Guardians Of The Galaxy #9: Review

Sep 2019

Donny Cates, Cory Smith

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Story Name:

Faithless (3 of 6)

Review & Comments

Rating:

Guardians Of The Galaxy #9 Review by Rob Johnson (September 21, 2019)

Most of the chars on the cover are prisoners on the Cathedral ship and don't appear within, not even as recognisable occupants of tubes in the background.

Back in #2 when Donny Cates started to bring Gamora into the story I wondered if he had forgotten that Infinity Wars #6 ended with her lost on an unidentified world intending to raise the newly reborn Magus to be a better person than his evil previous versions.

In the Annual I took the hint that Magus was the messiah the Universal Church Of Truth were trying to resurrect (they have form in this respect), again seemingly ignoring IW#6.

Oh, me of little faith! This issue knits Gamora's story back together, and the appearance of Li'l Magus throws severe doubt about the about the occupant of the cocoon. And we didn't think it was going to be Warlock who the Annual showed was alive and well elsewhere. And Star-Lord was obviously expecting Magus to step out of the cocoon, and was as gob-smacked as me when it turned out to be Drax.

Do the multiple cocoons mean that the UCT intends to send an army of Drax's against Death?

Drax and his human part Arthur Douglas were split apart in IW#6. The IW: Fallen Guardian 1-shot showed Art reunited with his wife in Soul World, and Drax off somewhere doing what he likes best - fighting. I'm now confidant Donny will explain how Drax got from there to here in the following issues.

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Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Guardians Of The Galaxy #9 Synopsis by Rob Johnson

Star-Lord's father J'son of Spartax is now the Patriarch of the Universal Church Of Truth (henceforth referred to as the UCT) and he's trying to persuade his son of the rightness of his cause. He describes what they found millions of years in the future - the universe dying. I guess we see what Peter Quill imagines on hearing his dad's words. [That's the only explanation I have for the skeletons of Earth heroes still in their costumes amid the ruins of recognisable Marvel landmarks like the Baxter Building, all having survived the aeons.] And the Patriarch says the figure of Death watched over it all. And now the UCT intends to prevent that future by killing Death.

In the present we see Peter in the grips of tendrils of the UCT's Cathedral spaceship. He chants the mantra of the converted "We have to have faith". The starship has been gathering in the power of the lifeforce of beings throughout the universe. Now they have their sights on what J'son claims is the biggest concentration of life energy in the universe - Earth. He promises to drain the life from only a couple of continents in order to resurrect their messiah, and then they'll return to the future to kill Death.

Then Star-Lord reveals that he wasn't really converted by breaking free and punching his pa's jaw. Then he makes a frantic escape from pursuing armoured guards. Only to run into the converted Cosmo the Space-Dog who zaps him with a mind-blast. J'son and the guards recapture him.

Meanwhile the dying Rocket Raccoon in a Transformers-like giant battle suit has brought Groot and Moondragon (and her manifested Dragon Of The Moon) to an unidentified planet for help to rescue Quill and the other Guardians Of The Galaxy from the UCT. But so far all they've done is fight a horde of vicious alien critters. Rocket says Gamora told him about the place 1 night when they got drunk (some time just before the Guardians found Gamora in #4 with Rocket on his birth planet Halfworld). Then our heroes find themselves floating above the foe and a voice tells them to stop scaring his pets. It's an early-teen version of Magus, and Rocket says this is who they've come to find.

Back in the Cathedral J'son takes Peter to the cocoon that will birth the messiah. (And last issue we saw that they have rooms full of such cocoons.) He commands the engines to be started, and the cocoon cracks open. [So they didn't need the extra life-energy from a large chunk of Earth for this.] And out of it steps Drax The Destroyer.

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