Or - “Playing Catch-Up Is Actually Kind Of Fun…”

Peter Quill. Astronaut. Star-Lord. Fallen hero. In the wake of the Annihilation, the powers of the universe have been completely revamped and reconfigured, but there are still situations that cry out for the intervention of the master of the spaceways… The situation on Hala (home of the Kree) is beyond desperate, and the powers that be have drafted Pete and a few of Marvel’s other back-catalog characters into a suicide mission, a mission behind enemy lines where nobody expects any of them to survive. Whaddaya bet that they’re right? (more…)

Or - “Open Source: A Wonderful Idea That Makes For Some Very Questionable Results.”

I’m referring, of course, to the old Wikipedia entry for Star-Lord, which is not merely confusing but utterly useless and has in fact been known to cause dementia and heart palpitations in laboratory mice. The simple truth of the matter is that Star-Lord’s backstory is HIGHLY confusing, filled with golden intentions and tangled antecedents, and while there’s a lot going on, some of it is practically incomprehensible. Blame that on 70’s Marvel’s rotating Editors-In-Chief, or perhaps the need to fill hundreds of pages on relatively short notice. Either way, as a small-time-comics-historian-slash-big-mouth-know-it-all, I felt the burden to try and clear a few of these loose ends up, once and for all, if only to save the brain cells of the youth of America who might want to know where Richie Ryder’s snarky right-hand man came from…

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Or - “It’s Interesting When A Character I Love Returns To The Spotlight…”

…especially when it’s a character that virtually nobody else has heard of. Star-Lord is one of the old-school fave-raves from the days of the Marvel black and white magazines (I also have a soft spot for The Zombie and anyone who appeared in ‘Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu’) even though his characterization and backstory varied wildly through his history. The one thing that seemed to maintain, however, was his sarcasm (bordering on misanthropy in some cases) and a sardonic wit. Pete was one of the high points of last summer’s Annihilation story, serving as Nova’s majordomo, comptroller, and sounding board, all the while insisting that the Star-Lord was dead. That begs the question: what changes his mind?

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