At the time when great crossovers featured mutant collections, The Avengers managed to capture attention with a war between the Kree and Shi’ar Empires. Panini Comics concentrates the entire saga and its epilogue in one volume that fills the missing gap.
How did we get here
We can draw certain parallels between Operation: Galactic Storm and the Kree-Skrull War but the differences that separate both stories are greater. Even starting from the presence of Rick Jones to start hostilities and the recurring presence of the Supreme Intelligence of the Kree, the volume in hand explores on other levels the personal relationship that exists between several of the members of The Avengers.
But to get there we still have to go through the causes that will motivate the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to intervene in a large-scale armed conflict between two powerful intergalactic empires separated by many light years away.
The problem is that in order to travel more quickly between the galaxies that house the Kree and the Shi’ar, both armies are going to use a jump point located near our star, the one around which we orbit, the Sun of our planetary system. With Earth threatened by the instability that it generates in our king star, the Avengers will have to intervene diplomatically to intervene in the conflict and try to prevent us from being directly splashed as collateral damage in a war between extraterrestrials who care little for anything that is not among their direct interests.
The little details that really matter
The story is grouped into multiple collections surrounding The Avengers of that time, the early nineties. In addition to the two headers of both Coasts, East and West, we will have chapters distributed in Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Quasar and Wonder Man, the main characters managing to obtain some extra wink within the pages of their own series but maintaining a linear reading structure.
Throughout nineteen issues plus a final epilogue that took place in the Cap collection, we will be able to enjoy great battles, but also those special circumstances that mark the characters and their future in the Marvel Universe.
To highlight some of them, we experienced the reunion of The Vision and Wonder Man under the watchful eye of The Scarlet Witch (remember that The Vision in its classic incarnation had the brain patterns of Simon Williams recorded). The love triangle does not fully emerge in these vignettes but doubt is hinted at, since Wanda and Simon were members of the West Coast and The Vision was on the East Coast team.
We also have that new Thor (Eric Masterson had taken the power of Mjolnir in the era of Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz) inexperienced, irreverent and crazy or the confrontation that Iron Man and Captain America had since the time of the so-called War of the Armor. Capi also does not have the best time throughout the adventure, coming to the point of raising moral questions about his companions that he does not share, making the leadership that he intends to impose difficult. That said, not everything is fights against the Imperial Guard of Lilandra Neramani or Ronan the Accuser and other recognized members of the Kree.
A very choral cast
In addition to having a huge number of protagonists and recovering the Goliath identity that Clint Barton (Hawkeye) had during the Kree-Skrull War, the Avengers are used in reserve for certain secondary activities and we even have the return of Monica Rambeau as Captain Marvel to take the reins of the group that enters into negotiations with the Shi’ar, along with Stellar Zorro, with whom she already formed an alignment during the era of Roger Stern and John Buscema.
All of them will be directed by the scriptwriters who at that time occupied the positions in each header, Mark Gruenwald (Captain America and Quasar), Roy and Dann Thomas (Avengers West Coast), Gerard Jones (Wonder Man) Bob Harras (The Avengers ), Len Kaminski (Iron Man) and Tom DeFalco (Thor).
For the drawing we have such well-known names as Rik Levins, David Ross, Jeff Johnson, Greg Capullo, Steve Epting, Paul Ryan, Rurik Tyler and Patrick Olliffe, all of them very accomplished, leaving a good taste in the mouth as far as the artistic part is concerned, without any of them standing out in an outstanding way at that time, since the careers of some of those who would achieve greater fame later were still in their early stages, so highlighting Capullo, for example, would not be the most correct.
Operation: Galactic Storm It is a good saga, entertaining, full of friction between the Avengers themselves and with the right dose of each of the villains and regents of each empire. And I haven’t had the need to establish parallels with Operation Desert Storm to talk to you about this comic.
Jesus Salvador Gomez
Weaned in an arcade playing Ghost N’ Goblins and raised under the prism of the national comics of Ibañez, Escobar, Vazquez… and the classic Don Miki from Disney, his life changed the day he got his hands on issue 45 of Spider-Man from Comics Forum. Since then, Marvel entered his life and will never leave it, just as video games have done. A lover of the mythical stages of Claremont, Byrne, Miller, Stern or Simonson, he confesses without shame that his wife is partly to blame for the fact that, even after reaching forty, he is still engrossed in hobbies that will never leave him.
