Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 4: Realm of Kings

I’m not even going to try to convince anyone that hasn’t already been following writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s cosmic Marvel epic through the pages of “Annihilation:  Conquest,” “Nova,” “War/Realm of Kings” and previous volumes of “Guardians of the Galaxy” that this volume is worth their time.  As someone who has, I can appreciate that this volume didn’t require knowledge of decades-old storylines in order to follow its story.  With the team decimated in the wake of Adam Warlock’s betrayal in the previous volume, Starlord has to manage the remainder of the team as they explore the extra-dimensional rift in spacetime known as The Fault.

This leads to Moondragon becoming impregnated with a nasty lifeform from the region, becoming bound to a member of the Luminals who wants revenge for said lifeform’s murder of her teammates, and subsequent kidnapping by the members of the Church of Universal truth who see this thing as the rebirth of their god.  And that’s only in the first half of the book!  The second half kicks off by revealing that the events that closed out the last volume were really bait-and-switch tactics, but I’m going to give Abnett and Lanning some slack since it reverses that needless slaughter.

Art is handled by Brad Walker and Wes Craig, two artists with noticeably different styles.  I think that Walker is better suited to creating sci-fi worlds of the kind that are shown here, but Craig’s style is appealing in the way that it reminds of the similarly expressive styles of Michael Avon Oeming and Bruce Timm.  Though there’s way too much continuity for most readers to take in here (if you felt lost by my plot summaries, this book is not for you), but it succeeds in telling interesting stories about its cast and The Fault while getting things into place for “The Thanos Imperative.”  So as a mechanism designed to set up a crossover — it could’ve been much, much worse.