Guardians of the Galaxy: Angela

So I managed to read the second volume of Guardians of the Galaxy today, too.  I was really looking forward to this one because it features Angela.  I'm not super familiar with her from Spawn, but I was interested to see what she would be like in Guardians of the Galaxy.

To that end, I wasn't disappointed.  Angela was pulled through some sort of temporal disturbance.  She gets into a fight with the Guardians of the Galaxy, who discovered her charging towards the Earth.  It turns out that she was amazed at the Earth's existence; she's heard stories of the Earth (much in the way we on Earth have heard stories of Heaven), and needed to see it with her own eyes (I thought that was an awesome story idea).  She ends up joining forces with the Guardians; in turn they are trying to help her get home.

I also really like how Gamora and Angela become friends.  They start off fighting one another, but in the end grow to respect each other.  That was a pretty fun story arc, too.

But like Cosmic Avengers, Angela suffered from some disjointed storytelling that made it a bit hard to follow.  I think what happened is that parts of the story took place in other comic lines.  So this graphic novel had only the specific Guardians of the Galaxy stories, which did not include those other parts.  That was really disappointing to me because I had no idea going in that parts of the story would be missing (especially since I'm not a huge Marvel Comics reader). 

But other than that, I enjoyed reading these two volumes.  I'm now quite excited for August when the movie comes out! 

Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Avengers

Since the movie is coming out this summer, I wanted to read some Guardians of the Galaxy comics.  And luckily the library has both volumes one and two of Brian Michael Bendis's

The one issue I had with this book is that, for volume 1, it sort of felt like I was jumping into the middle of the story.  I have no idea why the Guardians of the Galaxy had separated, or even why Peter Quill (aka Star-Lord) brought them back together, beyond the fact that they needed to save the Earth.  For motivation, I guess that works.  But even reading the shorter stories at the end of the book, which had him reassembling the team, I didn't really get a good understanding of why these characters are willing to work together for this goal (especially since most of the characters in the book aren't human). 

So anyway, the Guardians of the Galaxy are a group of outcasts/misfits who have formed a super team together.  There is the aforementioned Peter Quill, who has a human mother and an alien-king father.  There's Gamora, the daughter of Thanos (a super villain, I think), Rocket Raccoon (an anthropomorphic raccoon), Groot (a plant monster/ent-like being), and Drax the Destroyer (I don't really have a clue what his story is.  He destroys everything?)  Quill's father, the king of Spartex, has declared Earth to be off-limits to the rest of the galaxy's denizens.  But then the Badoon people decide to attack the Earth for unknown reasons a few days later.  So it's up to the Guardians of the Galaxy to stop them.

I apologize, as my summary makes Cosmic Avengers seem rather chaotic and hard to follow.  But the main story really wasn't (I had a harder time with the short stories at the end).  I enjoyed reading it, and am looking forward to reading the second volume soon.