (and in many cases, Perfectly Cromulent) corporate buzz words that don't really convey what the company does.Today, all across the galaxy, cultures are being transformed by Timely Inc. Timely Inc. associates corporate solutions to a broad range of idea-oriented requirementations. Fully functional cyber-assembly plants and advancile nanotechniques ensure that Timely Inc.'s famous and trusted innovations reach your home in optimated form. Trust Timely Inc. to resolutionize your life and redactify all your probelmatory areas with its market leading product diversifectation. Let Timely Inc. target the difficultized sectors of your life genre with tailored and synergetic solutionoids. Timely Inc.: truly inventive. For all your oblique business needage.
- Mechanical Animals: In the backup story, Rocket finds Groot being guarded by a flock of "cyborg punishment birds". They're basically just robotic woodpeckers with laser-eyes.
- Merchandise-Driven: Mojo's show about Rocket and Groot is an in-universe example. He's made at least four different Rocket Raccoon toys: each one is an Environment-Specific Action Figure, packaged with one piece of a buildable Groot toy. Mojo expects the toy sales to make up a big part of the profits.
- The Mole: The Wraith Queen has disguised herself as a member of Brandy Clark's retinue to manipulate her. Skrulls loyal to Doctor Dredd have likewise infiltrated the ranks of the Spaceknights, and they break him out of prison while the Annihilators are busy in Limbo.
- Monster Clown: A gun-toting wooden clown tries to kill Rocket at his workplace. Later, a whole hit squad of similar clowns comes after him on Planet X.
- Original Generation: Ikon was created specifically for this series, whereas all the other Annihilators are pre-existing characters.
- Planetary Relocation: Doctor Dredd uses his sorcery to teleport the Black Sun out of the Dark Nebula and into the Galadorian star system, where it threatens to consume the local star and go supernova. The Annihilators later bring Wraithworld out of Limbo and park it on the opposite side of the sun from Galador.
- Puppeteer Parasite: Groot manages to take control of some of the killer clowns by germinating cuttings of himself in their wooden heads.
- Resurgent Empire: Doctor Dread's ultimate goal is to restore the Skrull Empire to its former glory, by using sorcery to transform the Dire Wraiths into an army of Skrulls. He is killed before he can accomplish this.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: Rocket Raccoon's coworkers at Timely Inc. think he's the cutest thing in the world and can't help fawning over him or talking to him in a patronizing manner, which he hates. In fact, his cuteness was the only reason he was hired.Rocket's boss: You helped us meet our quota of cute sentient animals. You make the Timely Inc. office environment a more cheerful place so as to uplift the people who do actual work.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Star-Thief has been imprisoned in the deepest level of the Halfworld mental asylum. To prevent him from using his psychic powers to take over the staff and release himself, they adjusted the security protocols so that a lockdown can only be lifted if every single member of the staff is present and agrees to it. Rocket then left Halfworld and wiped his own memories so that he would never try to come back, thus ensuring that Star-Thief could never get out. Unfortunately, Star-Thief found a way to lure Rocket back...
- Shout-Out: One of the VR sets that Mojo sends Rocket and Groot into is a futuristic city clearly based on TRON: Legacy, with pink Recognizers flying through the skyline while copies of Rocket dressed as Rinzler pursue the duo on knockoff light cycles.
- The Smurfette Principle: Ikon is the only female member of the team.
- Soul-Crushing Desk Job: Or near enough. After the Guardians of the Galaxy disbanded, Rocket got a job as a mail clerk in the Timely Inc. company. He clearly hates the job, grimacing every time an employee fawns over him or patronizes him when he delivers their mail, and finding out that he was only hired to fill a quota does not make him feel any better.
- Story-Breaker Power: This is ultimately why the team didn't last very long. The Annihilators is a group made up of cosmic heavy hitters where the weakest member is still a planet buster. There's quite simply not a lot of enemies, even in Marvel Cosmic, that could pose a threat to them.
- Sympathy for the Devil: The Silver Surfer feels sympathy for the Wraith Queen after he views her memories and learns that constantly hearing her kin's telepathic cries for help and feelings of distress has driven her mad. Quasar likewise expresses pity for the Queen when she reunites with the other Dire Wraiths, only for the Dire Wraiths to make it clear that they despise her and blame her for their imprisonment.
- Take This Job and Shove It: Rocket already hates working for Timely Inc. as a mail clerk, especially after his boss admits the only reason he was hired was to make the other employees feel better. So when his boss fires him for the crime of defending himself from a killer clown, Rocket responds by shoving a trashcan on the man's head and declaring that he quits.
- Token Human: Quasar is the only human on a team consisting of various aliens and a telepathic dog.
- Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: The Wraith Queen tries to eat the Silver Surfer's brain and absorb his memories, only to find out the hard way that the mind of an ex-Herald of Galactus is far, far beyond what she can handle. The resulting psychic backlash knocks her out, banishes her army of shadow creatures, and gives the Surfer insight into her own memories and motivations.
- Transformation of the Possessed: In Earthfall, anyone possessed by the Magus gets his trademark purple skin, red eyes, and white hair.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: Both miniseries have a main plot revolving around the titular team, and a side plot about the adventures of Rocket Raccoon and Groot.
- We Have Become Complacent: Brandy Clark feels that the Spaceknights have become stagnant and soft ever since their ancient enemies, the Dire Wraiths, were sealed away. This, and her desire to reunite with her missing husband, led her to help Doctor Dredd's scheme to release the Dire Wraiths from Limbo.
- Weird Sun: The Black Sun that empowers the Dire Wraiths is a major plot element of the first miniseries. It eventually fuses with the Galadorian sun to become a single star that is yellow on one hemisphere and black on the other.
- Writing Around Trademarks: The first volume alludes to Rom multiple times, takes place on his homeworld, and even features his love interest and wife as an important character. But since Marvel doesn't own the rights to Rom: Spaceknight, he is never mentioned by name and doesn't appear at all. The in-story justification is that he disappeared some time ago.
- You Got Murder: Rocket receives a mysterious package in the mail. When he signs for it, a gun-toting clown pops out and immediately tries to murder him.
- Your Head Asplode: Star-Thief possesses Judson Jakes and makes his head explode.
