Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 1: The Final Gauntlet (Guardians of the Galaxy (2019))

Cheaper than in the shops. Nice comic.

My son loved this

“Guardians of the Galaxy – The Final Gauntlet” collects the first six issues of Mr Cates’ run at the not-quite-all-new Guardians.This is another ‘what happened next’ story following the recent Infinity Wars – see Wolverine – Infinity Watch for another 5-star story.So, following the recent/latest death of Thanos, Starfox/Eros (“I was an Avenger once, you know”) has called all the cosmic characters and representatives of the surviving space-faring empires to the reading of the will.Apparently, Thanos has made a download of his consciousness and he’s made arrangements to have it downloaded into s suitable candidate.Everyone’s first thought is “Gamora” (though not mine, my first thought was, as it turned out, the right one), followed (mostly) by “We must kill her before it is too late!”; fortunately, before anyone can act on this, the Black Watch arrive to steal Thanos’s body and drop everyone into a black hole. Well. That sorted that you might think.Cue 1970s music.Meanwhile, on a spaceship not a million miles from the above, Peter Quill and Groot.I.Am are moping around after whatever it was happened at the end of Infinity Wars (or afterwards, and we haven’t been told what it was yet – I’m going to have to go back and check how it ended, just in case), when Stormbreaker comes flying out of Knowhere dragging some survivors of the above catastrophe, carrying some former and some new Guardians, and suddenly we gave a new team and mission.And that was just the first issue.Then we have another five issues of top-grade cosmicy shenanigans (“We don’t mention Rocket”) with a Guardians’ story that hasn’t been this good since before Mr Bendis and the films got hold of them. We’re back to Abnett & Lanning levels of quality, and all in six issues.The artwork is excellent too.

It's difficult today to imagine a Marvel Universe without the Guardians of the Galaxy being an important part of it. Once upon a time however, there was so little editorial will at Marvel to support a Guardians of the Galaxy comic that the team — as well as many of Marvel's other cosmic characters — spent almost 15 years in publishing limbo.Whilst It's understandable that so many people credit the 2014 movie with breathing fresh life into the franchise, you actually have to go back a little further to Keith Giffen's 2006 big event Annihilation and Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning's 2008 Guardians of the Galaxy (Vol 2) to really get to the truth of how the team as most fans now recognise them came to be, and — with only the occasional change — that team roster has remained more or less the same ever since.That was more than a decade ago however, and in recent years there have been few Guardians story lines that could be considered significant or have lingered long in the memory, and a title that literally had the whole galaxy as it's playground was starting to feel small.It was undoubtedly then the right time for a change, with the job of saving the title from once again disappearing into the void of obscurity falling to writer Donny Cates and artist Geoff Shaw.But how have they done?In a word: AWESOME!From the first few pages of the first issue when Cates assembled pretty much every cosmic character to have ever graced the pages of a Marvel comic in one place — then promptly tried to kill them all in one fell swoop — it became quite clear that this would be a story of great depth and scale. Literally everything about it has felt BIG.It's part "Whodunnit?", part heist movie, part chase movie, part galactic war story, part love story, as a ramshackle team of Guardians try to keep it together long enough for one final big push to try to stop a mystery foe, from resurrecting the recently deceased Thanos.Quill's ad hoc Guardians team is a rabble of cosmic powerhouses as exciting as they are dysfunctional. The presence of characters like Gladiator, Lockjaw, Nova, and Beta Ray Bill on the roster — as well as antagonists like Cosmic Ghost Rider, Hela, Starlord, and the Black Order — give it a real feeling of being something new and fresh. Whilst a spine made up of old favourites like Starlord, Gamora, and Groot help it maintain a sense of familiarity, where as the return of former members Moondragon and Phyla-Vell put it in touch with some of its more distant roots. It's a team that definitely feels much greater than the sum of its parts.Oh yeah, and It's also got a gun in it that shoots black holes!The gun shoots...black...holes!Perhaps the only disappointment is that the excellent Geoff Shaw leaves the book as of the end of this volume. He will be handing over the artistic responsibilities to Cory Smith, who is an excellent artist in his own right with a style that fits the tone of the book, so I feel that we're in safe hands.Make no bones about it though, what you have here is not just one of the best Guardians of the Galaxy stories of a generation, but also one of the strongest opening arcs of any new series that I've seen in recent memory. It's also one of the finest titles currently being published at Marvel from a creative team that are one of the hottest properties in the industry at this moment.Absolutely excellent!