It’s an
all out brawl between Drax the Destroyer and Cuchulain the Irish Wolfhound, and
Kevin West took this issue off! The art
is brought to you by Scott Eaton who is more realistic and more exaggerated
than Kevin West in terms of his characters, bringing a decidedly different (and
welcome) feel to the book. It’s almost
Texeira-esque but not as exaggerated.
Gallagher,
and to an extent Eaton, provide an interesting setup to this issue. To show that everything is happening
simultaneously, between the Drax/Cuchulain brawl and the machinations of the
rest of the Guardians, they present everything together. The top half of the page is the rest of the
Guardians and what they are doing throughout the issue while the bottom is the
continuing battle between Drax and Cuchulain.
This is an interesting way of doing things and something that was
attempted with less success by Jim Valentino during his run as well.
The
battle between Drax and Cuchulain is a back and forth affair for the majority
of the book without much in the way of events to report, so I’ll focus on what
is going on on the top half of the page.
Vance escapes the prison guards and hides out, trying to find Charlie in
the process. Unfortunately tOrk finds
him first and is about to finish the beatdown that he started last issue when
he realizes that Charlie is all healed thanks to Diablo’s special serum. I assume he makes it like most concoctions in
prison, in the toilet with a mixture of spit and things bought from the
commissary. Charlie surprises him and
knocks him out, and even in a small space, Eaton does a great job making the
action as big as possible. Just as
Charlie puts the finishing touches on Tork, Vance shows up as well.
We then cut to Nikki and
Yellowjacket who have skirted around the “no girls allowed” rule and come down
to bust some heads and break Charlie out.
What the warden and the prison guards don’t realize is that they have
brought Talon with them. Yellowjacket
increases his size and sics him on the prison guards. At this point the storylines merge into one
as Cuchulain and Drax have damaged a nuclear reactor, causing it to blow a hole
in Stockade. 
The Guardians take the warden back
to their ship and continue to prove Charlie’s innocence, which is when Nikki
pipes up with “think about the scar”.
The scar that Charlie received from the Spirit of Vengeance was not
present on the video that the warden had as evidence of Charlie’s guilt. The real culprit was a clone of Charlie, the
one that we saw for one page a few issues ago that Rancor sliced up. The warden begrudgingly agrees to not pursue
any further action against Charlie and the Guardians and we cut to stockade as
Yondu and Talon look for Cuchulain amid the rubble. He comes out completely unscathed and they
teleport to the ship. Drax then emerges
from the rubble and sits in front of a television screen playing the alien
equivalent of the “emergency alert broadcast”.
After the Guardians send Cuchulain
on his way back to Earth, with their gratitude (and a little something “extra”
from Yellowjacket, or so it’s eluded to) they turn their attention to Mars,
which is apparently the base of operations of Ripjak as well as a quarantined
planet ever since the War of the Worlds.
Next Issue: More War of the Worlds talk!? And you thought they were done with that…
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