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Legendary Star-Lord #2 Review: The Family That Cons Together …

By Nick Tylwalk

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Sam Humphries is obviously a big Star Wars fan.

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Of course if you’re going to do riffs or homages on famous sci-fi properties, you could do a lot worse than paying respect to the classics. Legendary Star-Lord #2 doesn’t focus on these nods, but from the revelation that Star-Lord has a sister to the specific danger they both face to some of Peter Quill’s dialogue, they’re definitely all there.

So far, this book feels a bit like a lot of anime shows do, where there is a large confrontation looming somewhere down the road but the individual adventures on the way there may or may not do that much to get Star-Lord closer to his goal. We know he feels a need to take on Thanos, he’s just not in a huge hurry to do so — and that’s completely understandable.

One thing Humphries absolutely nails is writing a take on Quill that people will find very comfortable if the movie was their first exposure to the character. There are lines of dialogue on page 5 that you could easily picture coming out of Chris Pratt’s mouth, and his anger at the insult hurled at him and his teammates by his sister echoes the way he goes off on the Kyln guard who takes his headphones in the film.

My sister-in-law started reading Guardians of the Galaxy comics after watching the movie and was enthusiastic but a little confused about the differences between the film and comics versions of some characters. If she had started with Legendary Star-Lord, that wouldn’t be an issue. The breezy art by Paco Medina and Juan Vlasco help make it accessible too.

We’ll see if it keeps up. For now, let’s plunge past the …

SPOILER ALERT!

Star-Lord has been captured by his sister Victoria, and is about to be fed to the Sarlacc … er, Grimepit, where he’ll be slowly digested for decades. It’s all a ruse, though: after an exchange of insults earlier on, Peter managed to appeal to his sister’s need for cash to keep her troops outfitted to protect Spartoi refugees by getting them in on the con.

Despite Star-Lord being stripped of his rocket boots and not exchanging knowing nods beforehand, the siblings manage to barely escape with their hides intact and a whole bunch of the money belonging to the gangsters to which Victoria was going to hand Peter over. And it turns out the monster isn’t inside the moon they’re fleeing, because it is the moon. Star Wars homages, remember?

Peter refuses his half of the money and spills what’s bothering him to his sister. It’s an awfully trusting move considering they’ve just met, and it’s hard to tell if Victoria’s “If you can’t tell your sister, who can you tell?” line is supposed to be taken seriously or in jest.

We’re left with two questions to keep coming back for more: is Victoria going to keep helping Peter? And how will the menacingly named Mister Knife turn up the heat on Star-Lord?

Those are enough. For now, anyway.

Favorite moment: I’m wussing out and picking two: becoming a crime lord’s accountant is a fate worse than death, and the word “krutackers” is apparently a pretty serious insult.

Final thought: Whatever happened between Star-Lord and Thanos in the Cancerverse is definitely personal for Quill, but not calling in the Guardians to help take down Thanos would just be foolish.

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