- 6,196
- 16,487
Well, ******* finally.
As it stands, this thread will largely only discuss scaling and presentation of profiles, so, those who are not interested in this are free to ignore it. I'm also not terribly sure if this is controversial enough to warrant being moved to the Staff Discussion board, as were the last two threads, so, for the moment, it will be a regular CRT.
Now, moving on:
The Profiles
So, here they are:
I basically remade them from the top-down, so, preferably read them carefully to ascertain the validity of the changes outside of tiering. Obviously, while there are still more profiles to revise, these will serve as the basis for their ratings.
Odin's page, in particular, will be revised more thoroughly in the next part of these revisions, since he is from the group of characters that it tackles, but for the moment, I changed his AP and speed ratings alone, to give a model for what characters roughly on that level will look like.
About the Herald Tiers
So, currently, Marvel Comics' Herald-tier characters are scaled to 2-C at their absolute peaks, using Thor as a lynchpin. Thor, for his part, is that high because:
Long story short: He did stuff to Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil contains nine realms which are universes. Hence 2-C.
Yeah, so, these feats are pretty massive outliers. To put it bluntly: Yggdrasil is not 2-C, it encompasses the whole multiverse. Here and here, it's stated to exist across every plane of reality, and here, it's stated to be "everything" and to have branches and roots in "all that is." These statements are given framing context by this, which states Yggdrasil extends over all the multiverse's timelines, and by this, which shows even the Living Tribunal is encompassed by Yggdrasil.
So, unless we want to have all the Herald tiers be actually High Abstract tiers, these feats are unusable. And frankly even the current profiles are extremely weird on the matter. Odin's, for instance, works on the assumption that Yggdrasil is 2-A, despite it being used to justify 2-C, too.
As for what tier they will be: From what I can tell, we accept Hercules lifting the Greek firmament as being a High 3-A feat, so, that could serve as a good substitute for the current max ratings. A few other feats can also be recontextualized as being on that scale, taking a few pieces of information into account.
For example, Asgard and Earth are explicitly spaced apart by an infinite void, so Thor creating a storm that affects Earth from Asgard can potentially be reevaluated based on this. Thor has also wrestled with the Midgard Serpent while the latter was bridging the gap between Earth and Asgard with its length, so, that's another feat that'd interesting to take into account. But I ultimately leave this up to debate, seeing as Asgard has a fairly long list of statements about being plainly outside of space snd time, which may turn these feats harder to quantify.
Whatever Happened To Above All Others?
So, as you might have noticed from the first profile, I completely removed all references to Jim Starlin's Infinity Finale/Infinity Conflict/Infinity Ending storylines from The One Above All's profile, and I suppose an explanation is due.
To put it bluntly: That whole thing is so non-canon it hurts. Or more precisely, it's not canon to the regular setting of Marvel Comics. And to explain why, I ought to give a brief overview of the series of stories this topic revolves around, as well as their place in the verse.
First, we start with New Avengers Vol. 3, a long-running storyline penned up by Jonathan Hickman, which ran from January 3, 2013 to April 29, 2015. The overarching story was basically about apocalyptic events known as the Incursions, which were destroying and colliding universes all throughout the multiverse and causing the early death of existence as a result, and the heroes' efforts towards somehow finding a way to stop them. The story started reaching its climax in Issue #30, released in February 25, 2015, where it was revealed that the Beyonders were behind the Incursions, and where it was shown that they massacred all of the Abstracts, including the Living Tribunal, across all realities (This detail is important, so, keep it in mind)
Now, New Avengers Vol. 3's finale gave way to Secret Wars, a company-wide event that ran from May 6, 2015 to January 13, 2016. Long short story: It starts with the last two timelines in the multiverse being seemingly destroyed, and then ends with existence being reborn.
Only two months before Secret Wars' finale, though, in November 11, 2015, was released the first issue of Ultimates, written by Al Ewing. Now, this one took place after the events of Secret Wars, already in the rebirthed multiverse. More specifically, it established the idea that the previous iteration of existence was the Seventh, and that Marvel now takes place in the Eighth.
As Ultimates' storyline kept progressing along, it kept fleshing out the new cosmic status quo more and more. This trend continued well into the release of the sequel, Ultimates², which started publication in November 23, 2016, and it all came to a close with the finale, Garden of Ideas, published in August 17, 2017, which established more things about the new cosmic status quo: Namely, Infinity doesn't exist anymore. She was a personification and feature of the Seventh Multiverse and its realities, and moved on to the next place after it "died." Eternity is now the sole embodiment of existence.
Now, with all that groundwork set, let's pause and rewind a bit for the actual topic here: We're going back all the way to August 6, 2014, when Marvel released Thanos: The Infinity Revelation, this one penned up by Jim Starlin. By and large, it plays out very much like a pre-Secret Wars story, with all of the features of the classic cosmology that this entails, most notable of which is the fact Infinity still exists. Important because the universal personification reflects the multiversal personification, and so you shouldn't see Infinity around in the Eighth Cosmos at all, just like you shouldn't see the personification of the Sixth Cosmos in the Seventh.
Revelation, then, was followed up Infinity Relativity, released in June 3, 2015, and Infinity Finale, released in April 13, 2016. The interim between the two was filled up by Infinity Entity, a series of four issues released over the course of March 2016.
Relativity is a seemingly innocuous enough story, though it does feature its tidbits of weirdness, such as Thanos saying that, since an alternate Adam Warlock absorbed the entirety of a reality into himself, he now has the potential might of the Living Tribunal resting within him. An extremely weird comment to make, seeing as, while the Tribunal did always have M-Bodies interfacing with specific realities, he was generally speaking defined as an entity of multiversal scope, not being a part of any single reality as it is suggested here. After all, each reality is totally personified by Eternity, who is below the Living Tribunal.
And so we come across our first bit of weirdness in this series, which severely contradicts the current cosmology (And even some of Starlin's earlier writings, too): The fact that, here, Eternity and Infinity... don't seem to actually personify reality at all (Or "actuality" as Starlin likes to call it)? More precisely, while everywhere else depicts them (And later only Eternity) as fully representing a given reality, Starlin seems to depict them as being simply features of it, stronger than other Abstracts but ultimately no different from them. In fact, the aforementioned alternate Adam Warlock explicitly states that, because he now holds the whole of his reality in himself, he is even greater than both Eternity and Infinity, and considers them to be "limited by individuality," implying they aren't all-encompassing as he is.
We had already seen shades of this in Marvel Universe: The End, where Thanos absorbs the Heart of the Universe (Self-explanatory) and this allows him to completely overpower all of the Abstracts, Including the Living Tribunal. In fact, he himself stated that his existence had expanded into realms entirely beyond them, which he never even suspected existed. Yet all of his actions were still limited to a single reality, and he uses up all of his power recreating it. In the recap page of the final issue, the Living Tribunal is also stated to be "one of the superpowers of this actuality" alongside Eternity and Infinity, so, clearly, Starlin's worldview for Marvel has even he be just an aspect of a single universe that doesn't even stretch to the highest levels of it.
This is an extremely glaring disparity from the recent texts, because a rather large part of them is the idea of "As Above, So Below." As shown up there, the omniverse and the universe are simply rescaled images of each other, and this is why they both have the same face (Eternity). Here, meanwhile, Eternity is just one of the universe's inner features, and the defacto personification of it is... no one. At most, the role goes to whoever obtains the Heart of the Universe, but otherwise there is no specific entity embodying an Earth, something which Thanos explicitly points out when he says the Heart of the Universe is not a will of any kind, just inert energy waiting to be taken.
Things get even weirder when we read further into Infinity Entity: In Issue #2 of it, Adam Warlock says that, after the Living Tribunal was killed by the Beyonders, Eternity and Infinity took his place as the rulers of reality. Then comes Infinity Finale, where Thanos states that, in the alternate reality that the aforementioned Adam Warlock came from, the Living Tribunal was never killed by the Beyonders. So the trilogy does take place after Secret Wars, after all???
To lay down the hammer here: None of those things should be possible, firstly because New Avengers #30 explicitly states that the Beyonders fought the Living Tribunal across all realities simultaneously, and that, when the Tribunal died, it did so on that scope as well, a sliver of it falling in each universe. And secondly because the Living Tribunal wasn't the only Abstract that was killed by the Beyonders. Eternity, Infinity and all the others were also caught in the slaughter, also in all realities, according to Marvel's official website.
So the storyline basically operates under the assumption that the Beyonders only killed the Living Tribunal of one reality, and even then only the Tribunal, with the other Abstracts being for some reason spared. What happened is, I think, very obvious: Jim Starlin started writing this trilogy way, way, way before New Avengers Vol. 3 had wrapped up and Secret Wars had started, and by extension also years before Al Ewing started fleshing out Marvel's cosmic side.
As a result of that, and the fact the three stories (Revelation, Relativity and Finale) are overall written as seguing into each other more or less seamlessly, the whole thing ended up sticking out like a sore thumb in recent times, continuity-wise, even as he started trying to tie it into contemporary storylines. Even then, he ended up taking several liberties with regards to the events of Secret Wars, all of which ended up serving to isolate the whole thing even further from the mainstream.
Now, Al Ewing, being the continuity nerd he is, had the Living Tribunal drop this line in the first issue of Ultimates²: "Before all was, I am. After all ends, I am. I live, I die, I live again. I wear three faces, but my true face is ever-hidden, and my true name no one knows. I am the Living Tribunal of the Eighth Cosmos." In the letters page at the back of Issue #7, he then clarified to a fan that this was intended to be a reference to the ending of Infinity Finale, where the alternate Adam Warlock assumes the position of the Living Tribunal who had died.
So it seems the events of the trilogy did happen, but in very broad strokes, if at all. Firstly because Adam Warlock only replaced (what was in Starlin's view) the Living Tribunal of a single reality, as seen above ("He fills a need this universe did suffer"), whereas the Living Tribunal that appears in Ultimates² is explicitly the law of the whole omniverse and judge of all universes. And secondly because the timeline of events here just doesn't fit: In Secret Wars #8, Thanos dies to Doctor Doom, and Ultimates then reveals that, when this happened, he was cast out of the multiverse and stayed in the void in a state of undeath, meaning he was not part of the rebirth of the cosmos (And thus wasn't anywhere within it in that period), and he only came back during Ultimates. By the time that happened, the Living Tribunal was already back.
Meanwhile, in Starlin's trilogy, Thanos is up and about, and the Living Tribunal was dead all throughout the story until Adam Warlock took his place at the end of Infinity Finale. In fact, the overall implication given in Ultimates is that the Living Tribunal just naturally came back to existence as part of the cosmos' rebirth, just as the other Abstracts who were slaughtered did, because he is simply a personification of one of existence's fundamentals. However, Starlin's account is different, again due to how he works under the strange assumption that only the Tribunal was killed.
So, given that and all the rest, this means that, as said earlier, either the Revelations/Relativity/Finale trilogy happened in a very different way in mainstream canon, or it didn't happen at all. Given Al Ewing explicitly kept the one purported reference to it ambiguous so readers could come up with their own theories (A position that he always takes, being a heavy proponent of Death of the Author), I'm heavily leaning towards saying it really didn't happen, myself, but I'll leave that up to debate.
But, shockingly enough, this isn't the end of it. Starting in April 4, 2018 with the release of Infinity Siblings, Starlin started writing up yet another trilogy, comprised of it, Infinity Conflict and Infinity Ending, and oh man is this one a trainwreck.
Recall the Superflow? The conceptual space which keeps all realities apart and where the Abstracts live? That appears to not be a thing here. What separates each reality from its neighbor instead are things called "Astral Regulators," which are McGuffins placed in each reality by Above-All-Others himself.
And, speaking of Above-All-Others, Infinity Conflict also reveals that, when the multiverse's alternate timelines are imbalanced by the Regulators being meddled with (Thus causing them to meld into each other), not even he can exert control over the ensuing chaos, and he further states that, with the system of realities being thrown in disorder, he becomes weakened and not "omnipotent and infallible" anymore, thus meaning that even he is subject to the multiverse's systems.
Contrast that with The One Above All's other appearances, which depict them as not only something external to and more primal than said systems, but also as the point from which they're emanated to begin with (Further information on that being in the profiles linked above)
More: Remember what I said about how Starlin doesn't portray Eternity as the personification of the universe? Yeah, the same goes for the multiverse. When Thanos absorbs Above-All-Others, he becomes the personification of all realities, which indicates that there is no Multiversal Eternity in this cosmology, either. Now, even in the regular setting, The One Above All is still everything and nothing simultaneously, but that's in the much more metaphysical sense of them being the unmanifest blankness from which all of reality derives, and where only pure unity exists, with no separation whatsoever. That's not the case here; Thanos just became a walking multiverse, which is much closer to the role Multi-Eternity takes, and in fact he refers to the void as being outside of him, and as the state he will return to should he destroy himself.
Needless to say, Starlin's stuff also completely lacks any of the metafictional elements that the regular cosmology's recently started to employ. Whereas The One Above All is a writer entity, Above-All-Others is a much more direct, hands-on creator deity and ruler.
Given all of the above, I think it's more than fair to segregate Starlin's recent trilogies from the rest of the verse, even if not vice-versa. As such, I propose that things like Above-All-Others and Astral Regulator Thanos be removed from the main pages and separated into their own profiles. And given how Marvel Universe: The End was actually the starting point of much of the ideas contained in the two Infinity trilogies, I'd say the same should happen to Thanos' Heart of the Universe key.
Now, what tier will they be?
Well, for the longest time, Starlin's writings largely fit inside of the regular cosmology. The differences largely began to rear their heads in Marvel Universe: The End, which segued directly into the first Infinity trilogy. As such, everything prior to this, as well as what is not directly contradicted by his stories, applies to his version of the cosmology. Therefore the Abstracts in them keep their Low 1-A ratings.
A key difference, though, is that individual realities in Starlin's cosmology are larger than in the regular one. As said above, each reality contains an instance of the Living Tribunal within itself, and moreover they contain not just the physical and abstract realms, but also a layer that expands further beyond both, where the "universal vibratory patterns" exist. As such, realities/actualities here are flat 1-A, and this scales to characters like Heart of the Universe Thanos, the alternate Adam Warlock and Above-All-Others.
That said, Above-All-Others is not really as impressive as The One Above All is in the standard cosmology. He was unable to stop timelines from melding into each other when the imbalance resulted from Thanos' meddling started spreading across them all, and likewise his power and standing depends on the stability and separation of said timelines. The latter could be potentially be dismissed as some weird metaphysical connection, were it not for the fact there is otherwise very limited evidence that he actually infinitely transcends these realities. His realm is stated to be "an impossible place" beyond all time and space, but then even individual realities are described as having timeless and spaceless realms here, so that's not evidence of much.
Overall, Above-All-Others is just very, very far above the other two 1-A characters, but not by that much. He's pretty much just the 1-A equivalent of a 2-A.
As it stands, this thread will largely only discuss scaling and presentation of profiles, so, those who are not interested in this are free to ignore it. I'm also not terribly sure if this is controversial enough to warrant being moved to the Staff Discussion board, as were the last two threads, so, for the moment, it will be a regular CRT.
Now, moving on:
The Profiles
So, here they are:
- The One Above All
- The Phoenix Force
- Beyonders
- Beyonder
- The First Firmament
- Eternity
- Infinity
- Death
- The Living Tribunal
- Chaos and Order
- The In-Betweener
- Celestials
- Galactus
- Infinity Stones
- Cosmic Cubes
- Odin
I basically remade them from the top-down, so, preferably read them carefully to ascertain the validity of the changes outside of tiering. Obviously, while there are still more profiles to revise, these will serve as the basis for their ratings.
Odin's page, in particular, will be revised more thoroughly in the next part of these revisions, since he is from the group of characters that it tackles, but for the moment, I changed his AP and speed ratings alone, to give a model for what characters roughly on that level will look like.
About the Herald Tiers
So, currently, Marvel Comics' Herald-tier characters are scaled to 2-C at their absolute peaks, using Thor as a lynchpin. Thor, for his part, is that high because:
Long story short: He did stuff to Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil contains nine realms which are universes. Hence 2-C.
Yeah, so, these feats are pretty massive outliers. To put it bluntly: Yggdrasil is not 2-C, it encompasses the whole multiverse. Here and here, it's stated to exist across every plane of reality, and here, it's stated to be "everything" and to have branches and roots in "all that is." These statements are given framing context by this, which states Yggdrasil extends over all the multiverse's timelines, and by this, which shows even the Living Tribunal is encompassed by Yggdrasil.
So, unless we want to have all the Herald tiers be actually High Abstract tiers, these feats are unusable. And frankly even the current profiles are extremely weird on the matter. Odin's, for instance, works on the assumption that Yggdrasil is 2-A, despite it being used to justify 2-C, too.
As for what tier they will be: From what I can tell, we accept Hercules lifting the Greek firmament as being a High 3-A feat, so, that could serve as a good substitute for the current max ratings. A few other feats can also be recontextualized as being on that scale, taking a few pieces of information into account.
For example, Asgard and Earth are explicitly spaced apart by an infinite void, so Thor creating a storm that affects Earth from Asgard can potentially be reevaluated based on this. Thor has also wrestled with the Midgard Serpent while the latter was bridging the gap between Earth and Asgard with its length, so, that's another feat that'd interesting to take into account. But I ultimately leave this up to debate, seeing as Asgard has a fairly long list of statements about being plainly outside of space snd time, which may turn these feats harder to quantify.
Whatever Happened To Above All Others?
So, as you might have noticed from the first profile, I completely removed all references to Jim Starlin's Infinity Finale/Infinity Conflict/Infinity Ending storylines from The One Above All's profile, and I suppose an explanation is due.
To put it bluntly: That whole thing is so non-canon it hurts. Or more precisely, it's not canon to the regular setting of Marvel Comics. And to explain why, I ought to give a brief overview of the series of stories this topic revolves around, as well as their place in the verse.
First, we start with New Avengers Vol. 3, a long-running storyline penned up by Jonathan Hickman, which ran from January 3, 2013 to April 29, 2015. The overarching story was basically about apocalyptic events known as the Incursions, which were destroying and colliding universes all throughout the multiverse and causing the early death of existence as a result, and the heroes' efforts towards somehow finding a way to stop them. The story started reaching its climax in Issue #30, released in February 25, 2015, where it was revealed that the Beyonders were behind the Incursions, and where it was shown that they massacred all of the Abstracts, including the Living Tribunal, across all realities (This detail is important, so, keep it in mind)
Now, New Avengers Vol. 3's finale gave way to Secret Wars, a company-wide event that ran from May 6, 2015 to January 13, 2016. Long short story: It starts with the last two timelines in the multiverse being seemingly destroyed, and then ends with existence being reborn.
Only two months before Secret Wars' finale, though, in November 11, 2015, was released the first issue of Ultimates, written by Al Ewing. Now, this one took place after the events of Secret Wars, already in the rebirthed multiverse. More specifically, it established the idea that the previous iteration of existence was the Seventh, and that Marvel now takes place in the Eighth.
As Ultimates' storyline kept progressing along, it kept fleshing out the new cosmic status quo more and more. This trend continued well into the release of the sequel, Ultimates², which started publication in November 23, 2016, and it all came to a close with the finale, Garden of Ideas, published in August 17, 2017, which established more things about the new cosmic status quo: Namely, Infinity doesn't exist anymore. She was a personification and feature of the Seventh Multiverse and its realities, and moved on to the next place after it "died." Eternity is now the sole embodiment of existence.
Now, with all that groundwork set, let's pause and rewind a bit for the actual topic here: We're going back all the way to August 6, 2014, when Marvel released Thanos: The Infinity Revelation, this one penned up by Jim Starlin. By and large, it plays out very much like a pre-Secret Wars story, with all of the features of the classic cosmology that this entails, most notable of which is the fact Infinity still exists. Important because the universal personification reflects the multiversal personification, and so you shouldn't see Infinity around in the Eighth Cosmos at all, just like you shouldn't see the personification of the Sixth Cosmos in the Seventh.
Revelation, then, was followed up Infinity Relativity, released in June 3, 2015, and Infinity Finale, released in April 13, 2016. The interim between the two was filled up by Infinity Entity, a series of four issues released over the course of March 2016.
Relativity is a seemingly innocuous enough story, though it does feature its tidbits of weirdness, such as Thanos saying that, since an alternate Adam Warlock absorbed the entirety of a reality into himself, he now has the potential might of the Living Tribunal resting within him. An extremely weird comment to make, seeing as, while the Tribunal did always have M-Bodies interfacing with specific realities, he was generally speaking defined as an entity of multiversal scope, not being a part of any single reality as it is suggested here. After all, each reality is totally personified by Eternity, who is below the Living Tribunal.
And so we come across our first bit of weirdness in this series, which severely contradicts the current cosmology (And even some of Starlin's earlier writings, too): The fact that, here, Eternity and Infinity... don't seem to actually personify reality at all (Or "actuality" as Starlin likes to call it)? More precisely, while everywhere else depicts them (And later only Eternity) as fully representing a given reality, Starlin seems to depict them as being simply features of it, stronger than other Abstracts but ultimately no different from them. In fact, the aforementioned alternate Adam Warlock explicitly states that, because he now holds the whole of his reality in himself, he is even greater than both Eternity and Infinity, and considers them to be "limited by individuality," implying they aren't all-encompassing as he is.
We had already seen shades of this in Marvel Universe: The End, where Thanos absorbs the Heart of the Universe (Self-explanatory) and this allows him to completely overpower all of the Abstracts, Including the Living Tribunal. In fact, he himself stated that his existence had expanded into realms entirely beyond them, which he never even suspected existed. Yet all of his actions were still limited to a single reality, and he uses up all of his power recreating it. In the recap page of the final issue, the Living Tribunal is also stated to be "one of the superpowers of this actuality" alongside Eternity and Infinity, so, clearly, Starlin's worldview for Marvel has even he be just an aspect of a single universe that doesn't even stretch to the highest levels of it.
This is an extremely glaring disparity from the recent texts, because a rather large part of them is the idea of "As Above, So Below." As shown up there, the omniverse and the universe are simply rescaled images of each other, and this is why they both have the same face (Eternity). Here, meanwhile, Eternity is just one of the universe's inner features, and the defacto personification of it is... no one. At most, the role goes to whoever obtains the Heart of the Universe, but otherwise there is no specific entity embodying an Earth, something which Thanos explicitly points out when he says the Heart of the Universe is not a will of any kind, just inert energy waiting to be taken.
Things get even weirder when we read further into Infinity Entity: In Issue #2 of it, Adam Warlock says that, after the Living Tribunal was killed by the Beyonders, Eternity and Infinity took his place as the rulers of reality. Then comes Infinity Finale, where Thanos states that, in the alternate reality that the aforementioned Adam Warlock came from, the Living Tribunal was never killed by the Beyonders. So the trilogy does take place after Secret Wars, after all???
To lay down the hammer here: None of those things should be possible, firstly because New Avengers #30 explicitly states that the Beyonders fought the Living Tribunal across all realities simultaneously, and that, when the Tribunal died, it did so on that scope as well, a sliver of it falling in each universe. And secondly because the Living Tribunal wasn't the only Abstract that was killed by the Beyonders. Eternity, Infinity and all the others were also caught in the slaughter, also in all realities, according to Marvel's official website.
So the storyline basically operates under the assumption that the Beyonders only killed the Living Tribunal of one reality, and even then only the Tribunal, with the other Abstracts being for some reason spared. What happened is, I think, very obvious: Jim Starlin started writing this trilogy way, way, way before New Avengers Vol. 3 had wrapped up and Secret Wars had started, and by extension also years before Al Ewing started fleshing out Marvel's cosmic side.
As a result of that, and the fact the three stories (Revelation, Relativity and Finale) are overall written as seguing into each other more or less seamlessly, the whole thing ended up sticking out like a sore thumb in recent times, continuity-wise, even as he started trying to tie it into contemporary storylines. Even then, he ended up taking several liberties with regards to the events of Secret Wars, all of which ended up serving to isolate the whole thing even further from the mainstream.
Now, Al Ewing, being the continuity nerd he is, had the Living Tribunal drop this line in the first issue of Ultimates²: "Before all was, I am. After all ends, I am. I live, I die, I live again. I wear three faces, but my true face is ever-hidden, and my true name no one knows. I am the Living Tribunal of the Eighth Cosmos." In the letters page at the back of Issue #7, he then clarified to a fan that this was intended to be a reference to the ending of Infinity Finale, where the alternate Adam Warlock assumes the position of the Living Tribunal who had died.
So it seems the events of the trilogy did happen, but in very broad strokes, if at all. Firstly because Adam Warlock only replaced (what was in Starlin's view) the Living Tribunal of a single reality, as seen above ("He fills a need this universe did suffer"), whereas the Living Tribunal that appears in Ultimates² is explicitly the law of the whole omniverse and judge of all universes. And secondly because the timeline of events here just doesn't fit: In Secret Wars #8, Thanos dies to Doctor Doom, and Ultimates then reveals that, when this happened, he was cast out of the multiverse and stayed in the void in a state of undeath, meaning he was not part of the rebirth of the cosmos (And thus wasn't anywhere within it in that period), and he only came back during Ultimates. By the time that happened, the Living Tribunal was already back.
Meanwhile, in Starlin's trilogy, Thanos is up and about, and the Living Tribunal was dead all throughout the story until Adam Warlock took his place at the end of Infinity Finale. In fact, the overall implication given in Ultimates is that the Living Tribunal just naturally came back to existence as part of the cosmos' rebirth, just as the other Abstracts who were slaughtered did, because he is simply a personification of one of existence's fundamentals. However, Starlin's account is different, again due to how he works under the strange assumption that only the Tribunal was killed.
So, given that and all the rest, this means that, as said earlier, either the Revelations/Relativity/Finale trilogy happened in a very different way in mainstream canon, or it didn't happen at all. Given Al Ewing explicitly kept the one purported reference to it ambiguous so readers could come up with their own theories (A position that he always takes, being a heavy proponent of Death of the Author), I'm heavily leaning towards saying it really didn't happen, myself, but I'll leave that up to debate.
But, shockingly enough, this isn't the end of it. Starting in April 4, 2018 with the release of Infinity Siblings, Starlin started writing up yet another trilogy, comprised of it, Infinity Conflict and Infinity Ending, and oh man is this one a trainwreck.
Recall the Superflow? The conceptual space which keeps all realities apart and where the Abstracts live? That appears to not be a thing here. What separates each reality from its neighbor instead are things called "Astral Regulators," which are McGuffins placed in each reality by Above-All-Others himself.
And, speaking of Above-All-Others, Infinity Conflict also reveals that, when the multiverse's alternate timelines are imbalanced by the Regulators being meddled with (Thus causing them to meld into each other), not even he can exert control over the ensuing chaos, and he further states that, with the system of realities being thrown in disorder, he becomes weakened and not "omnipotent and infallible" anymore, thus meaning that even he is subject to the multiverse's systems.
Contrast that with The One Above All's other appearances, which depict them as not only something external to and more primal than said systems, but also as the point from which they're emanated to begin with (Further information on that being in the profiles linked above)
More: Remember what I said about how Starlin doesn't portray Eternity as the personification of the universe? Yeah, the same goes for the multiverse. When Thanos absorbs Above-All-Others, he becomes the personification of all realities, which indicates that there is no Multiversal Eternity in this cosmology, either. Now, even in the regular setting, The One Above All is still everything and nothing simultaneously, but that's in the much more metaphysical sense of them being the unmanifest blankness from which all of reality derives, and where only pure unity exists, with no separation whatsoever. That's not the case here; Thanos just became a walking multiverse, which is much closer to the role Multi-Eternity takes, and in fact he refers to the void as being outside of him, and as the state he will return to should he destroy himself.
Needless to say, Starlin's stuff also completely lacks any of the metafictional elements that the regular cosmology's recently started to employ. Whereas The One Above All is a writer entity, Above-All-Others is a much more direct, hands-on creator deity and ruler.
Given all of the above, I think it's more than fair to segregate Starlin's recent trilogies from the rest of the verse, even if not vice-versa. As such, I propose that things like Above-All-Others and Astral Regulator Thanos be removed from the main pages and separated into their own profiles. And given how Marvel Universe: The End was actually the starting point of much of the ideas contained in the two Infinity trilogies, I'd say the same should happen to Thanos' Heart of the Universe key.
Now, what tier will they be?
Well, for the longest time, Starlin's writings largely fit inside of the regular cosmology. The differences largely began to rear their heads in Marvel Universe: The End, which segued directly into the first Infinity trilogy. As such, everything prior to this, as well as what is not directly contradicted by his stories, applies to his version of the cosmology. Therefore the Abstracts in them keep their Low 1-A ratings.
A key difference, though, is that individual realities in Starlin's cosmology are larger than in the regular one. As said above, each reality contains an instance of the Living Tribunal within itself, and moreover they contain not just the physical and abstract realms, but also a layer that expands further beyond both, where the "universal vibratory patterns" exist. As such, realities/actualities here are flat 1-A, and this scales to characters like Heart of the Universe Thanos, the alternate Adam Warlock and Above-All-Others.
That said, Above-All-Others is not really as impressive as The One Above All is in the standard cosmology. He was unable to stop timelines from melding into each other when the imbalance resulted from Thanos' meddling started spreading across them all, and likewise his power and standing depends on the stability and separation of said timelines. The latter could be potentially be dismissed as some weird metaphysical connection, were it not for the fact there is otherwise very limited evidence that he actually infinitely transcends these realities. His realm is stated to be "an impossible place" beyond all time and space, but then even individual realities are described as having timeless and spaceless realms here, so that's not evidence of much.
Overall, Above-All-Others is just very, very far above the other two 1-A characters, but not by that much. He's pretty much just the 1-A equivalent of a 2-A.
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