Brian Michael Bendis (Author), Steve McNiven and Sara Pichelli (Illustrators), Marvel Comics (publisher)

> Review by Carolyn Marcille

If you liked the film Guardians of the Galaxy, you’ll find that Cosmic Avengers is a nice way to go a bit deeper. The book has a lot to offer. It drops you into the action VERY quickly, and does a good job of making you want to read what came before. You can’t just casually have a character say to Peter Quill “I heard you dragged yourself back from the dead” without wanting to know what happened. The artwork in Cosmic Avengers is quite good; the illustrators did a nice job ensuring that, even if there are pages that possess a lot of dialogue, there is an equal amount of visual interest. Cosmic Avengers is actually a pretty talky comic; there is so much going on that a relatively large amount of expository detail is necessary for understanding. But it all flows well and doesn’t slow the story down. And there is definitely a lot going on in this volume; Earth is under attack by an alien army, and a nefarious plot by Quill’s father is the root cause. Tony Stark’s Iron Man is a part of Volume 1, guaranteeing that future volumes will no doubt feature both Quill and Stark going all out to save their home planet.