The last couple of issues of Guardians of Galaxy have added some players and effectively moved the other portions of the team into place for the looming War of Kings. This issue is also a piece-mover, and is completely dedicated to playing catch-up with Drax and Quasar. I ended my review of War of Kings#1 (also written by Abnett and Lanning) with a mention of abstracts, and how they just can’t help but take notice, interject, or even be catalyst for events. It’s not very unlike the fictionalized meddling of deities – gods and demigods – in Greek mythology. We even kick off this issue with what struck me as a Trojan Horse. Phyla-Vell (that’s the present Quasar), like her brother*, is ‘life’ aspected even down to the name. Drax has historically been in opposition to Thanos, the consort and champion to the opposite concept of Death. So, we definitely are given the idea of avatars, be it loose, or more pronounced. Such an idea grants the concept of the War of Kings more angles, giving it the possibility of both a temporal and metaphysical layer and meaning.
“I’ve been in rooms with where there’s been Entropy sitting on one side of the table and Death on the other, and in between them Eternity and Chaos” – Drax
You can almost view the cosmic abstracts and concepts in the Marvel U. as an integrated Dreaming that’s very much in play in the standard universe. Drax and Phyla (‘killed’ in the previous issue) find themselves in an unfamiliar plane searching for Moon Dragon and are met by Maelstrom (Oblivion aspected) who tries to – and admits facilitating – their arrival to escape from the plane himself. Along the way Abnett and Lanning choose to highlight the lack of balance in the universe, as Life has eclipsed Death, and that it could be just as dangerous a situation as the opposite. In the end we finally get to the Dragon of the Moon and a Maelstrom armed with quantum bands. These are actually major occurrences, when you consider what is essentially the declaration of Oblivion’s – via Maelstrom – insertion into the game, as well as the presence of the Dragon of the Moon ,which is a creature that not only is a powerful entity in it‘s own right, but one that I’m very interested in seeing how Abnett and Lanning may to apply to the present Marvel cosmic landscape. It also causes me to wonder on the possibility of Thanos appearing to right the aforementioned balance, and even more, the cocoon we’ve previously seen. The former is probably a wishful reach, but it’s just something I always look for as Thanos and Warlock are very much the cornerstones of my Marvel U. There are what could be significant bullet points to the larger story in this issue, but I think it falters in feeling too much like staging ground and never seems to sell and buy into it’s own significance. What should be emotional – traversing oblivion in search of a daughter, and lover – I found failed to impact at the level I’d expect.
I cannot admit to being a particular fan of the art or coloring in this issue. There are some odd facial expressions, and I just got the impression that the choice of faraway shots and silhouettes were intended to avoid detail (lots of character’s backs to the reader as well). I guess that cope could have been used to display the unique qualities of plane/setting or to instill the sense of length of journey, but at the end of the day, I still felt that a certain sense of tension or foreboding was not reached when we were confronted with character shots. If Quasar were to have thrown out a Burt Ward line at Drax, nothing in the image would cause it to feel out of place. There is a rather striking image of the Dragon of the Moon, and what looks to be an almost Galactus-like head decapitated in the background in one scene, but these are the only instances that I really felt that the dialogue was amplified by the art. It was almost as if watching a familiar movie that had a different soundtrack playing. I’m not sure, I could have just been spoiled by Pelletier’s work on last week’s War of Kings.
It cannot be called uneventful, but in the end what you have is an issue that seems almost too necessary, and ultimately an average chapter of what is and has been an exceptional title.
*Genis/Genus
- Jay Tomio
Jan-ken-pon is the time traveling, force-walking, multiverse crossing column of Jay Tomio, owner of 1/3 of everything you see currently on screen, and the editor of Heliotrope. Some call him the Bodhisattva.
