Drax issue 1 (2005)

Drax the Destroyer #1-4

This miniseries precedes the Annihilation event by a few months. In the fourth issue there's an editorial in which readers are told that the comic "is just the tip of the iceberg. What we've really done is give you a glimpse or a preview of what is to come".

More or less this is a re-boot, or at the very least another "resurrection", of the Drax the Destroyer character. The story, by Keith Giffen, is fine but Mitch Breitweiser's art - helped enormously by Brian Reber's colouring - is great: he draws figures in epic poses against expansive skylines beautifully.

Drax is on board a spaceship heading for Kyln, a maximum security prison. The other prisoners include Paibok the Skrull, the Blood Brothers and a pretty menacing villain called Lunatik. The spacecraft crashes near Coot's Bluff in Alaska. The Drax who survives the crash is large and brutish: very Hulk-like and, over the course of the four issues, transforms into the Drax that Marvel seem to be using now. Much of what happens involves the Blood Brothers and Lunatik fighting with Drax, while the crafty Paibok enslaves the townsfolk of Coot's Bluff and forces them to work on repairing the damaged spaceship. Drax is befriended by a small girl called Cammi who is fascinated by the aliens she sees. At the end of the second issue Drax is stabbed through the head by Paibok and apparently killed. What seems to happen is that Drax starts to "cook" and out of the baked body, a smaller Drax climbs - with the distinctive red markings on his shoulders. When Cammi asks him why he changed Drax explains: "I am restored. Once again the Destroyer."



He finds that he has lost some of his powers - like power blasts - but he has gained a greater perception: there's a great sequence where Drax walks across a mountainside in the rain and is exhilarated by the experience. The Blood Brothers, who have a Wolverinish scent ability, claim that they smell Cammi when they find Drax. The two have "bonded" in some way. At the end Paibok sends a distress call and a second prison ship picks Drax and Cammi up.

There's not a great deal of Annihilation in this series. It's more of a prologue to the Prologue. Presumably the purpose was to rebirth Drax and give him a child to defend against the Annihilation Wave.