Guardians of the Galaxy #24

Ah, my spring break vacation is rapidly drawing to a close... Sad. Well, sad for me anyway. Although I am a bit bummed about the fact that I only have two more full days of vacation left, I can at least take solace in the fact that when I go back to school on Monday, I only have about a month to go before summer break is upon me! I'll be taking a few classes this summer, so it's going to be an abbreviated summer break, but hey, I'll take whatever days off I can get! As for my spring break, it's been pretty productive... If you consider reading back issues and playing video games to be productive! I'm about 39 hours into Dragon Age: Origins, which might be a very worthwhile pick-up if you're like me and you love RPG's, and I only have two more issues of LEGION to go before I finish that series off. Once I'm done with LEGION, I'll read its spin-off, REBELS, and then I'll go back to the Hawkman series, which I was reading before I got completely sucked into the LEGION books. I think that's a long enough intro, don't you? Tonight I'll be posting reviews for Guardians of the Galaxy #24 as well as Adventure Comics #9. Alright, that's enough out of me, on to the reviews!

Guardians of the Galaxy #24: Writers: Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning. Pencils: Wes Craig.
Last Issue: 7 out of 10.

This issue gets underway with Guardians members, Mantis, Major Victory, Gamora, Cosmo & Martyr attempting to battle through the forces of the Universal Church of Truth. During the battle, Martyr is contacted telepathically by Maelstrom, who reprimands her for doing such a lousy job as the avatar of death. While Martyr argues with Maelstrom, the Matriarch, who is the Church's second in command, attacks the Guardians with the power of her faith(which is a lot more devastating then it may sound!). While all of that is going down, the other Guardians(who have no idea of their teammates plight, nor of the fact that they're even alive)are pulling guard duty at some big inter-galactic shindig. They manage to prevent an assassination attempt on Blastarr, the king of the Negative Zone, and afterwards, they check up on Guardian member Moondragon, who swears that Martyr and the rest of the Guardians are still alive. Speaking of Martyr and the rest of the Guardians, they manage to defeat Matriarch, but during the fray, Martyr sneaks away and follows a path laid out for her by Maelstrom. The path leads Martyr to the huge cocoon the Church had found and were studying, and Maelstrom tells Martyr that if she destroys it, she'll have made up for the lousy job she'd done as the avatar of death. Martyr does as she is told, and cuts open the cocoon, and this issue closes with Thanos(!!!)emerging from the cocoon and blasting Martyr!

So Thanos was in the cocoon the whole time... Uh-huh... I'm not going to dwell on HOW Thanos got in there, because I doubt I'd figure it out. The last time Thanos was around(and alive)was back during the first Annihilation mini-series, where he gets killed by his long-time foe, Drax the Destroyer. And Thanos was most definitely DEAD, heart torn out, dead as a doornail dead, as a matter of fact. But whatever. I really like Thanos, and I have to say that I'm quite pleased that he's back, although I'm getting a bit annoyed by the endless x-overs/events that seem to be plaguing this series as well as Nova... It feels like we've gone from the War of Kings story, to the Realm of Kings, to the Thanos Lives storyline... A little break between x-overs would definitely be appreciated... Besides that, I have no real complaints here. This was a good, solid comic with a nice surprise ending.

Score: 7 out of 10.That's the ugliest cocoon I've EVER seen!!!