Review: Guardians of The Galaxy & X-Men: Black Vortex

The awkwardly-titled hardcover collection of "The Black Vortex" crossover storyline is a huge one. Enlarged from the standard 6.5-by-10-inch format to a 7.5-by-11-inch format, its 300 pages or so worth of story are taken from 13 issues of seven different ongoing titles and two one-shots published especially to bookend the storyline. There is a fairly significant event that could potentially have big ramifications for the two franchises named in the title, and it has next to nothing to do with The Black Vortex; Marvel could probably have entitled this Guardians of The Galaxy & The X-Men: Maguffin, for all the scary space artifact has to do with the actual event, Guardian of The Galaxy Star-Lord Peter Quill and X-Man Kitty Pryde deciding to take their relationship to the next level.

For that pair of characters in particular, this story is potentially a big, game-changing deal–although given what happened the last time an X-Lady married a character from outside the franchise, perhaps it's really not all that big a deal after all. Storm and The Black Panther's marriage simply fizzled in the corner of a panel of a crossover story having little to do with either of them, and their temporary union is already on its way to becoming a minor footnote in both characters' Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe entries.

Regardless of how the plot point plays out, however–and we won't know for sometime, thanks to Secret Wars preempting any and all other non-Secret Wars ongoing plots–it certainly didn't need a 300-page story involving far more characters than the storyline's primary writers Sam Humphies and Brian Michael Bendis can even keep track of, let alone find things to keep them occupied (For the sake of comparison, Avengers & X-Men: Axis is only 264 pages, Original Sin 240 pages and X-Men: Battle of The Atom about 250 pages). One might expect Marvel to be much better at crafting crossover stories at this point, given the fact that they are almost always engaged in at least one line-wide story of that nature, but this one is noticeably poorly put-together, reading more like one from the '90s, when they were transparent boosts to flailing and failing titles. Which explains the participation of not only Guardians of The Galaxy, Legendary Star-Lord, Guardians Team-Up and All-New X-Men (the X-Men book currently featuring Kitty Pryde), but also Cyclops, Captain Marvel and, most random of all, Nova.

The story would be big and unwieldy without the extra books, but it would also be a lot tighter, a lot less meandering and a lot less transparent in its mercenary conception. It would also significantly reduce the numbers of cooks in the kitchen. Star-Lord writer Humphries scripts six of the 13 issues (makes sense; this is basically a Star-Lord story arc gone mad), and Bendis four (the issues of his regular titles Guardians and All-New X-Men), while the inclusion of the hangers-on titles mean John Layman, Gerry Duggan and Kelly Sue DeConnick also script about 20 pages apiece. There are nine primary artists (not counting the inkers), a number which could have reduced by at least two without the less necessary tie-ins. Of course, the artists are so numerous and so varied, it hardly matters: Ed McGuinness, Kris Anka, Valerio Schiti, Andrea Sorrentino...there was no way that this storyline would have looked like it fit together visually, anyway.

McGuinness...

...and Sorrentino, who aren't exactly on the same page when it comes to drawing Rocket.

So, what's a "Black Vortex," anyway...?

Well, it is a full-length mirror seemingly created by a black Celestial referred to as "Godhead" 12 billion years ago in answer to the prayer of an alien named Gara who looked like final-form Frieza with breasts and capri pants. If you look into the mirror, you see a redesigned, more powerful and somehow vaguely "cosmically enhanced" version of yourself. If you "submit" to the mirror, you turn into that version of yourself.

In other words, it's a character-redesigning maguffin, capable of giving the way-too-many characters new, temporary looks, but, more importantly, it's something for the huge cast to chase around for 13 issues. It had fallen into the hands of Star-Lord and Guardians villain Mister Knife/J-Son and his new ally, Thane, son of Thanos. Kitty Pryde, on a space-date with her long-distance boyfriend Peter Quill, made a post-coital decision to steal it from Knife (Peter's dad) mainly to annoy him. Naturally, this gets them in trouble, as Knife sends his already-upgraded team of mercenaries The Slaughter Lords after them.

To their aid come the X-Men and The Guardians.

The former are Kitty's current "class," the time misplaced original teenage X-Men Angel, Beast, Iceman and Jean Grey, plus X-22, as well as Magik, grown-up Beast and Storm. Magik and the kids make sense, as they are all Kitty's close allies at Grown-Up Cylops' New Xavier School (I'm not sure of the publishing order, and if this was published before, after or simultaneous to its dissolution in the pages of Bendis' Uncanny X-Men), but Beast and Storm seem particularly random. I'd say they were wholly unnecessary and simply clutter up the cast, but Beast at least has something to do in the story, which is more than many of the other characters get.

As for the latter, they are Rocket, Groot, Gamora, Drax, Venom/Flash Thompson and Captain Marvel. So that's sixteen heroes so far, and we haven't even got to Teen Cyclops or Nova yet! A brief argument breaks out over whether or not to use the magic mirror, with Kitty and Peter finding themselves on opposite sides of the argument, testing their relationship (Kitty says no, because evil magic artifacts probably have bad side-effects; Peter says why not, because why not?) When The Slaughter Lords and Gara arrive to take it by force, the fighting and transforming starts...and pretty much doesn't let up for the next 280 pages or so.

Gamora and Beast immediately submit, the former getting a better new look, the latter getting a much worse (and thankfully temporary) one; she wants power to beat up the bad guys, he want cosmic understanding to help him fix time and space, which he's afraid he sort of broke when he brought the teenage X-Men forward in time a few years ago our time (that gets a full two panels worth of explanation, so look close!). Angel follows right behind them, getting a weird skull-shaped mask and fire wings.

Fearing the 16 heroes might not be enough to stop the cosmically enhanced bad guys, Peter makes an emergency broadcast for help, and turns up exactly one more character: Nova. He'll hang around for the duration.

Then things get complicated.

The transformed Beast, Gamora and Angel take off with the mirror, which Gara, The Slaughter Lords and our heroes all want to get back from them. Meanwhile, Knife and Thane are making a deal with the Brood, in which a cosmically-enhanced Thane promises to freeze a planet in amber (that's his super-power, by the way, covering things in amber) for The Brood so they can eat and breed in its population at their leisure. Hala, homeworld of the Kree Empire, gets attacked, and Ronan looks in the mirror and submits, getting a not-too-severe new look, in order to defend it; he fails though, and it's destroyed. Cyclops and his dad, space pirate Corsair, show up. The Collector briefly shows up. There's a lot of fighting, shouting and flying around. Other characters get upgrades. The narrative takes over-long detours to accommodate the participation of other books (There's 20 pages of Nova visiting Earth with the Vortex and The Collector meeting his family, because it's an issue of Nova, for example; later Carol Danvers get something to do, and rather than spending a panel or four on it, they spend 20 pages on it, because now it's an issue of Captain Marvel and so on).

This particular team-up is referred to as a "Locket Heedcoon."

At the end, all that really matters is that the characters who submitted get a chance to de-submit and resume their normal forms, and most of them do (I believe just Ronan and Gamora remain completely enhanced), while a handful of characters get mild, lasting redesigns: Teen Iceman is no longer made of snow when iced-up, but made of ice, looking as he did in Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends; Groot looks like a slightly different type of tree-man  (I think); and Angel keeps his fire wings and his dumb new costume, sans mask. The latter is the only one I really hate; partly because as far as X-Men go, Angel is one of the few perfect superheroes whose codename, appearance and powers all reinforce one another, and in part because the earthbound angel with fire wings schtick was already done in the pages of Peter David's Supergirl (and was fairly dumb then).

The important thing, though, is that Kitty and Peter get past their argument–regarding whether submitting to ancient magical artifacts is good or bad or not–and Kitty makes a realization about space (Earth is in space, it turns out!) and he gets down on one knee and proposes.

I did choke up a little on this page; I'm a critic, not a stone.

And then the Marvel Universe went on hold for like a year to accommodate Secret Wars.

Humprhies and Bendis are both fun writers, and despite what weaknesses there are in the plotting of both, they are both on pretty solid ground when writing dialogue and witty repartee, of which there is a lot, given this book's cast of thirty or so smart-asses.

I liked some of the art (particularly McGuinnesses'; dude draws the best Rocket) and hated some of it (particularly Sorrentino's photorealistic work, which couldn't be more out of place here among the cartoonier style of most of the other artists).

All in all, it's a complete mess though, and an at-times challenging slog. It's actually a decent argument for not waiting for the trade, as this likely would have read better if readers had a chance to self-currate it, and were savvy enough to skip the unimportant chapters...but then, the first and last chapters are really the only important ones. Everything else is just filler. And that's a lot of filler.

Review: Legendary Star-Lord Vol. 2: Rise of The Black Vortex

The second and final volume of Marvel's Legendary Star-Lord is a particularly patchwork affair. The short-lived, 12-issue series ends presumably prematurely in order to accommodate the publisher's Secret Wars plans, as just about every book Marvel was publishing ends just before or during Secret Wars, to be relaunched afterwards or not–Star-Lord gets relaunched with a new #1, new artist and the same writer in November. Unfortunately for any readers who might have been enjoying this "ongoing" Star-Lord solo series, it ends not with a bang, but a cacophony, whatever story writer Sam Humphries was trying to tell getting badly muddled as an inter-book crossover devoured the latter half of this series.

Of the seven issues collected in Rise, three of them are non-consecutive chapters of the 13-part "Black Vortex" story that ran through Star-Lord, Guardians Team-Up, Cyclops, Guardians of the Galaxy, All-New X-Men, Nova, Captain Marvel and a pair of one-shot specials. To break down the contents of this collection, then, we have Star-Lord #6-#12; that's three issues of Star-Lord telling Star-Lord stories, then part 3 of "Black Vortex," followed by part 9 of "Black Vortex," followed by part 12 of "Black Vortex," and then the final, Star-Lord-less issue of Star-Lord, a sort of epilogue involving at least two minor characters from the book.

It's not so much the "Rise" of the Black Vortex as it is the rise of the Black Vortex, followed by three random chunks of Black Vortex, followed by the aftermath of the Black Vortex. Were one to attempt to read this collection straight through, it would fall apart into complete gobbledygook in the middle. I started to read it, then stopped halfway through to go read Marvel's collection of Guardianss of The Galaxy & X-Men: The Black Vortex, which actually includes the whole storyline, and then came back to read the last chapter of Star-Lord Vol. 2. It's such a terribly assembled collection that I can't imagine what Marvel was thinking by even bothering publishing it like this; I suppose the thought was simply that without including the "Black Vortex" chapters, as unreadable as they may be isolated from the rest of the story, there just wouldn't be enough pages to fill up a trade. Usually their random filler material makes more sense than this though; couldn't they have just thrown in a "classic" Star-Lord story or two at the end, or something...?

That out of the way, we'll simply ignore the chunk of the collection that collects the out-of-context chapters of "Black Vortex" (I'll be writing about that next, anyway). The first few issues focus on Peter "Star-Lord" Quill's blossoming relationship with Kitty Pryde of the X-Men, who he met during an earlier X-Men/Guardians team-up story arc (Brian Michael Bendis' The Trial of Jean Grey; Bendis really likes Kitty Pryde, apparently). The two have been carrying on a kinda sorta extremely long-distance relationship, via some sort of hologram phone.

In the first issue of the collection, they are going on some sort of hologram date, with Peter taking a hologram of Kitty around his home planet Spartax on a date. I'm not sure how this works, mechanically, as in the past they were stationary when communicating; here he tries to take her out to dinner, and the space-opera, and dancing and so forth. Quill is being pursued by the colorfully-named Slaughter Squad, super-mercenaries hired by Mister Knife to capture him. He tries to hide these attacks from his superhero girlfriend, with disastrous results. Sam Humphries writes the whole issue like a comedy, albeit a not terribly funny, sitcom-in-space brand of comedy.

It ends with Peter being kidnapped by Mister Knife, who reveals himself to be...Peter's dad, deposed emperor of Spartax, J-Son! Kitty, seeing the capture via hologram, decides to go rescue her boyfriend in a stolen Avengers spaceship, with only Lockheed to accompany her. Yes, she may teach a team of superheroes, she may have deep connections to the veritable army of superheroes that is The X-Men, and yes, her friend Lockheed might work for an organization specifically devoted to dealing with space stuff (and her other friend Beast may be dating the head of that organization) but, she decides to go solo, evening ignoring the hails of Iron Man Tony Stark, a high muckety-muck in the Avengers who was also a member of the Guardians with Peter for a while.

I guess this was more dramatic...?

In the next issues, Kitty saves Peter, briefly meets his father and the pair retire to an orphanage that Peter helps fund for more old-school, network television-esque scenes (but in space!). After the pair come to terms with their crazy lives and have some sex, Kitty convinces Peter that she wants to do "something bad"; specifically, steal The Black Vortex from J-Son.

Now, they don't know what the Black Vortex is at this point, only that it's valuable to J-Son. What is it? It's a magic mirror that, if you look into it and "submit" to it (basically by saying "I submit" or agreeing to it or whatever), it gives you a terrible costume re-design, ups your power levels and maybe also kinda sorta corrupts you in a vague, never-defined way.

The actual heist takes place elsewhere, and here we get the three random chapters of "Black Vortex." So this is the point where a reader presumably stops reading this collection and goes off to read the aforementioned Black Vortex collection. If you do try to read, what you'll see is The Guardians, The All-New X-Men, some random X-Men (Storm, Beast and Magik), some Starjammers, Nova, Thanos' son Thane, Mister Knife, The Slaughter Lords and The Brood all arguing over and fighting over a big magic mirror for sixty pages. But, remember, these aren't consecutive chapters, and they don't specifically focus on Star-Lord, even though those chapters may fall in his book. I guess it would be a little like watching a movie on DVD, and you skip ahead to the third scene, watch that, skip three more, watch another, skip three more, watch one more scene and then stop watching the movie.

In the final chapter, Star-Lord doesn't appear at all. He can't, really, as it would ruin his big moment at the end of "Black Vortex," probably one of the biggest moments in the character's fictional life up until this point. So instead it features his half-sister Victoria visiting The Collector, who now looks just like he did in the Guardians movie, and bargaining with him to retrieve the body of J-Son, who kinda sorta died at the end of "Black Vortex" (which you wouldn't know from reading this book). Actually, he just gets encased in super-amber by Thane, son of Thanos, so he's only "dead" in the sense that, say, Han Solo was at between the end of Empire and the second act of Jedi was dead, or Wolverine is in the pre-Secret Wars Marvel Universe is dead.

She does this by dancing so well that she makes The Collector cry, and he collects the single tear he sheds (That's actually my favorite part of the issue...maybe because it's the only really good part of it).

Artists Freddie Williams II, Paco Diaz, Andrea Sorrentino and Paco Medina (with inker Juan Vlasco) draw this damn thing, and they all do a fine job. That's a lot of different artists, really, but they are all well within the same or at least similar aesthetic ballparks (Sorrentino sticks out, but is employed in such a way that it doesn't matter). The fact that almost half of the book isn't meant to be read anyway further distracts from the change in artists.

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: Guardians Disassembled

I would really like to sit the person in charge of putting Marvel's trade collections together down, maybe on a small comfortable couch next to writer Brian Michael Bendis, and ask them, "Person In Charge Of Putting Marvel's Trade Collections Together, what are you doing with Guardians of The Galaxy, exactly? These collections are a complete and total mess."

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the fourth volume collecting Beindis' run on the title—between volumes 2 and 3 there's the Bendis-written All-New X-Men crossover, in the un-numbered trade Guardians of The Galaxy/All-New X-Men: The Trial of Jean Grey. It's the fifth if you want to count Bendis' first arc on Avengers Assemble, collected simply as "Avengers Assemble", an Avengers/Guardians team-up that accounted for the writers first time writing the characters.

Contained in this 160-page collection are but four issues of the title Guardians of The Galaxy, plus Free Comic Book Day 2014 (Guardians of The Galaxy) #1. Plus a pair of short stories, one written by Andy Lanning and drawn by Phil Jimenez and Livesay and the other written by Dan Abnett and drawn by Gerardo Sandoval, featuring the origin story of Groot and a prequel to the Guardians 3000 series, respectively. Plus the first issue of the 2012 Kelley Sue DeConnick-written Captain Marvel series, and a story from a 2011 issue of Amazing Spider-Man, written by Dan Slott and drawn by a pair of pencilers and three inkers.

The book's organization flows okay—in terms of events, the visuals are all over the map as per usual—but it's a bizarre reading experience, as it essentially tells a single story, kinda sorta continued from Trial of Jean Grey (rather than GOTG Vol. 2) for 80 pages, and the rest of the book is given over to out-of-sequence filler material.

As for the visuals, even if you just concentrate on the 80-pages of Bendis-written GOTG material, there are six different pencil artists, and six different inkers. In a sense, the imagery on the pages that are meant to be read as part of the same story is every bit as inconsistent as the collision of stories that have nothing to do with one another (although their inclusion makes a certain sense, as you'll see; putting an issue of Captain Marvel or a Venom story in here isn't as completely random as throwing in, say, a Dr. Strange and a 3-D Man story might be. Rather, it's just sort of irritating).

The trade begins with a 10-page short from the FCBD special, in which Tony Stark sits down with Flash Thompson, who the Venom symbiote is currently bonded to, and asks him if he would be willing to join the Guardians of the Galaxy as a representative of Earth. This involves Stark explaining the Guardians and discussing them one by one in typical Bendis-ian, which is used as narration over pages of the characters in action, killing what I assume are random Badoon soldiers.

It's a short, effective introduction to the book's premise and cast, and one that adds a new member. In other words, it's a good jumping-on point, and a good story for a FCBD special from Marvel. It's penciled by Nick Bradshaw, a really rather incredible artist who was one of the best parts of the generally excellent Jason Aaron-written Wolverine and The X-Men; Bradshaw, whose very detailed, Arthur Adams-like work excels at filling panels with weird, cool-looking stuff, and is a perfect artist for a book set in space (He previous did several scenes in which Wolverine and Quentin Quire travelled into outer space to rub shoulders with aliens during Wolverine and The X-Men). Bradshaw is apparently meant to be the regular artist, but this is the only story he finishes in its entirety; the remaining issues of GOTG all have secondary pencil artists as well.

These include Cameron Stewart (one of may all-around favorite artists), Michael Oeming (one of Bendis' longest and most natural collaborators), Todd Nauck, Jason Masters and David Marquez. If you know more than one name on that list, than you also know not all of those artists draw in similar styles. Hell, Bradshaw's hyper-detailed work is almost the polar opposite of Oeming's abstracted, flat and cartoonish style; I love the work of both, but they don't exactly blend, you know?

After the FCBD short, there are the four issues of GOTG, the "Disassmbled" arc. The various characters have all split-up for whatever reason—Thompson/Venom is with Drax on Knowhere, buying space weapons—when they are all each attacked and kidnapped, taken hostage by different alien races.

It is all part of a plan by Peter Quill/Star-Lord's father, king of Spartax, to bring his rebellious, half-human son to heel and disgrace and dispose of his team. Star-Lord is taken by Spartax, Rocket is taken by the Kree and set for vivisection, Drax is taken by the Shi'ar and sentenced to death, Gamora is taken to the Badoon and beaten for information on the whereabouts of her father Thanos, Groot is taken by The Brood and Venom is taken by the Skrulls.

Things work ultimately work out just fine, thanks to some sudden appearances of guest-stars Captain Marvel Carol Danvers, who comes out of nowhere (not Knowhere, but nowhere) to rescue Star-Lord, and Angela, who also appears as a bit of deus ex mahina, but who at least was a member of the team previously—the sub-title of the second volume was Angela, remember—so her swooping in to rescue Gamora makes more sense than Danvers' appearance.

The rest of the book is all filler. The Guardians-related shorts are apparently from #14, a "double-sized anniversary issue!" (I have no idea which anniversary that could be referring to). The Groot story is interesting in its attempt to tell an entire story with variations of "I am Groot" as the only dialogue between all of the characters and for the way Jimenez draws gritty tree-people, while the other story is simply a sort of advertainment inducement to get a reader interested in Guardians 3000, a title starring a version of the team that the popular Guardians of The Galaxy took their name from.

The Captain Marvel and Venom stories are apparently there to fill readers in on the characters, although they're really there to fill up space (I know the Captain Marvel story is collected in a Captain Marvel trade, and I imagine the Venom story appears in a Spider-Man trade somewhere). Given the relatively small roles the two play in the book, and the fact that there's not all that much that needs explained about them that these stories offer that Bendis didn't include, they're kind of pointless additions.

It's collections like these that make me happy that not only did I wait for the trade, but I waited for the trade from the library, rather than shelling out $25 for 80-pages worth of Guardians of The Galaxy comics mostly by the guys who have their names on the cover.

Review: Legendary Star-Lord Vol. 1: Face It, I Rule

I know last year’s movie was pretty popular, but regardless, Marvel’s been expanding their Guardians of The Galaxy franchise at a rather incredible rate—Hell, it’s incredible that Guardians of The Galaxy even is a franchise.

Legendary Star-Lord is the the third in the new Guardians suite of books, launching after Rocket Raccoon became the first of the Guardians of The Galaxy spin-offs, and well before the debut of the Guardians 3000 and Guardians Team-Up (A sixth book, starring Groot, will launch in June). Legendary Star-Lord is also the one that seems most directly based on the film, with Peter Quill having by at this point been thoroughly and completely refigured to essentially just be “The Marvel Cinematic Universe” version of himself, rather than the version of himself from the comics.

To be fair, he was gradually moving in that direction anyway, ever since Keith Giffen and company dusted him off and teamed him with Rocket, Groot and other space characters in 2007's miniseries Annihilation: Conquest—Starlord and writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning's 2008-2010 Guardians ongoing. By the time Brian Michael Bendis re-introduced them during his short run on the short-lived Avengers Assemble and relaunched the Guardians title, he was a Spider-Man-style wise-ass (that being one of the two or three broad categories of character types that exist in Bendis’ Marvel writing).

Here though he’s wearing his costume from the movie, from the big red coat to the slightly goofy disappearing mask. He’s got his gun and jet-boots from the movie, and he’s drawn to look a lot more like Chris Pratt than previously.

He’s now more of a lovable loser-meets-rouge type of character, he loves old Earth music, he spends a lot of time in prisons and, just to gild the crap out of that lily of corporate multi-media synergy, his solo book takes its name from the most-watched part of the film (thanks to its prominence in the original trailers) and, hell, there’s even a very, very forced “Ooga Chaka!” reference in this book.

It’s a bit…much, really, but I suppose it’s safe to say that if you liked Star-Lord in the movie, you’ll like his comic book as well. Writer Sam Humphrise certainly seems to have put a lot of effort into capturing the spirit of the character from the film in his comic scripts, to the point that this comic book reads more like a spin-off from Guardians of The Galaxy the movie than it does Guardians of The Galaxy the comic book.

For reasons never actually addressed, Star-Lord is solo, the other Guardians only putting in cameos at best (Rocket appears in a fantasy panel, when Quill consults his WWRRD? wrist-band, Drax appears in the last panel of the book, they and the others appear in a montage). X-Man Kitty Pryde, currently Quill’s extremely long-distance girlfriend, actually plays a much bigger supporting role, appearing via hologram phone repeatedly throughout the five issues included in this trade.

Quill is after a powerful maguffin with which he hopes to take on and defeat Thanos, but along the way he’s captured repeatedly—first by The Badoon, later by his half-sister—and pulls off a couple of daring escapes, picking up a new ship and some additional supporting cast-mates along the way.

He squares off against Thanos on the moon, and seems to be kicking his ass pretty well, at least right up until the point when Thanos explains that if Quill kills him on the moon, the energy released will destroy the moon and therefore Earth. So Quill lets Thanos go. This is all pretty silly, really, and seems to be there mainly to give Quill something to do for a few issues (secure the maguffin) and tie-up some loose plot threads that pre-date this book’s existence.

Why does Quill take on Thanos all by himself, rather than calling in his own team? Or his girlfriend’s team, which is a veritable army of super-powered mutants? Or the 20-hero strong Avengers line-up? (Remember Iron Man was palling around with the Guardians for an arc or two in the relaunched Guardians ongoing).

His excuse is that he doesn’t want anyone else to get hurt, but given the fact that he almost beats Thanos solo, it probably would have behooved him to have a Thor, Hyperion or Iron Man around to help him move Thanos a safe distance from the Earth before finishing him off.

More perplexing still is that Quill lets Thanos leave the moon for deep speace, rather than pursuing him; if Thanos’ last card to play was that his proximity to Earth meant Quill couldn’t kill him, why would he leave the moon, and why wouldn’t Quill just follow him and kill him in space?

The answer, of course, is because Humphries and Marvel don’t want to kill off Thanos, but the script for that issue really could have taken a few more passes in order to make the conflict and its resolution make sense in context.

That issue, the fourth in the series, was drawn by Freddie Williams II and colored by David Curiel. Williams figure-work is recognizable as his own, but his line is much rougher and grittier, perhaps because he isn’t coloring his own work here, as he was doing at DC a few years back…? I actually wouldn’t have even recognized it as Williams’ work if I didn’t know it was his going in.

The rest of the book is drawn by pencil artist Paco Medina and iker Juan Vlasco. It’s clean, smooth, appealing artwork, which stands out sharply from that of Williams in his one chapter.

After the early climax involving the battle with Thanos, the final issue introduces a team of bad-asses working for the mysterious Mr. Knife in order to steal something called The Black Vortex—which is also the name of an upcoming X-Men/Guardians franchise crossover—and the fact that Mr. Knife also has a contract out on Quill’s head.

I’m not completely caught up on the Guardians book, which has actually been kind of difficult to follow, what with all the crossovers and the organization of the collections, but Humphries seems to be doing the light-hearted space adventure of that book (and, even more so, the movie) perfectly well. This read an awful lot like Guardians of The Galaxy, with more Quill and less Everyone Else, which is probably exactly what a Guardians spin-off series starring a particular character should read like.

Halloween 2014 just got a whole hell of a lot scarier

This was one of the many Guardians of the Galaxy-related ads to appear in Marvel books from the last batch of comics I bought. As you can see, there are Guardians costumes for the whole family! Star-Lord costumes for men and boys! Gamora costumes—dabs of green paint, I guess—for women and girls! And a Rocket Raccoon costume for anyone small enough to wear it!

If you want a Groot costume, well, you've gotta make that yourself. And if you want to dress up as Drax, I suggest you start working out right now.

...

Say, wait a minute. Now that I look a little closer at that Rocket...

Gah! That thing is horrifying! It's stiff, frozen, unmoving face! It's strangely uniform, manufactured pelt covering everything but it's human hands. Oh God, I'd hate to wake up in the middle of the night and see a couple of these things foraging in the dumpster outside my apartment complex through the window, or scurrying in and out of the drain by the curb at the end of the street...

Meanwhile.../Some Guardians of the Galaxy links and thoughts

I'd still like to see a cartoon in this exact style (Turtles Forever doesn't count).

I wrote two pieces about comic books that were published places that were not Every Day Is Like Wednesday this week. One was a short remembrance/review of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's 1984 comic book, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Las Vegas Weekly. And the other was a review of the collected edition of Dean Haspiel, Mark Waid and company's The Fox: Freak Magnet at Robot 6.

As I mentioned a bit on Twitter, that first issue of TMNT seems even stranger, more potent and more subversive now then it did the last time I read it, and the time before that, and the time before that. I never read it without having some pre-conceived notions of what the characters were like (based on the original cartoon show and the toy line), and it's probably impossible to do so now, as you'd have to be someone familiar with comic books, but completely unfamiliar with any iteration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

When I read it in, I don't know, 199X, it was a shock at how different those characters were. Since then, I've seen many more seasons of the cartoon, watched new versions of the cartoon, watched the first two live-action movies, read the later Mirage and Archie Comics, played some video games, ate the breakfast cereal and read the daily newspaper comic strip. Then, it seemed more shocking still.

Now Turtle-Mania has come and gone again, with a new series of the cartoon, an computer-animated movie, a rebooted comic strip...the concept and characters keep acquiring familiarity, picking up conceptions like a cartoon snowball rolling down hill, and the bigger that snowball gets, the stranger and more shocking that first issue is going to read.

The revisitation of the comic was, of course, prompted by the fact that the fifth feature film to feature the characters opens this week. But let's spends some time talking about last weekend's big based-on-comics movie, shall we...?

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS 

Super-comics are for objectifying women, movies based on super-comics are for objectifying men.

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy. I liked it an awful lot, and left the theater thinking it was both my favorite and the best of the Marvel Studios movies I've seen (which tends to happen every time I see one of those movies that doesn't have the word "Thor" in the title). The friend I saw it with declared it her favorite immediately.

I had pretty high expectations, so I was a little worried. These expectations were entirely related to that first trailer, which was a really, really good trailer, and one I watched over and over again over the course of several months just because I liked the trailer itself as a bit of filmmaking (I think it's my second favorite trailer of the 21st century, following Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Or maybe my third favorite; The Life Aquatic really had a hell of a trailer too, didn't it...?)

I was a little surprised that some of what was in the trailer wasn't in the movie, unless that stuff happened during one of the two or three times I went to the bathroom.

Like this image, for example:

For some reason, that's one from the trailer that really stayed with me. I didn't remember the guy hanging out with Space John C. Reilly calling them a bunch of A-holes. Or Glenn Close saying "Are you telling me the fate of 12 billion people is in the hands of these criminals?" Or Reilly saying "This might not be the best idea." Or Rocket saying "We're the frickin' Guardians of the Galaxy." Drax definitely wasn't in the line-up scene like he was in that first trailer, and Chris Pratt flicking-off Reilly and Other Guy didn't seem as funny without the computer analyzing the gesture.

The trailers might have been a little too thorough, though, as there was almost nothing in the movie that surprised me, between the trailer, the predictability of almost everything and the story beats and characterizations borrowed from the comics (Groot's Golden Retriever-like, eager-to-please expressions aside).

Good movie, though. High-fives all-around. My only concerns were nit-picky ones, for the most part, and I'll mention them in a few more paragraphs.

I only read a handful of reviews of the movie by professional film critics, but it seems to have been a very well-received one.

The only negative one I read was from The Village Voice's Stephanie Zacharek, and while I ultimately enjoyed and liked the movie a lot more thanher, that's an extremely well-written, well-reasoned, well-argued review. I thinks she's right about everything she writes...I just liked it more than her (By the way, that's the review that got some weirdos up in arms enough to call the critic a "harlot"...? I'm not surprised that there are a bunch of anonymous assholes among comic book and superhero fandom online, of course, I'm just kinda surprised that was all stoked by such a review. But whatever, haters gonna hate, and crazies gonna crazy, I guess; I am kind of impressed someone called Zacharek a "harlot," just because all of the online sexism I run across, I rarely hear such quaint, old-timey insults. I hope to see more use of the word "harlot," and maybe "harridan," "trollop" and "slattern" in the future, and less "bitch," "slut" and "C-word." Oh, I like "virago" too).

I thought Keith Phipps' review at The Dissolve maybe over-praised the film, while Sean O'Neal's at The AV Club was the one that probably best reflected my own assessment of the film.

As for comics people writing about it, I really enjoyed Abhay Khosla's take, although I didn't really agree with much of it. His second paragraph was pretty hilarious, though. Because as exaggerated as it might sound, it is actually 100% true. It's kind of strange how big a deal the soundtrack was to the movie, as that's pretty basic, non-superhero filmmaking. It's pretty Quentin Tarantino, and where did he get it? Martin Scorcese? I don't know; I'm not a film guy anymore.

Joe McCulloch's may actually be the best all-around review I read, from comics person or professional film critic. It's smart, well-written, funny, incisive and to the point.

I would also highly recommend this Comics Alliance post by Andrew Wheeler, about Marvel Studios' movies in general. And not just because it put the delightful thought of a Taken/Planet of the Apes crossover in my head.

Wheeler asserts that a large part of the reason Marvel succeeds as well as it does at the superhero movies is because that is all Marvel Studios does; it's their entire raison d' etre, whereas Warner Bros and the other studios make all sorts of different kinds of movies, and notes that the fact that Spider-Man and The X-Men were already spoken for meant Marvel Studios had to get pretty creative with which characters they could make movies out of...to their benefit and, I think, to the benefit of the film-going experience in general. (Additionally, I think Marvel Studios approached their "Cinematic Universe" with a long-term, world-building plan, whereas obviously the guys making, say, Green Lantern and Dark Knight Rises weren't really worrying what Superman and Aquaman were up to while Ryan Reynolds was in space or Batman was screaming unintelligibly about detonators).

He also asserts that Marvel is ironically doomed by its own successes, as they've kept a strict two movies-per-year schedule for a while. I honestly didn't notice or know that, but it explains why they didn't make another Hulk movie after the character proved so popular after Avengers; a Hulk movie seemed like a slam-dunk to me at that point, but Marvel just plain didn't have room, as more Captain America, Iron Man and even Thor proved sure-er things, and were hogging the available slots in their schedule.

This also, I think, helps explain the lack of a Black Widow movie. Me, I always thought the major problem with a Black Widow movie is that as a superhero, she's not really all that super; she's just a James Bond-style cinematic super-spy, and unless they put her up against some really Marvel-out villains (M.O.D.O.K. and AIM, for example), there didn't seem like there would be enough to differentiate Black Widow from, I don't know, Salt, to bother with. When you factor in the choice between doing Black Widow and, say, Ant-Man or Dr. Strange well, yeah, why bother with Black Widow...? She worked pretty well in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Regarding the lack of a female superhero movie, I've got to say, I never had much hope for Marvel in that respect. They simply don't have any really great female characters who aren't also X-Men (and thus at another studio), and pretty much all of the Marvel heroines I can think of who could conceivably headline their own comic book are derivative of male heroes: She-Hulk (if they won't make a Hulk movie...and, anyway, She-Hulk seems like a better TV show than a movie), Spider-Woman (Sony, but still), Valkyrie, Ms. Marvel/Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, etc. I don't think we'll see another attempt at an Elektra movie any time soon. The Wasp is tightly tied to Ant-Man/Hank Pym. I guess Scarlet Witch is in the next movie, but...I don't know, so much of her comics story has been tied to her father, brother and husbandroid, I can't really imagine a Scarlet Witch movie. Tigra seems too weird. Hellcat too much like Catwoman.

So I don't know, yo. If you asked me which Marvel superheroine should get her own movie, I would come up blank. Maybe the ensemble Sif and The Warriors Three, in which Thor's four buddies and Kat Dennings team up to take on Loki wihtout the boring Thor and Natalie Portman to get in the way, the movie I wish was on Marvel's schedule...? Or Elsa Bloodstone. That would work.

Really though, I think Marvel Studios's next step toward diversity needs to be to give a black superhero his own film, and that means Black Panther, whose film or films can dovetail in and out of any future Avengers movies easily.

Now, let's talk Guardians of The Galaxy, shall we?

So when I was putting together this who-created-who post about the characters appearing in the film, I noticed that while the movie was more an adaptation of the Dan Abnett/Andy Lanning and company conception of the team and characters (are they the guys who came up with the "I am Groot" gag, or was that Keith Giffen, or who...?), the characters themselves were mostly plucked from the late 1960s and 1970s, after that initial, furious storm of character creation that defined Marvel at the outset. I was therefore amused to see so many Kirby contributions—Groot, The Celestials, Ronan. Kirby is so fundamental to the Marvel Universe that even when you set out to make a film inspired by a 21st century remix of various, Starlin-era creations, you can't help but get a bunch of Kirby in there.

I was quite dismayed when I realized this was going to be another Marvel movie about some abstract, barely-defined magical maguffin, like the Thor movies, the last of which was a spectacularly incoherent film, plot-wise. I'm assuming that because this one was specifically referred to as an "Infinity Stone" (not gem, but stone; gems are for girls), then the reason for all these maguffins is that each is actually one of the six Infinity Gems Stones...?

So in a few more years maybe we'll get a big, huge Infinity Gauntlet story teaming up The Avengers and The Guardians and whoever else they introduce by then...? (Hopefully The Defenders and The Champions).

So here's my question. I missed all the Infinity business, not really reading any Marvel Comics until the '00s (and enjoying the 1970s material in the Essentials). Each gem is supposed to have a particular power, right? So which gem was the one in Guardians, the purple gem? Was it the explodey gem...?

And, finally, can we talk about that surprise cameo? My reaction was along the lines of, "What? It's Howard the Duck. Wait, why?!" I guess I was expecting something to tease the next Avengers movie or Ant-Man and, in that respect, I suppose it's cool they deflated expectations with this one, which didn't lead into the next film like the others in the past have, but was rather a gag use of the end-credits stinger.

I wish the scene lasted at least a few seconds longer, because by the time it registered what I was seeing, it was over, and I didn't notice if he was wearing pants or not. Was he? Now that Disney owns Marvel, I would hope they would let Howard The Duck go pants-less.

I liked that the movie had a sense of humor, and was actually even more of a comedy than Avengers was (Avengers being another movie I was relieved to see was a comedy, because if they played most of that shit straight, it would have been a real slog). The Footloose bit was good. I liked the fact that Rocket didn't seem to have any idea what a raccoon was (and was it just me, or was this the best performance of Bradley Cooper's career?). Dave Bautista was surprisingly funny, too. I especially dug the bit about no metaphor being able to go over his head.

Oh, and I liked that the climactic space battle took place in broad daylight in the sky above a planet. Star Wars is the go-to space movie to compare all others against, and setting the spaceship fights somewhere other than the star-fields of outer space really helped differentiate the climax from those other movies (The dimly lit interior of Ronan's ship, on the other hand, was pretty generic, as were his army of guys, of whom I can't remember any visual details. They were black in color and had guns. Not very interesting visuals; <i>Star Wars</i> wins for interesting-looking bad guy laser beam fodder).

I was a little bummed when it ended, because now there isn't a fun movie I'm looking forward to on the horizon.

Re: That movie that's probably well on its way to making tens of millions of dollars already

If you're reading this comics blog, then you're probably a fan of comic books in general, and superhero comics in particular. And I imagine there's a pretty good chance that, at some point this weekend, you went to the nearest movie theater to take in Guardians of the Galaxy, maybe the mostly hotly anticipated of all the many based-on-a-comic book movies that have appeared in theaters this year (Me? I'm going tomorrow night).

The movie is directed by James Gunn (Super, Slither), and written by Gunn and Nicole Perlman. It stars Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, David Bautista, Lee Pace and others. I don't generally follow box office returns, like, at all, but I'm fairly certain the film is going to be well-received and a huge financial success for Marvel Studios and Disney, as pretty much any profit made on a Guardians of the Galaxy movie is going to be seen as a remarkable amount (as far as properties likely to produce summer blockbusters, "Guardians of the Galaxy" was probably somewhere between Man-Thing and Red Raven on a list of all Marvel potential film fodder right up until about the point that it was announced that Marvel was doing a Guardians of the Galaxy movie).  A sequel is already showing up as announced under Gunn's IMDb profile, for whatever that's worth.

In short, a lot of people are going to make a lot of money off this movie.

And, if a lot of people make a lot of money and there are a lot of accolades being thrown about, then a lot of credit is going to go to a lot of people, from whoever cut those winning trailers to the designers and animators who got Rocket's fur to look just so to Gunn himself. If comic book people get any credit, chances are it's going to be as a collective (i.e. "Marvel") or under a "Special Thanks" near the end of the end-credit scrawl (IMDb has comics writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lannning receiving writing credit; if that's on the screen near the "written by" credit, then that's awesome).

So I think it's worthwhile to take a moment to remember who did what, and to maybe take a moment to write a check this weekend to The Hero Initiative, a non-profit that serves as a financial safety net for comics creators in need, for at least as much as the cost of a movie ticket (For me, it costs between $5-$9 to see a movie, depending on when I go; that's somewhere between one and three comic books). And/or to remember Bill Mantlo and his current circumstances, given his role in creating one of the more prominent and memorable characters in this particular film.

Hollywood, here we come!

The superhero team name "The Guardians of the Galaxy" was created for a 31st century group of heroes in 1969's Marvel Super-Heroes #18; they were written by Arnold Drake and their first appearance was pencilled by Gene Colan. The characters guest-starred in various Marvel books sporadically over the decades, eventually earning their own title in the 1990s.

In the 2007-2008 crossover storyline Annihilation: Conquest, overseen by writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, a rag-tag group of space heroes—including Groot and Rocket Raccoon—would begin to gravitate toward the character Peter Quill, Star-Lord. The miniseries Annihilation: Conquest—Starlord, written by Keith Giffen and drawn by Timothy Green II and Victor Olazaba, followed this thread most closely.

In 2008, Abnett and Lanning would launch the second volume of a Guardians of the Galaxy comic book, with pencil artist Paul Pelletier and inker Rick Magyar. The book spun out of the events of the writing team's various Annihilation storylines, and this particular line-up of this particular team is the same as in the movie—Star-Lord, Rocket, Gamora, Drax, Groot–and several others who come and go.

Behold: Groot's wide vocabulary!

Groot was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers in 1960; he was one of the more memorable monsters in a string of one-off monster comics produced by Kirby and Lee in the pre-superhero days of Tales To Astonish.

The Collector was created by Lee and Don Heck in 1966 as an Avengers villain.

Please tell me "the deadly lips of Ronan" are referred to in the film.

Ronan The Accuser was created by Kirby and Lee in 1967 as a Fantastic Four villain; his alien race, The Kree, were also created by Kirby and Lee, and are a mainstay of the space-set stories in the Marvel Universe shared-setting.

Drax The Destroyer was created by Starlin and Mike Friedrich in 1973 in the pages of Iron Man.

Gamora was created by Jim Starlin in 1975; she is the adopted daughter of Thanos, another Starlin creation (albeit one heavily influenced by Kirby's DC-owned, 1971 creation Darkseid, who Thanos has beaten to the big screen).

Star-Lord was created by writer Steve Englehart and artist Steve Gan in 1976.

The Celestials were created in 1976 by Kirby for his series The Eternals.

Rocket Raccoon was created by Bill Mantlo and Keith Giffen in 1976 (and dramatically fleshed-out in a four-issue, 1985, self-titled mini-series by Mantlo, pencil artist Mike Mignola and inkers Al Gordon and Al Milgrom).

The Nova Corps (and Richard Rider, aka the superhero Nova who starred in the comic book Nova, but who I don't think actually appears at all in the film himself)  were created by writer Marv Wolfman and first drawn by artists John Buscema and Joe Sinnott in 1976.

Nebula was created by Roger Stern and John Buscema in 1985 as an Avengers villain.

Korath The Pursuer was created by Mark Gruenwald and Greg Capullo in 1992 in the pages of Quasar.

And...that's all I know of. Did I miss anyone or thing very important, that isn't a spoiler for the film...? I'm just going off what I've seen in the trailers and the cast-list on IMDb here.

Review: Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2: Angela

In an attempt to convert interest in a major motion picture into comics sales, Marvel seems to be pretty aggressively reprinting anything even tangentially related to the characters starring in the upcoming Guardians of The Galaxy movie, and launching three new Guardians-related series this year, in addition to the ongoing monthly Guardians book.

I wish anyone who likes what they've seen of the movie Guardians thus far and decides to see what the comics offer the best of luck in trying to sort out what to read in which order,  and I hope they find the experience an enjoyable one. The current ongoing monthly series, the one written by Brian Michael Bendis, kinda sorta began in the pages of Avengers Assemble in a storyline that has since been released as a collection simply entitled Avengers Assemble (a title which is a pretty common one for books featuring the Avengers).

Three collections of Bendis' Guardians of The Galaxy series have been released thus far. The first, Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 1: Tomorrow's Avengers was kind of a mess. It featured five comics. A special "#0.1" prequel issue that told the origin of Peter "Star-Lord" Quill, the first three issues of the series and the one-shot Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers, which featured short, solo-ish stories featuring the various characters all drawn by different artists and joining/re-joining Quill's team. Read in book form, it's borderline incoherent, as it is essentially three different beginnings to a story that never gets going, and while there's a lot of talent involved in turning Bendis's scripts into good-looking comics, it's hard to imagine a more inconsistent-looking book.

Here's the credits page, for an idea of how many artists were involved in just those first five Bendis-written, Guardians of the Galaxy-entitled comics:

The narrative actually gets harder to follow in the second volume, as the events of the Bendis-written Age of Ultron line-wide crossover event series and the Jonathan Hickman-written Infinity line-wide crossover event series take place between some of the issues collected herein, and each pushes the book in a different direction than the one it seemed to be naturally flowing in (and which Bendis seems to be intending it to go in during the first three issues of the series, collected in the previous volume).

It's possible to read this volume in isolation, without having read Age or Infinity, but I'm unsure how much sense it will make.

This volume collects Guardians of the Galaxy #4-#10, once again by Bendis and a bevy of talented artists. There are some particularly weird credits here though, like a "consultant" one for Neil Gaiman, which comes above that of all the artists involved:

Sara Pichelli is the main artist for the first four of these issues, "with" other artists helping out on two of them. These begin with The Guardians enjoying some down-time in a space-bar, at least until a bar fight breaks out and a bounty-hunter tries to kill Gamora.

After that issue, the next three deal with the mysterious fallout form the "time is broken" climax of Bendis' Age of Ultron, which gave Star-Lord a strange vision and somehow landed Angela, the one-time supporting character from the pages of Image Comics' Spawn that her co-creators writer Neil Gaiman and artist Todd McFarlane have been fighting over in court for years, in the Marvel Universe.

The character is a pretty generic '90s bad girl character, of the sort one might expect Gaiman to be ashamed to have his name attached to. As originally conceived, she was an angel from Heaven (named Angela...Angel-a....GET IT?!) whose mission was to come to Earth and hunt Spawns with a big sword, wearing little more than a metal bra and long ribbons.

As a character, she is most interesting for her behind-the-scenes history, as it involves such important figures in the North American comics industry of the 1990s as Gaiman and MacFarlane, and her introduction into the Marvel Universe is most interesting in that it seems like it has more to do with Gaiman and Marvel getting together to say "Fuck you, Todd MacFarlane" in stereo.

Here the character, who the collection is named after, is largely divorced from her own  pre-existent history. After fighting the Guardians for about two issues, she eventually claims to come from a place called "Heven," where she was being trained to be a hunter, and to have never even been to Earth, although she's heard stories of it (I suppose there's something kind of interesting in the characters' parallel situations; Angela's from Heaven and only heard stories of Earth, while Quill and Tony Stark are from Earth and have only heard stories of Heaven, although Bendis does nothing other than point out that parallel in this volume).

After fighting, capturing, meeting and releasing Angela, the Guardians and their  book then jumps into an Infinity tie-in story, with Francesco Francavilla taking over art and coloring chores. The Guardians attempt to rescue SWORD's Abigail Brand, who Bendis writes exactly like he writes SHIELD's Maria Hill, from the alien-controlled SWORD HQ. Captain America calls on them to join him and The Avengers in...something that apparently happens in Infinity or a tie-in, as after the two Francavilla issues, the story jumps again to some sort of post-Infinity storyline, in which The Guardians, now missing Stark but with Angela apparently on their team, are searching for Thanos.

That last issue is drawn by Kevin Maguire, who is maybe the ideal collaborator for Bendis, given the former's skills with facial expressions and the latter's preference for filling his scripts with panel after panel of talking heads.

All three of the primary artists are incredibly skilled ones, but none of them draw anything at all like one another, and the book's visuals are as scattered as its narrative, which, because it is so dependent on the events of other books, where the plots in some of these individual chapters actually begin and end, scans a bit like a movie with every third twenty-minute chunk excised from the run-time.

It has its pleasures—Bendis' banter, Francavilla drawing the very best Groot ever, the chance to see Maguire drawing a bunch of action scenes—but it's not a terribly coherent work, and I can't imagine anyone new to the property, to Marvel or to comics in general (i.e. the audience that Marvel seem to be targeting with all theses Guardians books) being able to make heads or (raccoon) tails out of it.

It doesn't seem like the title's going to get any easier to follow in the near future either, as the next volume, The Trial of Jean Grey, is a crossover with the X-Men, in which the teenage X-Men from the Silver Age marooned in the present day see their Jean Grey put on trial for crimes she will commit as an adult in the distant past of Marvel continuity.

*********************

You know what part I liked the least about this collection?

When the Guardians have finally subdued Angela on the surface of Earth's moon and taken her aboard their ship for interrogation, Quill hears her name and responds with a leer, "From 'Who's The Boss?' Angela? All grown up?"

On Who's The Boss?, "Angela" was the name of the character played by Judith Light, who was 35 when the show debuted and is now 65. I'm assuming the character Quill (and Bendis) meant was Samantha, played by Alyssa Milano, who was 12 when the show started and 21 when it ended and, as anyone who has seen Alyssa Milano since then can attest, grew up to be a particularly lovely woman.

Please note that I did not necessarily know or like Who's The Boss?, which I did not watch on purpose at any point during my life (I was 7 when it debuted, and 16 when it ended, if I did the math right), but I do have access to the Internet, and could thus spend the 10-20 seconds necessary to visit IMDb.com and determine that Milano's character was indeed named Samantha, and it was the grown-up lady on the show who was named Angela.

So what's the no-prize explanation here? In the Marvel Universe's version of Who's The Boss?, the characters played by Milno and Light had one another's names...?

*********************

According to Comics.org, there have only been eighteen issues of this volume of Guardians published so far, but they have 67 covers between them. That is a lot of variant covers.

Here are my two favorite from those included in the gallery in the back of this trade, the first is by Milo Manara and the second is by Skottie Young:

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1: Cosmic Avengers

Remember how Peter Jackson's last Lord of the Rings movie had, like, six different endings, just piled one on top of the next, each seemingly complete unto itself, and you found yourself about to get up from the theater seat repeatedly, just to realize that what seemed like the ending wasn't really the ending, and there was at least one more scene to go?

The first collection of the new volume of Guardians of the Galaxy is sort of like that, only it's all beginnings instead of endings. This volume, which collects the Brian Michael Bendis-written series that spun out of the first Brian Michael Bendis-written arc of the Avengers Assemble series, collects five different comic books, but it reads like a series of three different beginnings of the same series (Come to think of it, Avengers Assemble Vol. 1 was also basically a beginning for this series, too).

The first beginning is that from Guardians of the Galaxy #.1, penciled by Steve McNiven, who also draws all of the parts of the first three issues that Sara Pichelli does not (the credits on this book are kind of a mess, and I had a hard time matching them up with the art that I saw later on, which all looked a lot like a rather rough version of McNiven; in addition to Pichelli pencilling and inking parts of two of the issues, there are two other inkers involved in issues #1-3).

I've actually read and wrote about this beginning already (although not in any great detail). It is essentially the origin story of Peter "Star-Lord" Quill, or at least of his childhood: How his Earthling mother met his marooned spaceman father and nursed him back to health, how his dad left her after he was conceived but before he was born, how the alien Badoon came to earth to kill he and his mom, how he survived and found a raygun.

It skips from that to a modern-day, adult Quill, finishing telling the story with "The second I could find a way off planet earth I took it...I got up here and here I am," before the camera pans out to show Quill standing in a spaceship, surrounded by the current Guardians line-up in their new, less-retro (and less cool) costumes, with Iron Man, also in a new costume, thanking him for telling him the story and saying that he has decided to take them up on their invitation to join them in outer space for a while (an invitation extended in the previously linked-to Avengers Assemble comic, and something he was considering doing at the end of Matt Fraction's run on Invincible Iron Man).

"Now we show them how it's done," Quill tells Stark, as their space ship zooms off to start the new series.

And then we get Beginning #2, which consists of the first three issues of the monthly series.

Quill is in a bar trying to talk a blue lady that looks like Gamora, the green lady on his team, into having sex with him (This isn't a plot point; McNiven just sorta draws them the same). Quill's dad, the king of Spartax, come in and has a long, Bendis-y conversation. Apparently Quill's dad and a Space Illuminati (The cosmic Marvel equivalent of all those scenes Bendis wrote of "The Illuminati" and Norman Osborn's "Dark Reign" cabal) have got together and talked about what they should do about the planet Earth, and they ultimately decide it is off-limits to all alien interference.

Meanwhile, Iron Man is apparently flying around solo in space in his new space-faring costume, which looks like his regular armor save with a higher red-to-yellow ratio, and a mask which somewhat resembles the one Star-Lord was wearing in the Keith Giffen-written StarLord miniseries.

The Badoon attack him, and the Guardians come to his rescue. Fight scene. Another check-in with Quill's dad's space meetings, in a two-page spread featuring a Bendis balloon chain.

It's the raised-hand posed that really annoys me, as it implies he's been in that position for the whole five-minute scene.

The Badoon attack London. Another fight scene (Weirdly, Rocket Raccoon seems kind of...Deadpool-like, shooting his foes in the face over and over and repeating, "Blam! Murdered you" to each as he does so. I don't think one needs to try so hard to make Rocket "funny;" the cognitive dissonance of his role in these stories vs. his appearance kind of does that all by itself).

The Spartax guys capture the Guardians. Another space meeting, where the space board of directors wonder if Quill's dad isn't being pretty manipulative. The Guardians escape, Quill making a speech to his people challenging his dad's authority, and setting the book's premise: This is going to be a book about a group of outsiders banded together to protect Earth from the sinister manipulations of the Galaxies various empires and invaders. It's the good guys from the original Star Wars trilogy versus the bad guys from the second Star Wars trilogy.

Or it's Bendis in space: Lots of chatter, clever repartee, plot-delineating exposition conversations, disregard for whatever was written about these characters by whoever was writing them previously, intimations of the importance of the conflicts to the entire Marvel Universe, better-than-average comics-making in general (Regarding Bendis' disregard, Quill was apparently dead before Bendis started writing him; there's a scene where his dad says "I get updates on you, you know...Heard you dragged yourself back from the dead," which is as much as an explanation as we're given in this whole volume. Gladiator appears in the space-meetings, and seems oddly disconnected from the character I just read in those Annihilators collections; one of which featured Gladiator battling to save Earth alongside a team that had taken over the Guardians of the Galaxy's role in the, um, galaxy. Also, his mohawk looks funny here).

This storyline will apparently continue in the next volume, and the rest of this volume contains Beginning #3, the one-shot special Guardians of The Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers #1, featuring a hodge-podge of solo-ish stories featuring the Guardians who are neither Quill nor Iron Man, each written by Bendis and drawn by different artists (Although a Yves Bigerel is credited with lay-outs on three of the four stories).

The first of these features nice (but, in two instances, surprisingly difficult to read) art by Bendis' frequent collaborator Michael Avon Oeming (and Rain Beredo, who I am guessing colored it, but it's unclear from the credits). This features Drax fighting some guys, and then Quill appearing to re-recruit him at the end, setting up expectations that maybe this is a getting-the-band-back-together series of shorts (I think it was the line "We need to get the Guardians back together" that gave me this impression).

But the second, by Michael Del Mundo, scuttles those expectations. It's an over-narrated story told from the perspective of an alien on an alien planet that's being harassed by other, meaner aliens, until Groot shows up and kicks their asses, and then Rocket and the Guardians arrive to pick up Groot in the last panel (So in story #2, the band is already back together, thanks).

The third, nicely drawn by Ming Doyle and either inked or colored (or both?) by Javier Rodriguez, Rocket is in a space-bar, bragging about his adventures and trying to hit on a lady that does not look at all attractive by human or raccoon standards. At some point, a mouthy guy says he saw "another one" like Rocket on Rigel Seven and leaves. Rocket interrogates him by gunpoint, but all he learns is that he once saw "one" just like Rocket, but it was a different color and it wasn't "up on both legs...walking and talkin'..."

Rocket seems to thing this is big, important news. But, um, a creature that looks like Rocket, but is a different color, and doesn't walk and talk? That's a fucking raccoon, and Earth is lousy with 'em. If this was meant to be the revelation that it's presented as (a mysterious assassin kills the mouthy guy before he can say too much, then disappears), then Bendis probably shoulda scripted it a little more carefully.

The final story, this one by Del Mundo again, is just Gamora fighting and killing some dude, with Quill showing up on the last page to pick her up.

So it's a series of beginnings, stopping and starting. I would guess Marvel published these two specials, the "#.1" issue and the Tomorrow's Avengers special, to introduce the characters a little better (though most of the shorts don't; all we learn of Drax and Gamora are that they are green-skinned violent bad-asses, all we learn of Groot is that he is a big tree that says "I am Groot," and all we learn of Rocket is that he is an obnoxious, violent drinker who has never heard of raccoons, despite having "Raccoon" as his surname). Well, that and to promote the series as a sort of big deal, what with the multiple #1s, and the word "Avengers" in the third #1, and so on.

And then I suppose when it came time to collect the first volume, they had little choice but to put them all between the same set of covers. Perhaps a different ordering would have helped, with Tomorrow's Avengers coming first, as it precedes the other two by story chronology, if not publication date? (Actually, the short stories in it seem to pre-date Avengers Assemble Vol. 1 as well).

Regardless of the decent quality of all three basic story units—GotG #.1, GotG #1-3 and Tomorrow's Avengers—they don't read smoothly as a complete whole, and the first collection of the new, higher-profile Guardians of the Galaxy series is a bunch of starts, which are presented in fits and starts.

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One thing I noticed, when I linked to that review of Avengers Assemble was that in that particular story, Rocket Raccoon had his own, distinct style of dialogue bubble, most noticeable in that it was yellow, indicating that his voice sounds much different than all of the humans/humanoid voices, who had yellow dialogue balloons (How different, and in what ways, I can't imagine; I do hope he's not meant to have, like, an Alvin and The Chipmunks chipmunk voice, because good God will that make that movie intolerable).

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Another thing I noticed? There were soooo many variant covers for these issues. Some of them are character-specific. You'll see lots of Rocket-only covers, by the likes of Joe Quesada. There's a really great Gamora, wearing her costume from the previous volume, by Milo Manara. There are a few Ed McGuinness covers and a Joe Madueira one. And there were so many for the first issue that the last few pages of the collection don't show the variants at full-size, but are divided into fourths, so they can show some sixteen variants in just four pages.

Many of these are retailer specific, indicating there was probably some weird ordering scheme I don't understand that triggered the production of a variant. Deadpool appears in a few of the retailer-specific ones—which is kinda weird, as he's not in the book at all—in addition to appearing in the "Deadpool Variant" and the "Hastings Variant." There's something called a "Phantom Variant" that kinda confuses the "Days of Future Past" cover with Wolvie and and Kitty in front of the poster image, showing villain Thanos in front of a poster with various Guardians' pictures and the words "fugitive" stamped/posted over them.

Of these 16 in the last few pages (and there are other full-size variants included throughout the book, like the aforementioned Quesadas and Manara), the only one I really liked was the Marcos Martin one:

He did a Guardians Pose image, but unlike many of them, he puts them all on there, and he does it in a way that is inventive, appealing and striking. I really love this Marcos Martin character.