Digitally Speaking...24 "Annihilation"

via Marvel

Annihilation #1 (Marvel)

From 2006.

I like to browse comiXology's freebies just to see what's available.  More often than not, a landscape of material I've already added to my library.  So when new stuff appears, it's exciting.  Marvel tends to make certain issues available as they're somehow related to what's currently relevant.  In this case, Annihilation is the birth of the Guardians of the Galaxy phenomenon from last year's hit film.  I'll explain elsewhere exactly how the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted, but suffice to say, as far as Marvel's space heroes go, this was basically Green Lantern: Rebirth.

Keith Giffen was writer.  Later, he was succeeded by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, who cut their space teeth with DC's Legion of Super-Heroes, and it was in that form I first heard about Annihilation, so naturally I thought it was an Abnettt/Lanning project all along, making it a surprise to learn that it was in fact Giffen's.  Giffen later revisited space comics for DC with Threshold and the spin-off Larfleeze, so it only figures there was some precedent there.

Above everything else that resulted, Annihilation also seems to have been, in some sense, a kind of Lord of the Rings story for Marvel's space heroes, a big cosmic war.  The movies will take a different direction, since clearly Marvel has long since considered the Thor movies to be the Marvel version of Lord of the Rings, which is fine.

Peter Quill, the erstwhile Star-Lord, co-stars, below a member of the Nova Corps.  Nova is Marvel's Green Lantern, except fewer people know anyone who's actually been Nova (except, y'know, John C. Reilly).  Gamora is present, as is Drax.  Thanos is there, too.  The one in this debut issue that receives the most interesting character work is Drax.  I suppose it only figures.

I'm not particularly inclined to read more of Annihilation itself, in part because I think I've already read the best of it (more on that elsewhere).  If you like cosmic war stories, though, you might read the rest of it.