Alright. The Guardians of the Galaxy are now my favorite super-team ever. More than the Bat Family. More than the JSA. More than the Green Lantern Corps. More than Riot Force 6. This team is just awesome, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they're executed on the big screen. ( )

Holy crap that was good. Then again, I've always been an absolute sucker for the really big and really powerful and bugshit crazy ideas. This story sequence was amazing. ( )

Most comics take the view that life is worth fighting for, that we should rage against the dying of the light. The Thanos Imperative’s a refreshing inversion of that, positing that a universe where death had been abolished wouldn’t be an altogether healthy one and that a heroic quest against an invasion from it would involve reintroducing death. Abnett et al have a great deal of fun with this idea, finding a very logical turning point where the universes split and thinking the logic of what would happen to various life forms very carefully and exactly how it might need to be defeated. It’s a wonderfully large scale story filled with the most powerful beings from the Marvel universe and alt-universe parodies of other familiar faces with Thanos getting a pleasingly antiheroic role and Nova and the Guardians of the Galaxy playing their full part.

Where I wasn’t quite so enamoured of the story was the artwork; Nothing wrong with the idea of trying Miguel Sepulveda’s slightly more scuzzy style on a space epic but I tend to prefer the cleaner lines Brad Walker brings in the early issues on display here. ( )