Warning! This article contains spoilers for Wastelanders: Star-Lord #1
In the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Marvel Comics’ future, first introduced to fans in the series Old Man Logan, Star-Lord returns to Earth for the first time in decades only to be haunted by deceased members of the Avengers. While Star-Lord is an intergalactic hero most well-known for his time spent on the Guardians of the Galaxy, he is still a human whose priorities should have perhaps been more focused on Earth. With that thought circling in his mind, Star-Lord is haunted by the imagined souls of the dead Avengers who reinforce his own guilt and despair.
In Wastelanders: Star-Lord #1 by Rich Douek and Brent Peeples, Peter Quill returns to Earth as an old man and bears witness to the fallout of the post-apocalyptic future before him. As introduced in Old Man Logan, the landscape of this disastrous future known as the Wasteland came to be after every supervillain on Earth gathered together under Red Skull and completely took over. In the process, nearly every hero died trying to fight back against the villain takeover, a battle to which Star-Lord wasn’t in attendance for.
Because he didn’t help defend the Earth from the supervillain takeover and the subsequent deaths of nearly every superhero on the planet, Star-Lord is stricken with guilt. That guilt manifested itself as Peter seeing ‘ghosts’ of his fallen comrades, imagined spirits that made him feel even worse about his intergalactic exploits while the Earth fell to chaos. While a number of the heroes who haunted Star-Lord upon his return to Earth were Avengers, a number of them were of a different superhero group, and whose grizzly deaths were done by the hand of another guilt-ridden hero haunted by the memories of his past.
When Star-Lord came to Earth as Old Man Quill, he was greeted by the ‘ghosts’ of the X-Men before he encountered any deceased Avengers members. The first dead X-Men member he sees is Kitty Pryde whose fictitious specter sports the gnarly wounds that killed her, wounds that were made by Wolverine. As shown in Old Man Logan, Wolverine was manipulated by Mysterio to kill every member of the X-Men as he believed them to be a random assortment of attacking supervillains per Mysterio’s illusions. Peter Quill is seeing the fallout of that attack in his guilt-driven visions, believing that maybe he could have stopped Wolverine before he caused so much mayhem.
Star-Lord’s manifestation of guilt by way of seeing judgmental ghosts of his own creation is not a new phenomenon for Old Man Quill. In fact, Star-Lord had the same thing happen to him before the events of Wastelanders: Star-Lord when he saw his dead Guardians of the Galaxy crewmates who told him to head to Earth. While Star-Lord may not have been able to do anything to prevent the downfall of the Earth, and in fact could have become one of the deceased himself, he still felt responsible for the carnage as he wasn’t there to help the heroes in their struggle. This, in turn, led to the Avengers haunting Star-Lord even after dying.
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/3EGZSwQ
