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Sunday 17 July 2016

Drax, Volume 1: The Galaxy's Best Detective Review (CM Punk, Cullen Bunn)


Drax’s purpose in life has always been to kill Thanos for murdering his family; except he’s always been distracted with guarding the galaxy! Now that he’s on a brief respite from the team, he can finally get back to killing Thanos – that is after he solves the case of the missing kids on some random planet he’s stranded on... But THEN he’ll get around to killing Thanos… yeah, that’ll definitely happen soon…!

Drax is the latest Guardians of the Galaxy spin-off and, like the others, it’s surprisingly not bad, but it’s not great either. The appeal for some might be popular former WWE wrestler CM Punk penning this comic - a fighter writing a fighter. Marvel wisely added old hand Cullen Bunn as co-writer to help out the inexperienced Punk. 

As a result the writing isn’t bad at all. The tone is quite light, the story sails along smoothly, the characters are well-realised and the dialogue doesn’t sound clunky in the least. The story is quite simplistic though and very straightforward in structure so it’s not especially memorable. Nor does Punk really provide any insight into the fighter’s mindset despite his experience, but he does pepper the script with plenty of hand-to-hand fighting and even an arena match! 

But it’s a coherent, well-paced and entertaining-enough read. It’s amusing seeing Drax fumble his way through an investigation and two of Marvel’s lesser-known older characters, Terrax (a former Herald of Galactus) and Fin Fang Foom (a giant talking dragon), also make unexpected, welcome appearances – the advantage of having adventures in space, where anyone could appear! I liked Scott Hepburn’s artwork too which was cartoonishly expressive, fun and looked cool, though I wondered what made him draw Drax wearing harem pants!? 

Drax’s solo book is basically what you’d expect, with lots of fighting in a breezy space adventure, though he’s still not the most interesting character and the story isn’t anything special.

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