Thoughts

Huzzah! We’re back into Space with Cockrum! And he’s brought lots of new friends!

The All-New X-men are testament to Cockrum’s visual creativity when it comes to designing new heroes. But this issue takes that talent and turns it up to eleven. Its a visual feast as The Imperial Guard and the Starjammers burst into the story. All looking awesome and all ready for a smackdown.

Pages 2-3 of this issue are a double spread that features the Imperial Guard and its a page I could look at for ages. All the Guard members look distinct, and interesting. You could give this to a kid and they’d have endless fun devising a name and powerset for all these characters. And when I say kid I, of course, mean me.

And if that wasn’t enough, in burst the Starjammers. Another fun visual creation, with the added bonus of being rebels.

Cramming all this into an issue something has to give, and to be honest its in the story. There’s almost too many characters for the limited pages the slugfest gets, and then we get a huge amount of exposition. The issue needs to go over exactly why the X-men are in space. It then has to cover who exactly Lilandra is and why the X-men are rescuing her. It then explains to us who they are rescuing her from (and the underwhelming mystery of Erik The Red get’s explained yet again) as well as the backstory of the location she’s been take to before finally telling us the kidnapper’s evil scheme.

It’s a lot and the issue does creak at times, but ultimately I rather an issue did too much than too little and when the narrative is flagging I’m more than compensated by Cockrum’s toy box of all new super characters.

Fun Panel

That thick spine of the omnibus means that this photo can’t do justice to this double spread!

That Don’t Make A Lick of Sense

At the finale of the issue, we learn that the evil villain’s plans with an Ancient Cosmic Power Source cause the entire universe to blink out of existence for a fraction of a second. In the final few panels, this sets up a cliffhanger where scientists back on Earth detect this blink and panic that the universe is on the edge of destruction. But how could they possibly detect this if the whole universe blanks out of existence. Any equipment that could use to detect this would blink out of existence to?

Any Googling

I did have a quick check to see whether the Starjammers had much of an independent life in comics. This is 1977, the year of Star Wars. So much potential for an ongoing Starjammers comic. Slightly shocked they didn’t get one at the time. What were you thinking Marvel?!?