Ruins (comics)
| Ruins | |
|---|---|
Cover to Ruins #1 - Men on Fire. Art by Terese Nielsen
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| Publication information | |
| Publisher | Marvel Comics |
| Schedule | Monthly |
| Format | Limited series |
| Genre | |
| Publication date(s) | August – September 1995 |
| No. of issues | 2 |
| Creative team | |
| Written by | Warren Ellis |
| Artist(s) |
Terese Nielsen Cliff Nielsen Chris Moeller (issue 2, last seventeen pages only) |
| Letterer(s) | Jonathan Babcock |
| Colorist(s) |
Terese Nielsen Cliff Nielsen Chris Moeller (issue 2, last seventeen pages only) |
| Editor(s) |
Tom Daning Marie Javins Carl Potts Polly Watson |
Ruins is a two-issue comic book mini-series, written by Warren Ellis with painted artwork by Terese Nielsen, her husband Cliff Nielsen, and Chris Moeller, who took over for the last seventeen pages of the second issue.
The series, conceived by Ellis as a parody of the Marvels series by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, is set in a dystopian version of the Marvel Universe. Like Marvels, the comic features reporter Phil Sheldon as the main character and was published in prestige format, with fully painted artwork and acetate covers, further creating the impression that it is a more twisted companion piece.
In the Marvel Multiverse, Earth of the Ruins universe is listed as Earth-9591.
Ruins follows former Daily Bugle reporter Phil Sheldon as he explores a dystopian alternate Marvel Universe where, in his words, "everything that can go wrong will go wrong"; a world where the myriad experiments and accidents which led to the creation of superheroes in the mainstream Marvel Universe instead resulted in horrible deformities and painful deaths. Sheldon tours the country investigating the after-effects of these events, researching a book about the strange phenomena in order to prove that the world has taken a wrong turn somewhere.
In the first issue, after witnessing the destruction of the last Avengers Quinjet (in this reality, the Avengers are a radical secessionist rebel group rebelling against an oppressive American government led by 'President X'), which has killed Captain America, Giant-Man, and Iron Man, and encountering a decaying Wolverine - whose flesh is slowly falling off from the toxicity of his adamantium bone structure - Sheldon proceeds to a Kree internment camp in Nevada, situated on a nuclear test site, where the last survivors of a Kree invasion fleet are slowly dying of cancer. Sheldon interviews Captain Mar-Vell, one of the Kree prisoners, who tells him why their invasion failed. The Kree had encountered the Silver Surfer (who had gone mad and torn open his own chest in a futile attempt to experience respiration again) only to discover that the Power Cosmic emanating from the Surfer's body had been interfering with their scanners. This prevented the Kree fleet from detecting a nuclear barrage which subsequently destroyed ninety percent of the Kree warships. In Washington, D.C., Sheldon meets government agent Nick Fury, who attacks and almost shoots him, insisting that 'proved he was clean' and claiming that Captain America introduced him to cannibalism. They are interrupted by Jean Grey, here a prostitute, who offers herself to the two men for twenty dollars; but Fury shoots her dead and then kills himself. After his encounter with Fury, Sheldon visits Chicago and interviews Rick Jones, a morphine addict living with fellow addict Marlo Chandler, who tells the story of when Bruce Banner saved him from a gamma radiation blast - which did not turn Banner into the Hulk, but instead transformed him into a monstrous green mass of pulsating tumors. Leaving the apartment, Sheldon trips over the corpse of the Punisher in the snow, and the issue ends with him on his knees as he begs to be allowed to show the world how this state of affairs came to pass.
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