Guardians of the Galaxy

Drax the Destroyer – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for Marvel’s Drax the Destroyer in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated September 2024 with titles scheduled for release through December 2024.

Drax the Destroyer was a character made for vengeance and built to be tinkered with by each successive generation of writers.

He was originally created alongside Thanos in Iron Man (1968) #55 in February 1973. Thanos was an unstoppable force of destruction, and Drax was his personal destroyer. His desire to destroy Thanos was driven by the forces of vengeance of Thanos’s entire race and, as it turns out, his own extremely personal vendetta against the mad titan.

The original version of Drax the Destroyer was completely unlike his familiar Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnation. He was a gallant, green, caped psychic born from the soil of Thanos’s abandoned homeworld, who could fly through space and emit powerful energy blasts. He seemed to be a deliberate copy of DC’s Martian Manhunter visually and in his powerset.

Drax made a strong early foil for Thanos, but Jim Starlin used him only for a cameo once his own late-70s saga of Thanos and Warlock got underway. That saga lead to the apparent death of Thanos, which meant Drax had no meaning – both within the story and as a Marvel character. After harassing Captain Mar-Vell for taking away his chance to slay Thanos (not realizing or believing it had been Warlock), he was hastily written out of comics via a peculiar two-part Avengers story by Jim Shooter in 1982.

When Jim Starlin returned to Marvel to revive Thanos, Warlock, and Gamora, he also brought Drax back to life – reasoning that if there is a Thanos there must also be a Drax. However, playing off of the peculiar circumstances surrounding Drax’s origin, Starlin used the reincarnation to tweak his character to be a cartoonish oaf with a low intellect. The MCU version of the character shares many qualities with this comedic relief version of Drax that starred in Starlin’s Infinity trilogy and Infinity Watch. However, the screen incarnation is never portrayed as being unintelligent the way he was in the comics. Onscreen, he is simply literal.

After briefly regaining his intelligence and losing it again, Drax was reinvented again in 2005 by Kieth Giffen. This version visually matches up with the screen version – a terrifyingly swift hunk of muscle capable of canny strategy. After anchoring his own mini-series, he was pulled into the first of Marvel’s mid-00s cosmic events, Annihilation and Annihilation Conquest – along with a few other familiar faces: Star-Lord, Gamora, Rocket Raccoon, and Groot – along with Nova, Warlock, Mantis, and Moondragon.

That group of character transformed into the original Guardians of the Galaxy, launched by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning in 2008. Drax appeared throughout their initial run. Despite being written off at the end (along with Star-Lord and Nova), he was back in the line-up in 2012 when Brian Bendis was brought aboard to navigate the comic franchise towards the impending MCU film.

The version of Drax in the comics since 2013 may be the Guardian who feels the farthest apart from his movie incarnation. He’s simply never been the comedic relief of the comics team quite as much as he has been in the films. He has also seldom been at the center of the team’s plots the way Star-Lord, Gamora, and Rocket often are – though he did have a major moment in 2018’s Infinity Wars by Gerry Duggan. [Read more…] about Drax the Destroyer – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Gamora – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

New for Patrons: Guide to Gamora

March 16, 2023 by krisis

Even with plenty of drag and indie comics to focus on this month, I still found the time to squeeze in another new Marvel guide for all Patrons of CK. This guide follows a character who started off both dangerous and incredibly complex when she was introduced by Jim Starlin in 1975, and that’s never changed – although she has changed considerably in her nearly 50 years of comics. It’s time for a Guide to Gamora!

Guide to Gamora

If I was totally off-base about my ideas of about Star-Lord when I got to work on his guide, working on a Guide to Gamora confirmed my assumptions and just made me love the character even more.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that out of all of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Gamora is both the one who is closest to her comic version in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s despite the fact that she is missing a critical element of her first 30 years of comics in the MCU.

Star-Lord, Peter Quill – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for Marvel’s Star-Lord, Peter Quill, in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated March 2023 with titles scheduled for release through July 2023.

Star-Lord is a Marvel character who has multiple versions and multiple origins, and what can sometimes seem like multiple personalities thanks to a tug-of-war between his comic stories and his happy-go-lucky Marvel Cinematic Universe persona.

Star-Lord was originally a pulp sci-fi character whose feature ran across a handful of Marvel magazines and anthology titles in the 1970s, as penned by his creator Steve Englehart (as well as Chris Claremont).

None of the worlds or characters he interacted with closely corresponded with Marvel’s version of space at that time. And, a close reading of his comics show that his taking on his heroic name occurred in our future (but his past) in 1990. That seemed to confirm he was not meant to coexist with the Marvel Universe of the 1970s. That character was completely forgotten throughout the 80s and 90s, and was relaunched with a different character taking on the title in a 1996 mini-series.

That pair of Star-Lords are now known as The Star-Lords of Earth-791. How did they wind up excommunicated from Marvel’s mainstream continuity? That’s down to his film success and Brian Bendis,

In March 2005, Keith Giffen & Ron Lim introduced an old, grizzled, partly-cybernetic man named Peter Quill into their Thanos ongoing series. Quill had an unnamed off-panel history with Thanos and was imprisoned for life after a galactic defense gone wrong resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. That explained why he refused to acknowledge anyone else calling him Star-Lord.

Peter Quill was freed from his sentence by Gladiator of the Imperial Guard and next turned up as the second-in-command to Richard Rider as the last Nova in the 2007 Annihilation event. This was the same cynical, cybernetic Peter Quill. He was promoted to a title star in a mini-series that lead into the next cosmic event, Annihilation Conquest. Quill’s cybernetic implants were removed and he assembled a team readers and film fans will recognize as an early iteration of Guardians of the Galaxy. The team’s roster and name would be formalized coming out of the event and leading into the Guardians ongoing series in 2008.

As Peter resumed the title of Star-Lord, authors Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning slightly softened his personality and youthened him, but he was still the battle-scarred veteran of the Annihilation events. Abnett & Lanning ended their run on the character with his disappearance at the end of The Thanos Imperative.

Throughout all of those stories, the unspoken implication was that our present-day Marvel-616 Peter Quill was in fact the same as Englehart’s future version, meaning that he (or, perhaps, his father) had traveled back in time from those original 1970s stories.

That slate was wiped clean by Brian Bendis in 2012. Bendis brought Quill back as the leader of the Guardians with no explanation in his Avengers Assemble series, a tie-in the impending Avengers film as well as a stealth reboot of a Guardians team that would perfectly match their impending film incarnation. Bendis continued that continuity-wipe with the point-one issue of the new Guardians ongoing, in which he completely revised Peter Quill’s origins to be based definitively on the Marvel-616 Earth (in a story that would be somewhat echoed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe).

Although all of the Annihilation stories were still in continuity, Bendis’s version of Peter Quill was younger and funnier – though he still wasn’t quite the silly, somewhat-bumbling version we’d meet in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As the MCU version of Star-Lord became a hit with the public, Bendis leaned into exploring his parentage and his connection to the planet Spartax while solo runs by Sam Humphries and Chip Zdarsky detailed his romance with Kitty Pryde and his solo adventures. Further Guardians books by Gerry Duggan and Donny Cates hewed closely to the Bendis template of the character.

It was Al Ewing in his 2020-21 Guardians of the Galaxy run who truly transformed Peter Quill’s character to align his present-day version and his comic origins, as well as exploring his devotion to Richard Rider and Gamora. Finally, by the end of Ewing’s run, it felt as though we had a Star-Lord who made sense as the combat-hardened Annihilation veteran as well as the happy-go-lucky Bendis-era Guardians. [Read more…] about Star-Lord, Peter Quill – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

New for Patrons: Guide to Star-Lord, Peter Quill

March 6, 2023 by krisis

It might be my Indie Comics Month here on Crushing Krisis, but it’s also a month to focus on a certain group of Marvel galactic heroes as we approach their third (and final?) entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe! Today I have a guide for all Patrons of CK that focuses on the leader of this ragtag band of galactic guardians and his odd trio of origins in the Marvel Universe – a Guide to Star-Lord, Peter Quill.

Guide to Star-Lord, Peter Quill

Often in these launch posts I admit to you that I was a little unclear on the origins of a character or that I learned a lot about them in my full read of their material.

This is a rare case where I can say I was TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY WRONG about my understanding about a character’s origins! In my defense, Peter Quill’s origins had just changed a year prior to the creation of my original Guide to Guardians of the Galaxy – and Marvel was still recollecting his original (no-longer-canonical) origins along with other Guardians materials!

First things first: The happy-go-lucky Star-Lord you all know (and many of you love) from the Marvel Cinematic Universe has very little to do with the Marvel Comics version of the character. Although Brian Bendis and subsequent authors have gradually introduced the goofball levity of the film version into comics, there’s no mistaking that the comic version of Peter Quill is considerably more experienced and downright grizzled than his film counterpart.

Actually, I’d say Star-Lord is the #1 example of Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity and characterization changing a character permanently in the comics! All of the other Guardians characters were already much closer to their film counterparts than Peter Quill as of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Once you can get past the shock (and, perhaps, betrayal) of this surprising revelation, let’s move on to exploring the two (or, maybe three?) comic origins of Peter Quill. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Star-Lord, Peter Quill