Guardians of the Galaxy & X-Men: Black Vortex
THE BLACK VORTEX! Its cosmic tendrils bring corruption and devastation wheresoe’er they wind!
THE BLACK VORTEX! Its thirteen chapters offer a glimpse into the abyss of eternity!
THE BLACK VORTEX! Playing goth, industrial and darkwave; women enter free before midnight.
Once the X-books got to dominate crossovers, or even skip them entirely, but today things have changed. And so here the X-Men find themselves as junior partners in a thirteen-part crossover that in fact only includes three X-books – All-New X-Men #38-39, and Cyclops #12. The remainder of the story wends its way through two book-end one-shots, Guardians of the Galaxy #24-25, Legendary Star-Lord #9-11, Guardians Team-Up #3, Nova #28, and Captain Marvel #14.
Precisely what the X-Men are doing here at all is not 100% clear. Kitty Pryde has a reason to be here, because she already doubles as part of Star-Lord’s supporting cast. Yet the rest of the All-New X-Men cast could scarcely be called vital to the plot. The plot does things to some of them, so it’s not a skippable arc for All-New readers. But the X-Men could be pulled out of the story entirely and not a great deal would change. For that matter, so could most of the individual Guardians. It’s really a Star-Lord and Kitty story that’s grown arms and legs.
Chapter 1 begins with a flashback that establishes the origin of the Black Vortex. Twelve billion years ago, for reasons the story never returns to, the people of planet Viscardi inexplicably had a Celestial standing around ignoring them, and apparently stopping them from developing interstellar flight. A woman called Gara has a good yell at the Celestial to complain about this situation, and specifically to complain that the Celestial doesn’t seem to understand that they long to leave their world, “drea[m] higher than your grasp”, and “know the cosmos”. Of course, people who speak to Celestials should be careful what they wish for, because the Celestial responds by creating the Black Vortex, a mirror that turns people into cosmically powered-up versions of themselves. This seems like a tremendously useful thing, so naturally everyone submits to it, goes mad, and tears the planet apart, leaving Gara as the last survivor of her race. So we’re establishing pretty early that submitting to the Black Vortex is probably a bad idea.
Meanwhile, Star-Lord and Kitty discover that the Vortex has fallen into the possession of Star-Lord’s arch-enemy and dad Mister Knife, who is using it to power up his henchmen (but evidently has more sense than to use it himself). I like the name Mister Knife, by the way. For one thing, it doesn’t sound like the stream of random characters that aliens normally get as names. And for another, before he was Mister Knife, he was J’Son, which is just terrible. Mister Knife is also trying to persuade Thane to submit to the Vortex – you know, Thanos’ son. All this feels very much joined in progress, and quite what Knife is up to with Thane is never particularly clear. I assume it was all set up in earlier issues of Star-Lord, but re-establishing it for the benefit of crossover readers wouldn’t have hurt.
Anyhow, Star-Lord and Kitty steal the Vortex halfway through chapter 1, and then enlist the X-Men and the Guardians to help them keep it safe. So that’s your crossover. Cue the running around. The bad guys come after them, and by the end of the opening chapter, Gamora has already submitted to the Vortex to obtain the necessary power-up to fight back.
Chapter 2 sees our heroes run away with the Vortex to engage in some intensive conversation about whether more of them should use it in order to power themselves up. It’s a Bendis issue – did I mention? In fact, as a starting point, this is a perfectly reasonable argument. It’s obvious to us that the Black Vortex must be a bad thing, because (a) we’ve seen the flashback, (b) we know how these stories work, (c) identity-subverting transformations are always sinister, and (d) it’s called the Black Vortex, for Christ’s sake. But Gamora seems fine, they could use the power to take on Knife’s guys, and there’s a pretty reasonable split between the moral purists and the more military-minded or simply pragmatic characters who see a useful magic trinket that shouldn’t go to waste. And so Beast (the adult version) submits too – which again makes sense, because he’s a bit desperate for some cosmic insight that might help him unscramble the damage he’s done to continuity.
Chapter 2 ends with a really badly executed cliffhanger that looks as though everyone has been transformed by the Vortex, but turns out just to be everyone looking in the mirror. Partly, this is visually confusing; partly, what’s actually happening is so anti-climactic that it doesn’t even register as a likely reading.
Chapter 3 sees Angel sign up for the power-up too – yes, this conversation basically extends through an issue and more, because they’ve got thirteen issues to fill. Beast and Angel look decidedly sinister in their powered-up forms, and are starting to ramble about the magnificence of the cosmos and such forth. So, you know, it’s pretty obvious where this story is going: power corrupts, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, yadda yadda. At any rate, having set up the premise, it’s now time to start filling those pages. So the heroes fight among themselves, and then the baddies come after them, and the three powered-up guys take the Vortex and leave.
From here – and yes, I know there’s ten chapters to go – there’s quite a bit of running around. The heroes are hiding from the bad guys. The Kree steal the Vortex, so the three powered-up guys go after them to get it back. Power levels fluctuate wildly according to the demands of the plot – if the Vortex needs to get captured the cosmic heroes can be beaten by some random Kree soldiers, otherwise they get very angry and can tear planets apart single-handedly. Something or other is going on with Thane and Knife but like I say, nobody ever bothers to explain their relationship to X-Men readers, so I’ll assume it doesn’t matter. And in the manner of crossovers that need to find busy work for a large cast, our heroes split up to deal with assorted troubles.
Occasionally Venom gets a line of dialogue and reminds us that he’s in the Guardians of the Galaxy these days.
And there’s a genuinely important bit for X-Men readers where, after much cosmic contemplation on the issue, cosmic Beast verifies that continuity is indeed irretrievably broken. This has nothing in particular to do with the Black Vortex plot, though – in fact, it’s positively counter to the Black Vortex plot by implying that Beast already did far worse damage before the Vortex got anywhere near him. So the story ends up moving on.
The Vortex is stolen again. Nova has it for a bit. Hala gets destroyed. Nova takes the Vortex home to his family for tea because we’ve reached an issue of his series and he has to get the spotlight for a few pages. He nobly resists the temptation of the Vortex. The baddies get the Vortex back and Thane gets powered up, which I’m sure I’d care about if anybody had bothered to explain to me who the hell he is.
And then, somewhat randomly and out of nowhere, in Chapter 9 Mister Knife covers the planet of Spartax in amber and gives it to the Brood as a present, so that they can try to infect everyone on the planet with Brood eggs. The deal is apparently that the resulting Brood army will conquer planets for Knife in return. This now becomes the main threat for the rest of the story, and the focus switches pretty much entirely to rescuing the population of Spartax. Star-Lord gets a really bizarre speech in which he acknowledges that the Vortex is a curse and laments ever having stolen it from his father in the first place – which rather overlooks the fact that if they hadn’t stolen the Vortex, surely Knife would have just got to the same basic plan a bit quicker?
The final issue of Cyclops crops up here, and we’ve talked about it before – it wants to play its final issue as Cyclops’s coming of age, and so it goes completely against the entire thrust of the story to date, and has Cyclops submitting to the Vortex as a heroic move where he overcomes fear. Iceman and Groot tag along for the power-up as well. But with the very next chapter, it’s Captain Marvel, and of course she bravely resists the temptation, in the latest iteration of a scene that the crossover is beating to death.
Ultimately, in the manner of big crossovers, there is an enormous fight. The remaining heroes have to decide who should use the Vortex one last time to save Spartax. Eventually Kitty does it because she doesn’t want to and is therefore the least corruptible – the old “the only person you can trust to run the universe is the person who doesn’t want the job” routine. Kitty’s cosmically-enhanced phasing powers free Spartax, and then we get an epilogue in which most but not all of the powered-up heroes give up their powers, which nobody had previously suggested was an option. We’re told that this will still have unspecified consequences, but none are immediately in evidence. Then Gara – remember her? – carts the Vortex away for future sequel use.
And… that’s it.
Hold on. Until the Spartax-in-amber thing showed up in chapter 9, wasn’t this story about a cursed power-up trinket and characters deciding whether to submit to it? Because a bunch of characters did submit to it, and by all appearances, nothing much happened, other than they got more powerful. And while the cosmic characters were acting all distant and weird during the story itself, the ones who choose to retain their new powers at the end (like Warren and Kitty) seem to be back to their normal personalities anyway.
So it all feels as though the story kind of lost interest in the whole Black Vortex thing about two thirds of the way through, or simply didn’t have a pay-off for it and transitioned into the amber stuff instead. And sure, Kitty phasing a planet free from amber is a nice visual, but the whole thing wraps up with epilogues setting up for sequels, and Kitty giving us a monologue about how Earth is in space too. Since when was this story about the artificiality of the distinction between home and abroad?
At thirteen issues – longer than the entire run of one of the participating titles – this is far too long. It’s really a Star-Lord arc that needed some guest stars in order to have people to power up, and certainly the finale is all about Peter and Kitty. For the rest of us, there are a couple of vaguely interesting ideas in here, but a lot of repetitive corridor-running to kill time, building to a final third that’s pretty disconnected from the first two. While it’s more coherent than crossovers of its scale tend to be, you’d struggle to say it managed to tell a satisfying story that rewards its sprawl.
If I can take a blind stab in the dark at why the X-Men are involved: Bendis has made it clear that the writer following him on Uncanny X-Men is continuing the Bobby story he’s just started, and, by implication, had some sort of say in who got the gig. I’m guessing it’s Humphries. He’s been a visual presence at the retreats, and it stands to reason that doing a smallish crossover and using Bendis’ characters in a small way was part of his audition for the gig?
I’m confused. Was the Black Vortex* bad? In the end, it seems to be a bit of an excuse for some character redesigns/power level changes.
*The McGuffin not the crossover. I’m pretty clear on this.
Jim Starlin explained that there are three(?) Thanos characters.
One version is his and Marvel lets him write those stories and it pretty directly connects to the continuity of the character through the DnA stories and the Giffen and Starlin stories.
One is the movie version.
The other appears in the Marvel NOW stories, mostly Avengers titles with Jonathan Hickman…. and unlike the big colossal cosmic menace Starlin’s Thanos was…. this one is more of a space pirate and spent most of his backstory days flying around space, sowing his wild oats, and then finally for Hickman’s Infinity story he found a half-Inhuman son Thane.
Because Inhumans are Marvel’s new big thing.
After that I don’t know. I lost all interest.
I despise the Bendis version of Guardians….
Did Peter propose to Kitty in the crossover, or after it?
And does anyone care?
Judging by what I’ve read by Sam Humphries (Uncanny X-Force, Legendary Star Lord, this crossover), I am sooo hoping the rumors aren’t true about him inheriting the X-Men franchise. His X-Force book was the worst run the book in the modern area. All of his X-Men characters in the crossover sounded like the exact same person. Even basic moments like the characters’ reactions to Star Lord and Kitty’s engagement rang false. X-23 leaps up and down beaming, “I so called that!” It seemed like he had never even heard of any of these characters before!
Is Marvel really in that much of a dearth of high profile writers in the post Hickman world?
What a pile of hot garbage.
Gah. It’s all just so bad. Kitty’s engaged and cosmic powered, for all the difference it apparently makes. Bendis spends half an issue hamfistedly having young Jean tell young Iceman that he’s gay. Young Angel gets stupid looking wings and a stupider-looking back-head-cowl, but is apparently otherwise unchanged by his cosmicification. Apparently Beast, Iceman, and Groot are somehow physically improved by their decosmicification, but it’s entirely unclear how.
Rebooting all of this crap and smashing the typewriters of everybody responsible for this crossover and its aftermath would be a mercy at this point.
I was amused by Young Angel’s argument in the latest New X-Men that he wants to stay Celestially-powered to avoid turning into his older self–especially given that his older self reached this current state by being repeatedly altered by Celestial powers.
I didn’t much mind the crossover, but I felt like it could have been done better in half the issues it took.
And surprisingly, not all of those decompressed issues were written by Bendis.
@Team Zissou: That’s my fear as well. Hopefully it will not come to pass.
But whatever, guess I can wait a few more years for a good X-Men run again.
@Team Zissou: If you believe the conspiracy theorists, it’s all part of Disney’s plan to run the comic branch of the X-Men franchise into the ground so that they have an excuse to cancel the books and remove a non-exploitable property that keeps reminding folks of how different the MCU is from the comics. (Because the X-Men are the only point of dissimilarity, you know.)
More seriously, it baffles me as well that Humphries seems to be in the running. He comes across as very likeable dude, but have any of his Marvel projects sold so well as to justify handing him the reins to a flagship book? Avengers AI was DOA, and UXF was a complete mess. Starlord launched well enough, but that was a book that debuted on the heels of enormous movie hype, and it lost 2/3rds of its initial DM sales by issue 8. I just don’t see it.
Humphries is a buddy of Bendis. Finding work at Marvel isn’t a matter of merit.
I love that this whole terrible cross over is a game of keep away that Magik can win rather handily in issue #1.
All of his X-Men characters in the crossover sounded like the exact same person.
That’s not stopped Bendis being Marvel’s “top” writer for a decade.
@Suzene: If Marvel were looking for an excuse to cancel the X-books they wouldn’t be publishing so many of them. For that matter, nor would they be wasting Brian Bendis’ contract on having him write the books at his presumably-not-cheap rates; nor would they have done Avengers vs X-Men or Axis as tentpole event books. If anything, the publishing department still seems determined to squeeze as much mileage out of the property as it possibly can. If somebody from Disney wanted to come along and slash the line back to three books then, from a creative standpoint, it would probably be a good thing anyway.
What probably IS true is that the X-Men are a much lower priority for licensing, merchandising etc than the properties which are entirely under Marvel’s control – which, for reasons of synergy, is perfectly rational.
I used to hate Marvel changing its books to match the films, but this is one instance where such a move would be preferable to “original” drek like this.
I miss the days when it was two strike forces, X-Force and X-Factor
plus Excalibur
Five x-comics.
Because I think a comic focused on the school is lame.
Sounds like the usual level of quality from Bendis & co. Which is to say, what a mess.
And Kitty and Star-Lord have been dating for what, a few weeks or months Marvel time and half of it was via cam? Ok then.
While I don’t imagine they will actually end up married, I did wonder how old Kitty is supposed to be? While I’ve been reading about her for (gulp) 35 years, she was only 13 when she was introduced. Is she actually even 20 yet?
Oh, and Paul, you’ll be pleased to know that you know as much about Thane as the readers of Star Lord. I’d hate for you to think you were missing out. 🙂
Paul wrote: “If Marvel were looking for an excuse to cancel the X-books they wouldn’t be publishing so many of them. For that matter, nor would they be wasting Brian Bendis’ contract on having him write the books at his presumably-not-cheap rates.”
I’m inclined to agree with Paul’s overall assessment of Marvel’s attitude towards the X-Men (the comic publishing division does need to make money on its own, and X-Men comics are profitable).
I am curious about the Bendis point specifically, though. If he has the sort of contract that guarantees so many pages a month at a given rate (it is my understanding that the benefit to the creator of an exclusive contract is guaranteed work, but maybe I’m wrong), doesn’t Marvel have to put him on a book like Uncanny X-Men? There are only so many titles that will get the kind of sales to support a writer at Bendis’ page rate.
In other words, putting a high profile, pricier writer or artist on core X-Men titles may not be evidence that Marvel are putting their full support behind the X-books. It may simply be evidence that they need the guaranteed sales of X-Men titles to provide economically feasible work for the creators they have made commitments to.
@Paul – I don’t actually think Marvel has it out for the X-Men. Sorry, guess I should have added a smiley or something. We’ve already got confirmation that the X-Books are going on past Secret Wars. If there actually was an edict from Disney to shut them down, having them be one of the pizza toppings that get lost during the great universe mash-up would have been the perfect chance.
If they’ve made Bendis a $$$ commitment, the money has been spent regardless of if he’s on a high-profile book. In fact, putting high-profile exclusive creators (especially writers, who can do multiple books) on low-profile books is probably the wiser sales move. The Bendis/Maleev Moon Knight series, for example, probably sold more than a Frank Tieri/Kris Anka Moon Knight series launched at the same time would have. It wouldn’t be true indefinitely if things got really bad, but a book like Uncanny X-Men will pretty much sell itself no matter who’s writing it. That there are currently five books with “X-Men” in the name is testament to that.
So, having read your recap of this… what exactly is the difference between submitting to the Vortex and getting a redesign and a power upgrade, and being randomly chosen by Odin’s Brother and getting a hammer, a redesign, and a power upgrade?
@quizlacey there are no differences in fact there is the similarity of unmitigated character damage that will lead to years of trying to rectify or retcon this. (Check out the just finished Amazing X-Men arc now picture something similar for Kitty in five years.)
@Team Zissou
Your description of Sam Humphries largely doubles as a description of Brian Michael Bendis.
Which should explain why Marvel would have no issue giving the X-Men to Humphries, as they don’t see any of those problems as problems.
I thought this was a terribly tedious storyline, and something of an extended mess. So much of everyone chasing the cosmic MacGuffin, with so little payoff… especially since the few changes that were made, can and probably will be undone as soon as Secret Wars has its way with the universe.
Bobby has gone from snowball to icecube… just like his adult self did once upon a time. Yawn.
Warren has cosmic wings and um,stuff? Yay.
Groot has another redesign. Big deal, he changes with every artist. Soon, he’ll resemble a ficus.
Star-Lord and Kitty are engaged. Like that’ll last or come to fruition. They’re even less convincing than Ororo and T’Challa, or Piotr and Domino. I’ve never been able to buy their romance or how they fit together, and I think even trying is doing a grave disservice to the characters.
(Side-theory: Claremont’s original development of Kitty Pryde turned her into every teen reader’s comic girlfriend. If you grew up in the ’80s and maybe ’90s and were reading the X-Men or Excalibur, Kitty was The Girl, much like Donna Troy was The Girl for those reading the Titans in a certain era. And because of this depiction, it’s always been hard to seriously link her to a significant other. Piotr was a chaste romance, Pete Wisdom was an edgy, hard-to-believe follow-up, Bobby was never serious, and now Peter Quill is a long-distance affair that doesn’t feel believable or three-dimensional… (Kitty as everyone’s girlfriend is a theory that’s been floating around for a long time, by the way, but it makes sense as to why her relationships never seem to -click-.)
Anyway, where was I. Oh yes. Black Vortex. Too many chapters, slow progress, clearly treading water and killing time until the universe ended. What does it mean that the Secret Wars continuation of Star-Lord has the Kitty from Age of Apocalypse guest-starring instead of the 616 Kitty, hmmm?
So yeah. Glad that’s over.
To add to what was said above – Thane wasn’t a part of STAR LORD. In order to understand Thane’s story, you need to have read his digital comic which was compiled as a Thanos mini last year, which came out of INFINITY, where the character premiered. So, you know.
Thane, son of Thanos! He should join a team compromised of Daken, Skaar, Hope, and the Young Avengers called: Nobody Gives a Shit.
Oneminutemonkey, your description of Kitty sounds kind of like the justification for Bobby being gay. Chaste romance, “Look, I’m having straight sex” edgy romance, gay friend, long distance romance…
Side note, I grew up in the 80s and neither Kitty nor Donna Troy were “The Girl”. Never really liked either of them. Maybe it was because they were written like the “comic reader’s girlfriend”…
Not “The Girl” for me, I mean. I’m sure they were the girl for some, though. Particularly for certain comic book writers.
God, this story line was absolutely horrific. I’m firmly in the camp the Bendis’ X-Men run has ranged from mediocre to above average with occasional crap and occasional genuinely good stuff. In short, I feel like it’s been light years better than Avengers and far better than Fraction’s train wreck. That being said, this may be one of the worst X-Men stories since Chuck Austen. Can anyone think of anything post Austen that has been this bad?
When I say “light years better than Avengers” I’m referring to Bendis’ run. Hickman’s Avengers is beyond brilliant.
Just a thought but why would Thanos, who’s whole thing is death and causing death father children?
So he could murder them later on as a I stopped paying attention
The idea, added with INFINITY, was that Thanos in his youth was a devil-may-care space pirate who sowed his oats rather liberally across the universe, but now that he’s a mature dude he doesn’t like the idea of having any children. It . . . *sort of* fits into his timeline? Being unpredictable and capricious is part of his schtick, after all.
“Hickman’s Avengers is beyond brilliant.”
It’s been a total snoozefest.
“Being unpredictable and capricious is part of his schtick, after all.”
His schtick has always been extremely straightforward.
It may be a bit of a stretch, but I seem to recall that in one of the infinity gauntlet series from the 90s where Thanos temporarily “won,” he turned around and created a planet full of living people. If memory serves, he told the Silver Surfer that he did that so there would always be people to kill to honor Death. I suppos you count having children as an extension of that philosophy. You could also argue that he has children knowing that they will kill others, or possibly that he reproduces as part of that whole subliminal desire to lose schtick Thanos was stuck with a while back.
“Hickman’s Avengers is beyond brilliant.”
Disagree. It’s had some cool moments, but good grief, we’re 77 (SEVENTY SEVEN!) issues into the storyline at this point (just between Avengers and New Avengers), and now the ending is getting spun into a mega-crossover.
Yeah, it’s better than Bendis’s run, where there was clearly no direction and everybody just stood around talking about stuff in between getting punked by the Hood (THE HOOD!).
But Hickman’s run seems like it has the opposite problem. Stuff happens, but it’s on such a gigantic scale that the characters taking part in it are more or less irrelevant. I guess there’s some interesting character drama there, but there’s not a lot of actual superheroing going on.
I’d desperately love for something more like the Busiek/Perez run, where there was a better balance between character interactions and scale of threat, such that the characters in the story had personality but were also able to take part in the action in a real way.
Jerry Ray is right but I was too offended by “Hickman’s Avengers is beyond brilliant.” to comment.
The story itself is serviceable in many respects as science fiction fantasy but is not an Avengers story.
Also for a single story 77 issues is probably too long.
I miss the Busiek days.
“The story itself is serviceable in many respects as science fiction fantasy but is not an Avengers story.”
That’s kind of my feeling about it. It might make a good novel, but it doesn’t feel like an Avengers story.
Another problem with it is that it’s a universe-ending kind of story, but it’s only now, on the brink of megacrossover, starting to have ramifications in the wider universe. When you’ve got a 77-part-and-counting story running for multiple years, there’s obviously no way to actually tie that in to the whole line, but it’s felt wholly disconnected from other stories, like it doesn’t actually take place in the shared universe. (I haven’t thought about it much, but can you really reconcile it with the timeline or events in Fantastic Four or Inhuman or Iron Man or whatever?)
@Jamie –
Starlin has been quite consistent over the years regarding this facet of Thanos’ personality. (One suspects he accentuates it at times to account for seemingly out of character appearances that can’t be chalked up to faulty clones.) When lucid, Thanos admits he is mad, and his tendency towards unpredictable and self-sabotaging behavior is part of this madness.
@Joseph
That story was a dream sequence experienced by the Surfer right before he was set to fly into battle between panels in INFINITY GAUNTLET #4. I think the basic idea is valid, though.
Star Lord and Kitty? Probably not the first to point this out, but what is it with Kitty and guys named Peter?
I was a teenager in the 80s, and Kitty was definitely “The Girl” (in comics) as far as I was concerned.
Kitty joined X-Men at the school in the first issue of the comic I ever bought (#138). I was 9, and she was very much the POV character for me coming into the world of the X-Men. I grew up with her, and yeah, I definitely had a crush on her.
what’s an “Avengers story” any way? random dudes get together and beat shit up. that’s always been the problem with the Avengers. they have no hook to relate to.
“what’s an “Avengers story” any way?”
For the last 10 years or so, it’s been random dudes talking. First they were talking about breakfast, then they were talking about the end of the universe.
I don’t particularly need a hook – I just like a good superhero story. What’s the hook of the Justice League?
“that’s always been the problem with the Avengers. they have no hook to relate to.”
Under Busiek (and arguably Stern), they’ve been a family, and Ultron Unlimited (on which the bulk of the new film was based) is all about those family-like connections.
Avengers works when it’s about the characters.
Hickman doesn’t give a shit about characters. They’re just chess pieces to him.
Hickman’s Fantastic Four run was exactly the same. It was just about shuffling the Inhumans into power and having Doom proclaim things and the rest of the FF just sit back while things happened around them.
I’ve been liking Avengers more than some of the people here, it seems. Hickman definitely has a tendency towards putting plot before characters (something that’s often said about sci-fi in general–I mention that not to get him off the hook, but because I was recently in a sci-fi literature course, and by God, I’m going to get my money’s worth). But there have been some character beats that I appreciated:
–Hyperion bonding with Thor
–Sunspot’s mix of heart and cocky naivety (makes an interesting contrast with Iron Man)
–Namor getting taken down a peg
–Natasha and Jessica tracking down Tony and abandoning him.
The story’s had some big problems: the glacial plotting, a tendency towards the long game that ignores doing something in the here and now, and gender stuff (I hope you liked the Natasha/Jessica scene, ’cause that’s about the only time an established female Avenger will do something significant in this book.). But there’s also been a lot that’s kept me reading.
I’m not totally sure Hickman can stick the landing, but, well, we’ll see.
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