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Saturday 26 December 2015

Warzones: Guardians of Knowhere Review (Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Deodato)


This one’s not part of Brian Bendis’ ongoing Guardians title, this is a Secret Wars tie-in, part of the Warzones series. It’s also turrible! 

Knowhere is still the hollowed-out head of a dead Celestial used as a spaceport where the Guardians like to get drunk and bar-fight in, but here it orbits Battleworld. Also the Guardians aren’t the Guardians as they’ve all been mind-wiped and believe Doom is God Emperor of everything, like the other denizens of Battleworld. Except for Gamora who has a sneaking suspicion that things aren’t quite right… 

Guardians of Knowhere is four issues of Big. Dumb. Fighting. Sigh. A human-like character called Yotat gets blowed up by alien gangsters but of course that doesn’t kill him, it just turns him into a Hulk-like monster - he’s the punching bag the Guardians hit for four issues. 

Angela’s one of the Thors, Doom’s Battleworld police force, who’s there to punish Gamora for straying outside her zone (Battleworld is a patchwork world of various zones stitched together with strict rules about the inhabitants remaining within their own borders). The Nova Corps - here the line-up is Nova, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Venom, Adam Warlock, and a female Watcher? - also show up to hit this Yotat character and a few of the Guardians. 

And that’s it - all of those characters hitting one another, page after page. Quite an imagination, Bendis! Mike Deodato’s artwork and Frank Martin’s colours are the only positives about this otherwise wholly pointless book. 

Rounding out the volume is Bendis’ New Avengers: Illuminati #3 from 2007 where we find out the Beyonder’s origin from the first Secret Wars. It’s a completely inconsequential reveal and the issue is just an excuse for more dumb fighting. 

Guardians of Knowhere is totally missable. It’s a tie-in that knobody kneeds to read - you can easily just read the main Secret Wars event without this and still understand what’s going on. Same goes for regular Guardians readers, you can skip this entirely and still knot miss anything pertinent to that series. Sometimes tie-ins can be good and worth checking out regardless of their irrelevance to the main story like Hank Johnson, Agent of Hydra - Guardians of Knowhere is definitely knot one of these. It’s one big steaming pile of knothing!

Guardians of Knowhere

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