Thanos Lights Up Empire’s Beautiful Subscriber Cover For Avengers: Infinity War

The Mad Titan cometh.

With less than six weeks to go until the hotly-anticipated release of Avengers: Infinity War, Empire has today peeled back the curtain on its exclusive subscriber cover for the Marvel ensemble piece, and it’s a fitting tribute to Thanos and his souped-up Infinity Gauntlet.

Drawn up by the remarkably talented Orlando Arocena, this old-school illustration is a visual delight, as it shows the Marvel mega-villain wielding that fabled Gauntlet and all six of its precious stones: Mind, Time, Power, Reality, Space, and the elusive Soul Stone, which is seemingly not housed up in Wakanda, after all…

Indeed, speculation is rife that Iron Man and the fabled Soul Stone are one and the same, while others believe the burden to find the sixth and final Infinity Stone has fallen upon the shoulders of Hawkeye, a character who has been conspicuously absent from Avengers: Infinity War‘s marketing blitz thus far. Superman, eat your heart out.

As for Empire’s newly-appointed cover star, Josh Brolin’s Thanos is said to be a whole new breed of supervillain – Darth Vader on steroids, according to Joe Russo.

Who’s the most surprising? Let’s take Thanos. I don’t want to keep defaulting to him but I think people will find him at turns horrifying and at turns empathetic. … Certainly, we love villains with depth and it was really, you know, in Winter Soldier what motivated us to work on that film is the fact that Captain America was unwittingly going up against his best friend. As a villain it’s an incredibly rich backstory and potential for real drama there, so we love complicated villains.

Ahead of the final product arriving on April 27th, Empire is expected to peel back the many layers of Avengers: Infinity War in the coming days, so stay tuned for more. In the meantime, you can feast your eyes on that inspired cover art down below.