Infinity Countdown Review (Gerry Duggan, Aaron Kuder)

I know, I know, Marvel and this fucking word “Infinity”, eh? So characters are running around chasing after the Infinity Stones AGAIN before Thanos blah blah blah - Marvel don’t have new ideas any more!

The best books Marvel has published this year have been Gerry Duggan’s All-New Guardians of the Galaxy which disappointingly ended after just three volumes - except it didn’t! Infinity Countdown is the unofficial fourth book in the series… with added nonsense because Event.

So from that series we get here the conclusion to The Gardener storyline and continuations of the Rich Ryder/Raptors and Guardians/Infinity Stones storylines... none of which are that good unfortunately. The Gardener story plays out as you might expect and the others spin their wheels.

The added nonsense is various cosmic characters doing random stuff. Adam Warlock and Kang are time-travelling because that’s what they do, a preggo Nova Corpsman gives birth, some Chitauri champion fails at pretending he’s a threat, Galactus and Silver Surfer are battling a Hank Pym/Ultron hybrid, Doctor Strange is chatting with Stilt-Man who’s somehow involved - all of it is pretty pointless bloat, thrown in to beef up the book to an absurd seven issues of basically filler.

Drax is brilliant in every scene he’s in - that character is absolutely killing it whether in the comics or the movies! There’s a couple good surprises in this book that I won’t spoil here, one of which involves Groot that’s a sensible (and long-time coming!) development for him, and another that involves Galactus and the Surfer which also makes sense given Marvel’s recent Legacy tack.

And the various artists draw some great pages. From Mike Allred’s superb Adam Warlock issue to Mike Deodato and Aaron Kuder’s work, this is a fine-looking book! Still, despite all the noise he makes, Gerry Duggan can’t shake the feeling of inconsequentiality that surrounds Infinity Countdown. I’ll read the new Infinity Whatever event when it comes out (apparently the Stones do something different this time around) but unfortunately the brilliance of Duggan’s Guardians series didn’t transfer over into Marvel’s much wider Cosmic arena.