Humphries, Sam
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
1 out of 5
(1 book)
Legendary Star-Lord: Rise Of The Black Vortex
(Art by Paco Media, Andrea Sorrentino, Juan Vlasco, Freddie Williams II and Paco Diaz Luque)
A tie-in to the Black Vortex crossover event. Peter Quill of the Guardians of the Galaxy begins an uncertain romance with Kitty Pryde of the X-Men but their love is sorely tested by the conflict sparked by the ancient Black Vortex.
Marvel have always been pretty terrible at producing tie-in stories to crossover events within ongoing series and this is an example of the worst way they're known to do it. Instead of doing what some tie-in do, which is to tell the B- or even C-plot, here we get the A-plot but just not all of it. Of the Black Vortex event we get parts 3, 9 and 12, in succession, so that it's more or less incomprehensible without the other stories which tie-in. The reason for this, of course, is that it is a cynical marketing ploy to make you buy other books that you might not otherwise. What it means for this particular book is that it lacks any sort of cohesive narrative and is basically like picking up seven random comics and reading them all at once.
The only vaguely uniting element to this book is the relationship between Peter and Kitty, which is a thread throughout. Unfortunately, I absolutely do not buy into them as a couple and was therefore in no way invested. She's an Earth-bound X-Man of supreme integrity and he's a rogueish interplanetary criminal. They're so tonally different in their characters, something that the book does admittedly note, that it's clear that their relationship was just plucked out of the air as two characters who currently didn't have romantic partners that the writer could just smoosh together.
1 out of 5
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Marvel Comics (here)