Greetings from Battleworld: Secret Wars Week 11

Welcome back to another exciting week on Batteworld. Two number ones this week. First from Dan Grote...

Captain Britain and the Mighty Defenders #1

 Story: Al Ewing

Art: Alan Davis, Mark Farmer and Wil Quintana

Finally, someone outside the main Secret Wars book remembers life before the incursions. Not just someone, a whole domain of someones!

Welcome to Yinsen City, the most peaceful domain in all of Battleworld, born from a reality in which Tony Stark sacrificed himself all those years ago in the cave to save the life of fellow captive Ho Yinsen, who it turns out did a better job of being Iron Man – or Rescue, rather – than Stark ever could.

Like any other domain, everyone is obsessed with Doom’s laws about heresy and not crossing borders, but everyone in Yinsen City gets along so well that when the local Thor – She-Hulk – gets wind of it, she all but brushes it off.

Perhaps that’s because she, Yinsen, and others are starting to remember: Remember the incursions, remember the time before Doom was god, remember their true origins before becoming barons and Thors and Spider Heros.

And then they get a sword-wielding visitor from beyond the city limits who remembers even more: Dr. Faiza Hussain, who goes by Captain Britain even though on Battleworld there is no such place as Britain. The defenders of Yinsen City take her in, because they’re good people, which immediately triggers the wrath of Doom. Rather than throw them all over the Shield to the zombies and Ultrons, Doom knocks down the wall between Yinsen City and neighboring Mondo City, a fascist domain where everyone dresses like Avalanche from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and their tanks have many, many guns. Yinsen is killed, Faiza is kidnapped and what becomes of the others is unclear.

What I like about this book is that it pulls elements from lesser-known but no-less loved series: Paul Cornell’s Captain Britain & MI:13, Ewing’s own Mighty Avengers, and creates a diverse team (all people of color with the exception of She-Hulk). It also has a great “What If?” element in the Yinsen baronage. Most importantly though, it addresses, head-on, many of the questions I asked around the time I started reading A-Force, about how many people remember what came before and how certain characters can still have codenames that hinge on the existence of lands that do not appear on Battleworld. Many of the other books are fun, great reads, but they do little to address the greater mechanics of Secret Wars, which is probably to their credit. This book, like the reader, isn’t afraid to ask “What the hell is actually going on here?”

Also, it should be noted that She-Hulk-Thor’s hammer is a tiny courtroom gavel. Why? “Because I’ve got my hammers right here” (puts up fists). Jen Walters, I love you. Never change.

And then from me...

Guardians of Knowhere #1

Story: Brian Michael Bendis

Art: Mike Deodata & Laura Martin

Dan talks above about how people in Yinsen City are starting to remember incursions and the past. Well, it seems like that isn't the only place where Doom's little fiction is fraying. Guardians of Knowhere opens with an explaination of how Doom killed the Celestial to leave the head that serves as Knowhere floating around Earth like Unicron's head circling Cybertron in late Transformers stories. Well, Angela comes up to Knowhere to find Gamora and exact the will of Doom, to instead find a drunken Drax the Destroyer. We don't get an answer as to why Drax seems so at ends and lacking in his usual drive at first, but the issue gives us some hints towards the end. Drax starts a fight with Angela and Gamora arrives, still cosmically powered as she was at the end of "The Black Vortex" storyline. Rocket shows up, helps get the Guardians away from Angela, and then our team talks. Angela is looking for Gamora because she's breaking the cardinal rule of Battleworld: Gamora is moving between domains. And when Gamora brings up Thanos, neither Rocket or Drax know who he is (and since Drax was created to kill and counter Thanos, I figure that's why he's drinking himself to death). I don't know if it's the cosmic awareness Gamora has now, or just the beginning of the end of Doom's reign, but it's clear Gamora is getting suspicious. It's an interesting first issue that is one of the more direct follow ups to an existing Marvel title into Secret Wars. As Bendis was writing Guardians of the Galaxy before the event began, he's carrying those characterizations over, and I wonder if, because of the Guardians alien nature, if they might be the actual 616 Guardians, not alternate versions. Mike Deodata is an artist who draws a mean fight scene, and the battle between the Guardians and Angela through Knowhere is top notch. More tied in with Secret Wars than many of the crossovers I've been reading, if you enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy in recent years, this book will nicely scratch that itch until All New All Different Marvel starts up.

Fit to Be Tied In: A History of Marvel Crossovers and Events Part 3- Cosmic Crossovers from The Infinity Gauntlet to The Annihilation Wave and Beyond

While it can be argued that the original Secret Wars was Marvel's first cosmic crossover, after all the Beyonder is a pretty cosmic threat, the threat still was mostly directed just at Earth. Something like the "Dark Phoenix Saga" had a loftier scale, with the Phoenix a threat so great it called down cosmic empires. So for me, the era of the cosmic crossover didn't start until 1991, when Jim Starlin made his grand entrance to the crossover stage with The Infinity Gauntlet.

I've written about The Inifinity Gauntlet multiple times in multiple ways, but long story short: Thanos gets the six Infinity Gems (yes, gems. It might be stones in Super Hero Squad and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's still gems in the comics). Thanos becomes a god. Thanos kills half the universe. Heroes fight Thanos. He kills heroes. Cosmic beings fight Thanos. Thanos captures or destroys them. Nebula steals the Gauntlet. Thanos joins with heroes to stop Nebula. Adam Warlock winds up with Gauntlet. Thus endeth the lesson.

It's a well regarded, well remembered crossover from first of the cosmic masterminds, Jim Starlin, with art by George Perez (who you might remember from another crossover, Crisis on Infinite Earths) and Ron Lim.. While Thanos had been appearing in Silver Surfer for over a year, this is what brought him to the main stage of the Marvel Universe, and took a villain whose appearances could be counted on both hand and both feet of two people suddenly became a villain who was central to the Marvel Universe. It also resurrected Adam Warlock, Pip the Troll, and Gamora, three other Starlin characters (Warlock is technically a Lee/Kirby character, but Starlin's Warlock is about as similar to Lee/Kirby's as he is to Reed Richards) who would be part of the center of the cosmic Marvel Universe for the next few years, and the other two parts of Starlin's Infinity trilogy.

Starlin and Lim return in 1992, which saw the debut of The Infinity War. Following up on plot threads from The Infinity Gauntlet, when Warlock was briefly the lord of creation, he cast all good and evil from himself, thinking this would make him an impartial deity. What it really did was help give birth to the Magus, the embodiment of Warlock's evil, who took the name and skin color of the dark future version of Warlock from the classic Starlin tales. The Magus's plan is one of those incredibly windy, Machiavellian ones that has about four levels of wheels within wheels, but it involves creating evil doppelgangers of pretty much every superhero and sending them out against their opposites to replace them. There are four different factions all investigating the Magus's plot: the Infinity Watch (Warlock's team who each got an Infinity Gem when he divided up the gauntlet); Galactus and his merry band of the Silver Surfer, Nova (his herald at the time, an Earth girl made into a fiery cosmic being, not the cosmic hero of New Warriors and later cosmic events fame); the heroes of Earth; and Dr. Doom and Kang.

Starlin does a lot of writing here about duality, about how we all have multiple versions of ourselves, some more divergent than others. For instance, Thanos's evil doppelganger is pretty much just Thanos. While the story is fun, it's much busier than Infinity Gauntlet, much more involved, and you almost wipe your brow in relief when all the threads come together. This was a big crossover with lots of issues where heroes fought their doppelgangers. Notable ones included Spider-Man #24, where Spider-Man's six armed doppelganger would survive and become part of "Maximum Carnage" and issues of Fantastic Four, where Sue Storm fought, defeated, and accepted her dark doppelganger, leading to the infamous Invisible Woman costume that had so many cut outs it might as well be an Emma Frost costume.

And if the Magus was Warlock's evil side, what happened to the good side? Well, that was the Goddess, who was the central antagonist of the final third of the Infinity trilogy, 1993's The Infinity Crusade. Powered by a couple dozen cosmic containment units (Cosmic Cubes of many shapes), the Goddess goes about recreating Counter Earth, the Earthlike planet that used to orbit the sun at the exact opposite point of Earth, turns it into a garden of Eden, and then populates it with superpeople from Earth she considers worthy. The Goddess's goal, she claims, is to rid the universe of evil. Sounds good, right? Well, pure good not balanced with anything is as destructive as poor evil, and again we get various factions fighting each other, including Goddess's heroes, the remaining heroes now forced to fight their friends, and Thanos and Warlock teamed up with Mephisto.

If you've read pretty much anything Starlin has ever written, you know he has a thing about organized religion, and the Goddess, with that name plus a giant cathedral and seeking people of faith, is clearly part of the evil religious figures that Starlin has created. This does have a really great last scene, one of those perfectly plotted little twists that makes you smile when you realize it was all there from the beginning.

After Infinity Crusade, the cosmic aspects of the Marvel Universe cooled off. Warlock and the Infinity Watch ended about a year and a half later, with Starlin having jumped ship about a year before. Warlock was sent over the the Ultraverse for a while, and needed a few years away to lose the stench of the epic failure. Thanos became a much more rote cosmic baddy, losing mos if Starlin's nuance. Starlin eventually came back, wrote the  self contained mini-series Infinity Abyss and Marvel Universe: The End, and the first six issues of a Thanos ongoing. When Starlin left that series, Keith Giffen took it over, and also wrote a four issue mini-series for another Starlin character, Drax the Destroyer. These two stories led into the renaissance for Marvel's cosmic corner.

Annihilation was released in 2006, so it was well over a decade after the Infinity trilogy. A war fleet led by Annihilus, the insect-like ruler of the Negative Zone (an antimatter universe) from Fantastic Four, comes into the normal Marvel Universe and starts systematically destroying everything. Since theer were no cosmic ongoings at the time, the crossover was instead handled as a prologue one shot followed by four mini-series, Nova, Ronan the Accuser, Silver Surfer, and Super-Skrull, that funneled into a single mini-series, Annihilation, where a ragtag group of rebels, led by Nova (which will be Richard Rider for the remainder of this article), must fight back the Annihilation Wave. The scale is huge, but the series itself is small, just six issues, and Giffen and artist Andrea Devito use every page to the best effect. It's action packed, it's heart wrenching, and it's exciting. Annihilation gave birth to a new Nova series, which was used to springboard another three events that made up the new era of cosmic Marvel.

The year after Annihilation began, it's sequel launched. Annihilation: Conquest saw the Kree Empire invaded by the techno-organic alien race, the Phalanx, who had fallen under the sway of this summer's Spaderyest villain, Ultron. Once again, a ragtag group of heroes have to face down the big bad. This event followed the same format as Annihilation, with a one shot and then four four issue arcs, but this time one of those stories took place in the recently launched Nova ongoing. The other three were Wraith (a new character, created by Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach), Quasar (starring Captain Mar-Vell's daughter, Phyla, and returning Adam Warlock to life), and Star-Lord by previous Annihilation mastermind, Keith Giffen. Conquest was another exciting, world spanning cosmic piece, and Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (DnA for short), who wrote it as well as the Annihilation: Nova mini-series and the Nova ongoing, get a lot of credit for their strong characters and wild sci-fi ideas, which is deserved. However, I want to call out Keith Giffen, whose contributions tend to be forgotten. He did write Annihilation, and while I have a feeling DnA might have picked the characters, it was in Giffen's Star-Lord mini-series that Marvel fandom was reintroduced to Mantis, Bug, and two other then little known characters, Rocket Raccoon and Groot, who appeared in a little movie that came out last summer.

With all the key players in place, this book launched a second cosmic series by DnA, this one the launchpad for that movie I just mentioned, Guardians of the Galaxy, which not only featured the moive team of five, but Adam Warlock, Quasar, Bug, Mantis, Jack Flag, Major Victory. and Cosmo, the Russian cosmonaut dog who appeared in the Collector's menagerie in the movie. The next cosmic event broke the pattern established by the Annihilation event, both in naming and format.

War of Kings was the Game of Thrones of cosmic events. Two of the great outer space empires, the Kree and the Shi'ar, went to war, with the Shi'ar currently under the control of Vulcan, the incredibly powerful and totally insane third Summer brother of long lost X-Men storyline, the Kree had recently been conquered by the Inhumans; so in a very meta way, it's a forerunner of Marvel's current publishing issues with mutants versus Inhumans. The lead in to this story took place in Guardians and Nova, along with a mini-series called X-Men: Kingbreaker, featuring the Starjammers and a group of X-Men who were fighting Vulcan, and War of Kings: Darkhawk, a mini-series that established a tin between the 90s hero Darkhawk's alien armor and the Shi'ar.

The core mini-series dealt mostly with the war, and featured a lot of the Inhuman royal family, Vulcan and the Shi'ar Impreial Guard, and Lilandra, the deposed Shi'ar ruler, and the Strajammers. Nova and his newly reformed Nova Corps took up the battle in his title, while the over in their title, the Guardians tried to stop the War in their title, as they had been warned the war would have dire consequences. As the series moved to its cataclysmic end, the Guardians failed, and Vulcan and Black Bolt were seemingly killed as a massive bomb, meant to obliterate the Shi'ar, exploded, tearing a hole in space dubbed The Fault. Only by sacrificing himself does Adam Warlock stop The Fault from eating all of the universe, but in so doing he finally gives in to the future and becomes Adam Magus.

War of Kings led into a branding called Realm of Kings. It was like the Dark Reign banners that ran through much of Marvel for some time; not really a crossover, but more telling readers that these stories had something to tie them together. The Fault becomes the principle problem, and investigating it shows that it ties the Marvel Universe to a malignant other universe filled with undying monster versions of this reality. The Universe is dubbed the Cancerverse, and is a place wheer Death has been killed, meaning nothing can die and it has used up all its space and needs to expand. While Nova and the Shi'ar investigate, the Guardians are forced to deal with the Universal Church of Truth, the body created by, and once more under the control of, Adam Magus. It turns out the Magus is trying to throw open The Fault and let the Many-Angled Ones (Cthulhu like monsters) and their converted servants in. And he succeeds, but not before the Guardians find a cocoon like the one Warlock hibernates in, and from it emerges Thanos, long thought dead after the end of Annihilation.

The final act of this period of Marvel's cosmic dramas was The Thanos Imperative. While Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy had cult followings, their sales were middling, and so they both ended with Realm of Kings, and everything was wrapped up in a six issue mini-series with two bookend one shots. The Cancerverse Revengers, led by a corrupted Captain Mar-Vell, begin invading the Marvel Universe, and kill Adam Magus immediately for failing to kill Thanos. The various cosmic forces fight a holding action, trying to keep the Cancerverse forces, and the universe itself, from advancing far from The Fault, while the Guardians, Nova, and Thanos enter the Cancerverse, as Thanos's close relationship with Death will allow him to reawaken it/her in that universe and stop the spread. It's a tense battle, full of epic cosmic figures, and DnA threw everything they could into this last cosmic tale. In the end, the heroes succeed, but not without a cost: Drax is killed by Thanos, and as the Cancerverse collapses, Thanos, Star-Lord, and Nova are seemingly trapped forever in the what remains of it.

And that's it. There were a couple of follow-up mini-series for a new cosmic team called the Annihilators, set up to be the opposite of the scruffy Guardians who fought by wits, instead being made up of incredibly powerful characters, but they didn't really take off, despite being good stories and having great Rocket and Groot back-ups. A couple years after that, with Thanos revealed as the big bad at the end of Avengers that Thanos and the Guardians returned in Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagely's Avengers Assemble, which set up all that's come since.

Later this week, come back for Part four, where Dan returns to take you through the next batch of X-Men events.

Animated Discussions: Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes

I started binge-watching EMH when my son was just a few months old and I needed something to watch while I bottle-fed him and he did his tummy time. At the time, I was deep into reading Brian Michael Bendis’ New Avengers, a more street-level version of the team, which by contrast gave the cartoon a more old-school feel.

But it was nice to see a classic Avengers lineup, including Cap, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk (who’s done way more time as an Avenger this past decade than he has since the 1960s), Hawkeye, Black Widow, Black Panther, Hank Pym and the Wasp, and later Ms. Marvel and the Vision.

The show was a great educational ramp-up to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which had only given us 2 Iron Men and a Hulk when the show started in fall 2010.

Apparently, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes aired out of order and also as mini episodes on Disney XD, but I’m going off the way the eps are listed on Netflix, as that’s how you’d most likely watch them now.

In Netflix order, the show starts off with a series of one-off episodes, individually introducing Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Cap, etc. The team assembles in a two-parter called “Breakout,” based on the Bendis story that brought the New Avengers together, in which villains escape from four supermax prisons simultaneously, and the Avengers band together to mop up the mess.

Over three years and 52 episodes, EMH casts a wide net, adapting stories from the "Korvac Saga" to the "Kree-Skrull War" to "Secret Invasion" to "Red Zone" (that’s right, even the Geoff Johns stuff squeaks in). Many of the episodes were written by comics people, including Christopher Yost, who penned a number of books for Marvel, including New X-Men, X-Force, X-23 and Avenging Spider-Man/Superior Spider-Man Team-Up; and the Man of Action team that includes Joe Kelly, Steven Seagle, Joe Casey and Duncan Rouleau, who also have written for Disney’s Ultimate Spider-Man and Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 and Generator Rex. Man of Action also work on Disney’s follow-up Avengers cartoon, Avengers Assemble, which was intended to more closely mirror the movie.

Notable voice actors include Fred Tatasciore, who by now has made a career of playing the Hulk in cartoons, Drake Bell, who’s done the same for Spider-Man, Phil LaMarr as JARVIS (the AI, not the butler), Brent Spiner as the Purple Man and J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson.

Below are some of the series’ best episodes. You’ll note they’re exclusively from Season 2, which is when the show really finds its footing, as having introduced all the major characters, it has a chance to breathe, explore their stories and create some really nice character moments.

“The Private War of Doctor Doom” (Season 2, episode 1): Dr. Doom attacks the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, kidnapping the Invisible Woman and the Wasp in the process. The episode’s greatest moments come in the first act, during which Iron Man and the Wasp visit Reed and Sue Richards, and Johnny and Ben visit Avengers Mansion for a poker game with the Hulk, Hawkeye, Cap and Black Panther. Hulk and Thing immediately start pummeling each other, playing up their long-standing rivalry, while the Torch and Hawkeye crack wise. Meanwhile, at the Baxter Building, Reed is in his lab, doing his level best to ignore Tony, who is detailing a long-winded yarn about the team’s recent adventures in Asgard and also pondering aloud his chances of scoring with the Invisible Woman.

“To Steal an Ant-Man” (Season 2, episode 5): Hank Pym, who quit the team riddled with guilt about creating Ultron and claiming to be a pacifist just like Smokey in “The Big Lebowski,” hires Luke Cage and Iron Fist (yay) to help him find whoever stole his Ant-Man costume. The thief turns out to be none other than Scott Lang, better known by his Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe handle, Ant-Man II, who is using the suit to rob banks for money to save his daughter, who in the comics grew up to become the Young Avengers’ Stature. There’s a great sequence in the episode in which Lang is adjusting to being Ant-Man size, shrinking himself into a dusty motel carpet and being attacked by insects until he realizes he has the power to control them. Pym narrates over the scene, explaining that whoever stole the costume would have to adjust to a new reality. The episode also nails the interplay between Cage and Fist, one of my favorite duos in comics. Fun fact: A security guard named Michelinie appears in the episode, named after David Michelinie, who wrote Marvel Fanfare #47, the comic this episode is based on.

“Michael Korvac” (Season 2, episode 6): As critically beloved Avengers stories go, "The Korvac Saga," about a normal man who freaks out when given the powers of a god, is pretty high up there. But this episode is also notable for introducing the Guardians of the Galaxy – specifically Star-Lord, Adam Warlock, Rocket Raccoon, Groot and Quasar – into Marvel’s cartoons. And it’s written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, who banded together the modern-era Guardian six years ago, leading to the top-grossing movie of 2014. Rewatching this episode after having seen the movie, it’s funny how emotionally powerful a moment watching Groot be destroyed in the movie was, considering in this episode he’s lasered to atoms twice.

“Prisoner of War” (Season 2, episode 10): Captain America has been held in a Skrull prison for months but finally stages a breakout of his own, leading a band of heroes and villains against the Super Skrull. Secret Invasion takes up a good chunk of Season 2, but this episode stands out for its good old-fashioned Capitude.

“Along Came a Spider” (Season 2, episode 13): After the events of “Secret Invasion,” Cap’s popularity is at an all-time low, so to cheer himself up, he fights the Serpent Society with Spider-Man, on loan from Disney XD’s “Ultimate Spider-Man,” a cartoon that features a running gag in which J. Jonah Jameson constantly yells about the menace that is the Web-head from giant screens all over New York. Spidey, Cap and the Serpents get stuck underground with a bunch of subway passengers, who initially spit on the two heroes like they’re the X-Men or something. But after enough moments of Cap being Cap, the civilians rally around him, driving off the superpowered snake monsters with rocks.

“New Avengers” (Season 2, episode 23): When Kang places the Avengers in a temporal void, a new, Bendis-fied team made up of Spider-Man, Wolverine, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Thing and War Machine assembles to save them.

“Avengers Assemble” (Season 2, episode 26): With cancellation imminent, the last few episodes rush to tie up every loose plot, but their scope more than makes up for it. In the final ep, every hero who ever appeared on the show bands together to stop Galactus from eating the Earth. Special guests include Spider-Man, Wolverine, Cage and Fist, War Machine, Winter Soldier, Falcon, the Fantastic Four, the Red Hulk, and heralds Terrax, Firelord, Stardust and Air-Walker.

Dan Grote has been a Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.

Recommended Reading for 8/8: Guardians of the Galaxy: Rocket Raccoon & Groot- Steal the Galaxy

Ok, so this is the wrap up to our celebration of Guardians of the Galaxy. I still can't get over the fact that these obscure characters are the stars of the biggest blockbuster of the summer. Not a complaint, just... wow. So, today's recommendation is not a comic, but the most recent in Marvel's series of self published novels. While the earlier books in the series were adaptations of comic series (Civil War, X-Men: Gifted, and New Avengers: Breakout to name a few), this novel is an original story, and to top it off, it's written by Dan Abnett, half of the writing team that brought the Guardians back to prominence. When it was announced, I knew I had to give it a shot, and I was pleased that I did.

This novel is a wacky caper story, where a Rigellian Recorder robot falls into the hands of Rocky and Groot, and quickly it turns out that the robot is being pursued by the Badoon, The Kree, Timely Inc. (a megacorp that Rocket once worked in the mail room for), and a few other factions. It isn't clear at the beginning what the Recorder might have recorded, but whatever it is, it's got many factions hunting it, and only a raccoon and a tree to protect it. The novel a tour of the Marvel cosmos, with intergalactic empires, space cops, Spaceknights, and hired killers all hunting for our hapless heroes and their new robotic friend.

It's not surprising that Abnett tells an action packed story with more than a touch of humor. Rocket and Groot are inherently funny characters, a classic odd couple, and tossing in the Recorder to be a straight man against the two of them works beautifully. The voices that both Rocket and Groot have (well, it's a bit more limited with Groot, but the impressions you get form him) today are directly from Abnett's run, so I can think of no writer who better captures them. Different chapters of the novel are narrated differently, but the majority of them are form the perspective of the Recorder, who is a very likable narrator, a robot in the mold of C-3PO without much of the screeching, and so you get his often very literal interpretations of events, and his commentary about the odd characters around him, including a recurring line about Rocket's, "disturbingly human hands" which starts out funny, and then it does that thing where it gets less funny only to become even funnier as the line keeps popping up.

Before I move off the topic of humor, I just want to touch on Timely, Inc. When they appeared in the comic back-ups starring Rocket and Groot in the Annihilators mini-series, you knew they were this very officious mega-corporation. Digging deeper into their workings, you see that it's even worse than you imagined. The scenes with Timely are like a Dilbert comic strip in space, where the company is actively attempting galactic domination and with all of the different aliens on the Special Projects board speaking in these terrible buzzwords that clearly have no real meaning, just adding ridiculous suffixes onto existing words. It's a funny little trope. The great thing about that board, too, is that variety of aliens represented there. It includes not just a Kree , but a Skrull (the shape-shifting enemies of the Kree), a Z'Nox (an obscure alien race from early X-Men stories), a Shi'ar (a much less obscure race from more modern X-Men stories), and a Kaliklakian (the insect-like species that former Guardian Bug was a member of who have a -tik- distinctive speech pattern).

That variety of aliens is a hallmark of the book, which takes you all over the Marvel universe. As someone who is deeply familiar with these concepts and characters, it's hard to judge ease of accessibility, but it struck me that Abnett did a good job of explaining the core concepts. With the Recorder, whose whole job it is to accumulate data, as a narrator, there was an easy device to talk to the reader and explain who or what something is. By introducing original characters as members of the Nova Corps and Shi'ar Imperial Guard, you got to know these characters and through them their organizations, instead of trying to use an established character.

Thematically, the book treads on similar topics as the movie, a story about friendship and loyalty. I don't think  this is necessarily intentional, as the friendship between Rocket and Groot, and their loyalty to one another, has been key to a lot of the the stories that they have been featured in. What the book does is bring in other characters. We see how Rocket and Groot have to make decisions about the Recorder, and whether to stay loyal to him despite his vast worth to various factions. Gamora appears, hired to retrieve the Recorder, and she must decide if her contract is worth more than the friendship she has with our heroes. And a fallen Galadoran Space Knight, called Roamer, who has forsworn his oaths to protect the innocent, must decide if he really is a mercenary or still has a hero within him, loyal to the ideals who once believed in.

And for those of us who are familiar with the Marvel cosmic universe, there are a few great cameos and appearances. I've already mentioned Gamora has a role in the novel. Roamer, a member of the Spaceknights, is, well, never really given much background, but with that name and background I think Roamer might be someone we know. The master of the Negative Zone, Annihilus, pops up as one of the beings hunting the Recorder. The very end of the book tosses one last faction into the novel that I won't spoil, but is familiar to anyone who truthfully knows their Marvel cosmic history (there's a hnt there). And the cameo that got me most excited was an appearance by Pip the Troll. The one member of the 90s Infinity Watch (the team that protected the Infinity Gems, also featuring Adam Warlock, Gamora, Drax, Moondragon, and Thanos) that never appeared in the Guardians of the Galaxy comic series (he was a member of X-Factor for much of that time, a mismatch that worked really well), Rocket and Groot get to meet up with a retired Pip who now runs a junk shop. It's a really fun scene, and a treat for those of us who know these characters.

I know a novel is a lot more of a time commitment than a comic is, and so many have to be more frugal about what they choose to start. Rocket Raccoon and Groot- Steal the Galaxy is a quick, fun read, perfect for summer vacation. If you're a long term fan of Guardians of the Galaxy, or someone who just discovered them through the movie, it's a great read.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Rocket Raccoon and Groot- Steal the Galaxy is available at any book or comic book shop.

Matt and Dan Go to the Movies- Guardians of the Galaxy

Matt Lazorwitz: So, while we didn't go together, both Dan and I saw Guardians of the Galaxy over this inaugural weekend, and so now it's time for our second tag team review! Let's start off with Dan.

Dan Grote: Guardians of the Galaxy is great for two different kinds of people: Those who love the cosmic Marvel characters and enjoy hunting for Easter Eggs, and people for whom none of these characters existed prior to this movie.

As much as Guardians is a brand-new concept for most moviegoers, the film doesn't feel like there’s homework required, nor does it hold your hand through excess exposition for the most part. Personally, I haven’t been into the cosmic characters since Matt and I scripted Infinity Watch 2099 fan-fic (try and guess around what time that was!), [Editor's Note: Hey, it was the early 90s, we were in our early teens, and this is how we thought you got into comics, send a pile of reference heavy fanfic to a comic company, and they would love us. If only that were true] and even then the only characters from this movie that I knew were Gamora, Drax and Thanos.

ML: Coming from it at the other end of the spectrum, as a guy who spent time writing a piece that was a run down of these cosmic heroes before going to see the movie because they are my favorite characters in the Marvel Universe, I was really impressed. Not only did they get the tone of each character spot on, but those Easter Eggs weren't club you over the head, wink at the camera Easter Eggs. They were part of this big, crazy, gorgeous world that director James Gunn and his team built.

DG: Avengers notwithstanding, the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have largely been confined to their little corners. The Asgard corner, the World War II corner, the S.H.I.E.L.D. corner, the Stark Industries corner, etc. Space is not a corner, and director James Gunn understands that. To quote Saturday Night Live’s Stefon, this club has everything: Kree, Sakaarans, mad Titans, tree monsters, raccoons with weapons fetishes, space hillbillies, an Earthling, blue people, purple people, green people, white people, Stan Lee, Lloyd Kaufman, etc.

ML: So many of these wacky and bizarre concepts come together in one of my favorite settings in the Marvel Universe, Knowhere, the floating, severed head of a Celestial that has been turned into a space station, a concept I never thought I'd see on screen. Not only was it done on screen, but it was done in a really impressive way. It strikes me as a sci-fi version of one of my favorite scenes from another comic book movie, the Troll Market sequence from Hellboy: The Golden Army. While all the scenes in Knowhere are littered with Easter Eggs (none more than the Collector's menagerie), it's more than just Easter Eggs. It's this fully formed and rendered world where everyone seems as strange and out of place as the Guardians. Standing against the clean, white spaces of Xandar, it makes the universe seem a wilder, more expansive place.

DG: I’m very much enjoying the trajectory of Chris Pratt’s career. I remember when he was the popular jock on Strangers with Candy. He was one of the ancillary characters who helped improve the fourth and final season of The O.C. He’s the idiot heart-and-soul of Parks and Recreation, and because I have a 3-year-old, I’ve seen The Lego Movie about a bajillion times. His Star-Lord is the perfect rake-as-hero (think Gambit without the Cajun accent and the rape-y vibe), and I look forward to seeing him in more things.

Lee Pace makes a great Ronan the Accuser, who turned out to be a much more imposing villain than I had expected. The movie does give us a little more Thanos, but he’s still not a fully realized threat. Ronan, on the other hand, is deadly, spouting threats, taking on the entire Nova Corps and throwing even the hulking Drax across the room as the Infinity Stone drives him to new levels of zealotry. The people casting and designing Apocalypse in the next X-Men movie should take notes.

ML: And while he was only really on screen for a moment, there was a great sense of grandeur and menace from Josh Brolin's Thanos. I've been waiting to get a real look at the most cosmic of Marvel bad guys, and I was not disappointed.

DG: Also a surprise was the depth Bradley Cooper brought to Rocket. When he was first cast, I thought I would have rather seen a professional voice guy like Jon Benjamin (Archer, Bob’s Burgers, Venture Bros.) or John DiMaggio (Futurama, Adventure Time, Batman: The Brave and the Bold) handle the character, but Rocket wasn't just there for comic relief. He’s an equal member of the team with his own reasons to be empathized with, and the Oscar-nominated actor performs admirably.

ML: The major surprise for me was Dave Bautista in the role of Drax. I'm not a professional wrestling person at all, so I had no exposure to Bautista as an actor before this (yeah, I said it), but I have found that a lot of times, pro wrestlers have a hard time getting out of the character they play there when acting in other parts. Dwayne Johnson is a notable exception, and Andre the Giant's turn in The Princess Bride is legendary for a reason,  but there's a reason that Hulk Hogan played pretty much himself in Rocky III and there was no Oscar talk for his roll in 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. Bautista brings layers to Drax. The writing gave him a really solid arc to work through, and Bautista played rage, to understanding, to empathy. Drax can be a one note character in the comics, so I was glad to see that Bautista was given this to work with, and that he rose to the challenge.

The core cast is rounded out by Zoe Saldana, whose Gamora wasn't given a ton to work with. A lot of what she had to say and do was designed to move the plot along, but the always sterling Saldana did a good job with her character moments. And while Vin Diesel only said five words (many of them repeatedly) throughout the entire movie, he does a great job with the nuance of them, and warms your heart at just the right moment. If you walked out liking Groot, and wanting to see more of him, it wouldn't hurt to check out The Iron Giant, the animated film by The Incredibles director Brad Bird, which starred Diesel as the titular robot.

DG: There are a few characters I would have liked to have seen more of, as is the way with any front-loaded flick. The Nova Corps, staffed by high-quality actors such as Glenn Close, John C. Reilly and Peter Serafinowicz, essentially act as machines to advance the plot. Same, too, goes for the Collector, though Benicio del Toro gets to both advance the plot and play Easter bunny, as most of the movie’s eggs – including the post-credit scene – are in his basket.

ML: My favorite of those Easter Eggs was the appearance of another character I never would have anticipated in a movie: Cosmo, the psychic Russian space dog. I mean, that is a concept that could only be created for a comic book, and despite only getting a couple cute cameos, he was still there! Now for a bigger roll in Guardians 2...

Also a shout out to the way the film dealt with Yondu's power. Yondu as a character was one of the most changed from his comic book persona, but I loved how they kept his sonic controlled arrows as part of the character, and how it looked. It was yet another neat touch.

DG: Without spoiling, the post-credits scene is most notable for not setting up a future Marvel movie. Not Avengers 2, not Ant-Man, not Doctor Strange, nothing. Just one last surprise, everyone-in-the-theater-gasps-then-claps joke.

ML: My final note is just how much I loved the soundtrack. I'm a sucker for music of the 60s and 70s, and have spent most of the weekend humming either Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede or O-O-H Child by the Five Stairsteps. That funky juxtaposition just seemed to work for me.

I AM GROOT! And You Are?: A Guardians of the Galaxy Primer

Today, Guardians of the Galaxy opens in theaters. Two years ago, pretty much no one outside a small group of fans knew who the Guardians were. I'm lucky to be someone who has followed the exploits of this incarnation of the team since its inception. I'm not saying this out of a sense of hipster, "I was a fan before it was cool." No, I'm saying it because I feel that, having followed these exploits for a number of years, it gives me a good perspective to give a rundown of the team's recent history to those of you less familiar with them, either to get you ready to see the movie, or to give you some more background if you were one people who went to see it last night (I'm going after work, so there will be something posted in the way of a review either this weekend or Monday).

The original Guardians of the Galaxy were a team of freedom fighters introduced in 1969, whose adventures took place in the distant future. There, a group of aliens fought against the evil Badoon, who had conquered our solar system. That team came back in the 90s for a successful run, originally drawn by Image founder Jim Valentino, but when that series ended, the Guardians fell into limbo, only making an occassional appearance.

Marvel's outer space characters were all pretty much moribund in the late 90s into the early 00s. Since the end of Infinity Trilogy (Infinity Gauntlet, War, and Crusade) and the cancellation of Silver Surfer and Warlock and the Infinity Watch, attempts had been made, with new series featuring such characters as Silver Surfer, Adam Warlock, and Thanos, but none had really caught on. But in 2006, writer Keith Giffen took that little corner of the Marvel Universe and exploded it. After doing six issues of a Thanos series, and then a four issue Drax the Destroyer mini-series, he wrote Annihilation, a six issue event mini-series with various tie-in mini-series, featuring an attack from the Negative Zone (an alternate universe) by the forces of Annihilus, a classic Fantastic Four villain, and his army, called the Annihilation Wave. This series returned the original Nova, Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, and various others to the forefront of the Marvel Universe.

The following year, Marvel followed the series up with Annihilation: Conquest, written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, who would shepherd the team for the next few years. This was the story of when the empire of the Kree, a race of warlike aliens, was conquered by The Phalanx, a race of techno-organic beings (basically, shapeshifting robots things that possess people), under the control of the Avengers villains, Ultron, who you might have heard of connected to another upcoming Marvel film. Not only was the cast of the original Annihilation back, but added were Adam Warlock, Rocket Raccoon, and Groot.

With Ultron defeated, things might have settled down. But Warlock, who I've written about before, knew that the cosmos was threatened. These wars had weakened the walls of the universe, and someone needed to, well, guard the galaxy, hopefully stopping another war that might bring further damage. So Warlock went to Peter Quill, the hero known as Star-Lord, and Quill gathered the various beings who had fought with him during the Phalanx war, creating the new Guardians of the Galaxy.

It was a big team, not just featuring the five members of the current/movie team (all of whom I'll get into detail about shortly) and Warlock, but various other unusual characters. These included Mantis (the celestial madonna and psychic), Quasar (Phyla-Vell who was the daughter of legendary cosmic hero Captain Marvel), Bug (an insectoid alien warrior), Moondragon (daughter of Drax and lover of Quasar), Major Victory (one of the original future Guardians who was displaced in time and gave the team it's name), and Jack Flag (a human hero fleeing trouble on Earth).

The Guardians might not have been the lovable losers the TV commercials make their movie counterparts out to be, but they certainly were a ragtag group. The cosmic heroes of the Marvel Universe had always been A-List powerhouses who could go toe-to-toe with the likes of Thor without blinking. But most of these Guardians were low on the power scale, and were saving the universe with little more than wit, gumption, and a whole lot of luck.

Over the course of a series that ran two years, the Guardians faced many of Marvel's great cosmic threats. They fought the Universal Church of Truth, who sought to convert the entire galaxy to their religion. They were caught up in a war between two of the great alien empires, the Kree and the Shi'ar. They briefly disbanded when it was revealed that Star-Lord manipulated many of the more reticent members to join, only be to regathered by the unlikely Rocket Raccoon to save Star-Lord, who had been sent to the Negative Zone.

But their greatest foe came from within. To stop the universe from ripping itself apart, Adam Warlock was once more transformed into his darker self, The Magus. He manipulated many of the team to be his servants as he took over the Universal Church of Truth, and opened the Fault, a crack between universes, to allow a malignant universe entrance to his own. He died in the process, but the Guardians now had to face down a team of dark Avengers who were the champions of that universe. Allying with Nova, the Guardians traveled to the heart of the Cancerverse, the name given to this new dark universe, with the one being who could stop it: Thanos, worshiper of Death and cosmic warlord, the greatest threat our universe had ever faced. In the end, they succeeded, but at a great cost; to allow the others to escape, Nova and Star-Lord stayed behind, to keep the mad Thanos in the Cancerverse as it collapsed. And that was the end of the Guardians of the Galaxy...

... or so it seemed. The Guardians returned, with Star-Lord again in the lead and no explanation, in the pages of Avengers Assemble to do battle with a similarly mysteriously returned Thanos. The Guardians have gone on to headline their own series, where they do their best to protect the helpless, standing up to great cosmic empires like the Spartax, Shi'ar, and Badoon, being joined by the mysterious Angela, and Avengers like Iron Man, Captain Marvel, and Venom.

Since the team began to really form in Annihilation: Conquest, there have been five members who have been around pretty much consistently, and they form the backbone of the movie team. Here's a quick rundown on who each of them are.

Star Lord, Peter Jason Quill, has one of those convoluted comic book histories that make your head spin. His origin has been tinkered with many times over the years, which is better explained over on this column from Comic Book Resources, but what you really need to know is that he is the son of a human woman and a prince of the Spartax Empire, and has a bad habit of getting himself into trouble. When he first appeared in the modern comics, he was in prison. Freed to help fight the Annihilation Wave, he was again imprisoned when his attempt to network all security of the Kree Empire allowed the Phalanx to invade their system. Sent on a suicide mission to redeem himself, Quill met his fellow future Guardians, Rocket, Groot, Mantis, and Bug. Quill continued to seek personal redemption for his past crimes by leading the Guardians of the Galaxy and protecting the universe. Since returning from the Cancerverse, he has become more of a rogue, a sly trickster who enjoys the ladies and thumbing his nose at his father, J'Son of Spartax, who is now the king of the Spartax Empire, but is no less a champion of the little guy. A skilled marksman and tactician, Star-Lord often looks before he leaps. The upcoming story beginning in the August issue of Guardians of the Galaxy, will reveal how Star-Lord and Thanos escaped the Cancerverse, and the fate of Richard Rider, the Nova who was lost. He also headlines his own series, Legendary Star-Lord.

Gamora is known as the Deadliest Woman in the Universe, and that reputation has been earned. After her people were wiped out by the warlike Badoon, Gamora was taken in by Thanos, who trained her to be his own personal assassin. Gamora eventually betrayed Thanos to aid Adam Warlock, and she used her skills for the betterment of the universe. Meeting Star-Lord during the Annihilation War, Gamora was one of his first recruits for the new Guardians. Cold and deadly, Gamora is possibly the toughest member of the team, unmatched in the use of sword, blaster, and her hands. Her gruff exterior hides a good heart, though she does take time off from the Guardians to take on the occasional mercenary job.

Drax the Destroyer has a complex backstory, one intrinsically tied to Thanos. Drax was once human Arthur Douglas, who saw a space ship while driving along a desert road with his wife and daughter. The spaceship, not wanting any witnesses, fired on Douglas's car, killing him and his wife, and leaving their daughter to be taken in and raised by other aliens, to become the heroine Moondragon. When cosmic forces wanted a champion to stand against Thanos, whose ship had killed him, Douglas was resurrected in a powerful new body, that of Drax the Destroyer. Drax has died and returned many times, each time slightly different. Originally a cosmic juggernaut, then a childlike giant, now he is smaller but more clever (at least in the sense he's smaller than let's say the Hulk, but bigger than pretty much anyone else you'll meet), and deadlier than many beings with his knives and knowledge of hand to hand combat. Drax's return to life is almost always tied with the return of the being he was created to destroy, and while he aids the Guardians in their noble goals, Drax always has one eye open for Thanos.

Since they met during the war with the Phalanx, Rocket Raccoon and Groot have been inseparable. Both imprisoned by the Kree, Rocket and Groot were sent on a mission with Star-Lord. They have been a pair of the most earnest Guardians, doing their best to save the galaxy because it's the right thing to do and its fun. Rocket comes from Halfworld, a planet of anthropomorphic animals. He is not just a crack shot, but an expert tactician and star pilot. He has a thing for large firearms. Groot is from Planet X, and aside from his giant size and strength, he can regrow himself from the smallest of fragments. All he can say is, "I am Groot!" although those who understand him know that there is nuance in exactly what that means. Interesting fact, he is actually one of the oldest characters currently in use in Marvel comics, having been introduced in Tales to Astonish when it was a sci-fi comic in 1960, predating nearly all Marvel superheroes. Rocket Raccoon has his own ongoing series, with Groot as his buddy and supporting cast.

So, those are the Guardians of the Galaxy. Every indication is that the movie will be packed with appearances and cameos by a legion of cosmic Marvel characters, and I might write up a little something about those characters after I've seen the movie. If you want to check out more Guardians, there is the monthly comic series for the team, Rocket, and Star-Lord, and this past week saw the release of the first of two volumes collecting the entire 2008 series that introduced the team.

Reviews of Comics from Wednesday 10/30

Five Ghosts #6
Story: Frank J Barbiere
Art: Garry Brown

After a few months off after the initial arc, Five Ghosts is back with a tidy and fun little one off. Fabian Gray travels to Japan to answer a summons from an old flame of his, to aid her in stopping a clan that is moving in on her family's lands, and to retrieve a mythic sword, the sword of Masamune, which she tells him is made from the same Dreamstone material that gave Fabian his own unique powers. It's a story of samurai action, with beautifully choreographed fight scenes, betrayal, and Fabian using his powers in some cool ways. It's cool to see more about Fabian's backstory; at one point he gets out of a trap that was crafted to stop him from summoning the ghosts that grant him his abilities, and he points out that he was the world's greatest thief before any of that happened. Little bits like that add to Fabian as a character and make him more well rounded than just being a vehicle for the stuff that happens when he calls one fo the ghosts. Artists garry Brown fills in for regular artist Chris Mooneyham, and does an admirable job of it. His style is different than Mooneyham's, but still creates a great pulp atmosphere. If you haven't tried Five Ghosts yet, this is a perfect issue to try out, and if you're a fan of the pulp atmosphere, you'd be doing yourself a favor.

 

 

 

Guardians of the Galaxy #8
Story: Brian Michael Bendis
Art: Francesco Francavilla

Guardians of the Galaxy has been a pleasant surprise since its reboot. I was a very big fan of the last incarnation of the book, the one written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, and featuring a sprawling cast that included most of the current members, plus a bunch of others, including Adam Warlock, my favorite Marvel character of all time, and Cosmo, a telepathic Russian dog. So the streamlined team was a worry, since I felt one of the things that I enjoyed about the last series was all the different relationships; although the new series did still include Peter Quill, Starlord, a character Abnett and Lanning spent a lot of time fleshing out, cosmic mainstays Drax and Gamora, and fan favorites Rocket Raccoon and Groot. The stories so far have been fun, and the characters read like themselves, if slightly Bendis-ized versions. This issue begins Guardians' crossover with Marvel's big Summer/Fall event, Infinity. The main Infinity series has been ok, if a bit lacking in focus in my opinionso it's nice to see a crossover that has a nice tight focus. The Guardians have been contacted by Abagail Brand, the head of SWORD, the Earth organization in charge of dealing with extraterrestrial incursion, asking for them to free her from Thanos's forces on The Peak, the Sword space station headquarters. There's some great action scenes, as Starlord and Rocket infiltrate the Peak, free Brand, and go to try to retake the station. But the highlight of the issue is some great character work at the beginning. With Thanos making trouble again, Gamora, who was raised by Thanos, confronts Starlord and Drax about exactly how Thanos and Starlord escaped being trapped in a collapsed dimensions together, and how Drax is alive again. She gets little answer, and Gamora's anger at Starlord, and her own decision to go storming off to confront the father figure who has haunted her for her entire adult life, not to mention killed her on at least once occasion, does a lot to further develop her character and the reactions of the others helps flesh them out. Add the usual incredible art by the busiest man in comics, Francesco Francavilla, who draws a particularly great Rocket Raccoon, and you have a book that is living up to it's concept and its pedigree.

Itty Bitty Hellboy #3
Story & Art: Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani

If only every comic could get Itty Bitty, I think we'd have much happier fans. After Tiny Titans and Superman Family Adventures, I didn't expect Art and Franco would next move to the macabre world of Mike Mignola's Hellboy, but not terribly surprising, it's still a joyful and amusing romp. Every issue is packed with humor and fun little character beats. This month's issue of Itty Bitty Hellboy opens with Hellboy preparing his favorite dish, pancakes (or "pamcakes" as he calls them, which readers of regular Hellboy comics know saved him from becoming evil), with the help of Liz Sherman's fire powers. Hellboy gets Baba Yaga to make one of his pancakes gigantic using her magic, and before you know it, everyone is asking Baba to make something huge. She banishes Hellboy and his friends to Hades, and the demons rally around Hellboy, only to have him use his pamcake making skills to keep them from destroying Earth. Lobster Johnson and Lobster Smith, his pet Lobster, dig their way out to try to help the world. And Roger the Homunculus finds a little love with Baba Yaga and Hecate. I can't really do the issue justice, since so much of it is about the punchline to the wonderful set-ups Art and Franco come up with, and the adorable visuals. I've said something like this with eveything I've ever reviewed by Art and Franco, but if you're looking for a change of pace from the usually grim and grity comics of today, you couldn't do better than trying out Itty Bitty Hellboy.

The Sandman: Overture #1
Story: Neil Gaiman
Art: JH Williams III

I wish I could type an approximation of a squeal of delight, because that would be the only thing that could do this wonderful comic justice. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman is one of the touchstone comics of the modern age and possibly of all time, and it is my favorite piece of longform graphic storytelling.  New work from Neil Gaiman is something I always look forward to, and this past year has been an embarrassment of riches, between The Ocean at the End of the Lane, his first novel for adults in years, two new childrens' books, Chu's Day and Fortunately the Milk, and now a return to the world of the Endless, with a story set before the first issue of The Sandman. Dream, or Morpheus if you'd rather, the protagonist of The Sandman, appears in this issue as he did in the many flashbacks that took place before his imprisonment in the first issue of the series; he is imperious, cold, and callous, something made clear in his tone when addressing Lucien, the librarian of dreams, a character who is a loyal retainer who Dream dismisses with barely an acknowledgment. The tone of Dream is chilling, as he prepares for war, something we saw a couple times over the course of The Sandman, and any reader familiar with it knows this can only mean trouble. Gaiman has lost none of his feeling for the characters that we know and love from The Sandman. It's interesting to see the Corinthian, the nightmare serial killer with mouths for eyes, again, and to see exactly what made him slip out of the Dreaming and into the waking world in the time of Dream's imprisonment. We also meet some new characters, including George Portcullis, a dreamer who manages Dream's London office, and Gaiman uses him to demonstrate the malleability of identity in dreams; identity was one of the themes often played with in Sandman. The final pages reveal something about the Endless and Dream that will hopefully be as surprising to the reader as it is to Dream himself.

Gaiman has often said he writes for his artists when he is working on a comics projects, playing to their strengths, and this issue is a perfect example of that. I've loved JH Williams III's work since Chase in the 90s, and his work has grown exponentially over the years, and this issue is a masterpiece. His use of nearly entirely two page spreads, his frightful Corinthian, the alien world at the beginning of he issue and it's population of sentient flowers, are all drawn in exquisite detail. Williams draws a Death who is especially beautiful, and the soft look he gives her stands in sharp contrast to the harsher lines he uses to draw her darker brother, Dream. The issue is a feast for the eyes, and I hope that the eventual collection is in landscape format to allow the art to be appreciated in its entirety by those who want to read the story in that format. When a creator returns to a legendary work there's always the concern they will have lost whatever it was that made that work something special. I am glad to say none of the magic that made Sandman has been lost over the intervening years; go, read it, and plesant dreams.