Review: Guardians of the Galaxy #7 (Bendis)

And the sad Avenger-ization of Guardians of the Galaxy continues.

I guess it all boils down to the hype surrounding the movie, but I honestly don’t know how this book keeps its 60K readership.  It’s been seven issues now and nothing much has happened.  I guess the Avengers-zombies buying this book have been conditioned by years of Bendis’ writing to put up with it.

Star-Lord is written completely out of character.  All he does is make a series of silly references to old pop culture.  I guess Bendis thinks that’s cute.  It isn’t.  It’s annoying.  He comes across as an immature idiot – not a mature leader of men.  That was apparently Bendis’ intention because – as always expected – he writes Tony Stark as the real leader of the team and even has Tony call Star-Lord out about the silliness.   It’s sad to see how Bendis has so corrupted and degraded the concepts that made Volume II of Guardians of the Galaxy great enough to warrant a big budget movie adaptation.

Apparently Bendis doesn’t know that Drax was originally a human and has all of the memories of his life as a human as he writes Drax as being unfamiliar with the religious concept of “Heaven.”   Of course, this is nothing new.  All of the characters are written out of character.  Bendis is re-defining GotG to be just another Avengers clone of a comic book – talking heads, interchangeable characters, and of course highlighting the real Avenger on the team, Iron Man, to the exclusion of everyone else.

This snooze-fest of an issue features the GotG team conducting a silly and boring interrogation of Angela led by Tony Stark (of course) – then simply letting her go.  That’s it.  Honestly.  That’s all there is.  No wonder Gaiman tried to minimize his involvement in writing this turkey.  He was probably embarrassed by how bad the writing truly is and ran the other way wishing he could back out or maybe use a pseudonym.

Whereas previously the art was the only saving grace of this book, it must be pointed out that the art is slipping in quality.  Ponsor’s colors remain top notch – with him making the best of what little he has to work with.

Of course, Wacker is back on the letters page.  I greet that with about as much welcome as I greet a phone call from a telemarketer as I sit down to dinner.  And if you can believe it, Wacker is even more grating than said telemarketer.  I smirked in unsurprised amusement when Wacker admitted he has never been a fan of cosmic.  Hey Wacker – that shows big time.  Truth is, cosmic could be improved substantially and immediately if he resigned from any involvement in it and took all the other non-cosmic-fans (i.e. Bendis, Loeb, and Brevoort) with him – never again to darken cosmic’s door.

One worry is that Wacker mentions the Cancerverse as an upcoming storyline.  I greet that with absolute dread.  This “creative” (and I use the word, creative, lightly in associating it with Wacker and Bendis) team is bound to pillage, abuse, disrespect, and otherwise fark-up the interesting and innovative concepts pioneered by DnA.  I fear that this bodes ill for the hinted at return of Rich Rider as this “creative” team will no doubt do a “Parallax” treatment on Rich, bringing him back as a Shuma-Gorath corrupted villain to be killed off (permanently this time) to cement NINO in place as their one and only “Nova.”  That would be consistent with their ongoing disrespect and disregard of true cosmic fans.

So, if you want to do something to stop the further degradation of cosmic, do the sensible thing and vote with your dollars by leaving this turkey of a comic book un-purchased on the shelf of your local comic shop.  Then Wacker, Bendis, Loeb, Brevoort and Alonso can move on to fark-up something else and perhaps a new generation of true cosmic fans will come along and bring about the cosmic renaissance true cosmic fans long for and deserve.