Issue 10 gets straight
into the action. The splashpage is a top down view showing as Black
Knights flooding through a doorway towards Warlock, Pip, Gamora and
Thanos.
It’s a great hook. It
immediately suggests imminent violence and conflict, the few against
the many. It makes you to turn the pages and find out what happens
next. What does happen is an appealing few pages packed with
fighting, shouting and frenzied narration.
Eventually the good
guys escape into tunnels under the Magus’s citadel and have time
for the regular recap. Recaps are a recurring in theme in this comic,
regardless of the writing team. That’s format showing – they’re
written with the casual reader in mind, who might never have seen the
previous issues before. That’s exactly how I encountered it, of
course, and I never saw another issue. I have been thinking about it
for the last forty or so years, so I guess it worked.
Even the creative team
seems sick of explaining the convoluted story again, though, so this
time we’re presented with an efficient page of typeset text and a
rather cool illustration of the story so far. It’s another feature
of this series, I guess, that it’s found ways to make these static
scenes work, from the High Evolutionary by Gil Kane to these types of
pages from Jim Starlin.
While wandering in the
caves, they come across the dying Matriarch. She’s been flung into
a pit by the Magus because she was planning to overthrow him in a
sub-plot I haven’t bothered to discuss here before. Starlin uses
shadows and force perspectives as the beautiful femme fatale delivers
her exit speech. The words are like heavy metal lyrics again, but the
art gives it a heavy romantic, almost erotic atmosphere.
Warlock is also clearly
moved by the experience and sounds off like an over wrought teen.
Thanos appears and
tells him ‘Because THAT is the way of LIFE!’
Thanos’s appearance
at the end of this scene triggers an explanation of who Thanos is.
Captain Marvel appears and relates Thanos’s origin and the story of
his recent defeat at the hands of the Avengers. He signs off like
this:
This feels like a
really strange interjection to have in the middle of this deadly
serious action. It doesn’t quite seem to fit with the space opera
we’ve been enjoying up to now. The previous series had a similar
identity problem, and couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to be
proper marvel or a thing on its own.
Well, the story quickly
progresses and Thanos outlines his plan – he has a Time Probe that
will carry Adam Warlock to a point in his future when he can kill
himself and prevent the Magus from ever existing. To save the galaxy,
Warlock has to kill himself!
Issue #11 begins with
Magus boarding Thanos’s space ark just as the heroes are putting
their plan in play. There’s more fighting, shouting and frenzied
narration. Warlock can’t fight his through the Black Knights to the
time probe. The power of the Soul Gem takes over and sucks out their
lives.
He makes it to the Time
Probe and finds himself in the Ditko-esque netherworld of his Life’s
Path.
Making his through the
time streams he makes his destined appointment with the dreaded
In-Betweener. The In-Betweener spouts a bit of gibberish.
He then
tells Warlock he’s early: there are still five minutes before the
appointed moment when he’s carried away to his evil destiny. This is all the time
Warlock needs to save the day. He races around the abstract
expressionist Ditko weird-scape destroying the life paths that lead
him to be the magus. It’s like some strange psychedelically induced
cognitive therapy, with Warlock trying to auto-suggest some kind of
optimal life path.
Inevitably the moment
arrives when Warlock must close his life loop – he must use the
Soul Gem on his future self. Warlock finds himself dying, crushed
under some fallen masonry. The future self knows what’s coming, of
course. This is a brilliant scene, definitely a fitting climax to the
demented tale of self-loathing. (The scanner, alas, does not do it justice!)
The universe changes
around them. Pip and Adam find themselves on Homeworld, without
Thanos or Gamora. Magus’s Church of Universal Truth is gone, but
Warlock catches the Matriarch in the crowd – not everything
changes.
And then...
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