Philosophical Musings of a Book Nerd

I think I better be careful as I might end up reading more graphic novels that I originally intended to, but then again considering the price of some of these books (and the number of books on my TBR shelf), that is something that I probably don't need to stress all that much about. Actually, I have discovered that our local public libraries have quite a few graphic novels on their shelves, though due to budget constraints I suspect that they aren't the latest editions (and even then the selection available doesn't seem to be all that great). The other problem with graphic novels (or should I call them comics because for some reason I can't really see Marvel Superhero comic books are being anywhere near books like Tintin) is that they tend to be serialised, and even if you do only get the books as opposed to the individual comics, you can still get a little lost.

So, as you can tell from the title, this is one of the Guardians of the Galaxy series, though we only have Groot, Rocket Raccoon, and Drax in this story (I'm not really all that sure what happened to Star Lord and Gamora, but I suspect they are taking it easy after a rather hectic adventure the week, or month, before). Anyway, they stumble upon this massive spaceship and decide to go on board and investigate only to encounter the Guardians of the Galaxy (one of them carrying Captain America's iconic shield), and after a brief battle decide to team up and, well, encounter The Guardians of the Galaxy. It turns out that the teams that they have met have come from the past, and the future, and the ship that they happen to be on has gates into these various time streams (and I have also learnt that the original Guardians are actually the team from the year 3000).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, which doesn't take all that much effort because many of these stories tend to run along a similar plotline anyway, the Guardians encounter a big bad guy that is trying to take over the universe – or all of reality as the case may be because his massive spaceship happens to sit outside of the time stream – and the Guardians of the Galaxy, after getting locked up in his prison and Rocket Raccoon having the unfortunate experience of having some other guy placed into his body, escape, beat the bad guy, say farewell to everybody, and go on their merry ways. Yep, basically your typical Hollywood plot with no real twists, and a bunch of superheroes being, well, a bunch of superheroes. Okay, we also have a bunch of space fighters flying around doing what space fighters tend to do, but that is it.

So, I guess the question comes down to why I gave this comic book the rating I did (I was going to say seven, until I realised that Goodreads, which is the other site I post these reviews on, only lets you rate out of five, and you can't do half ratings either, which is something Booklikes allows you to do), and I have to admit that I don't really know. Okay, there are people out there that have some really sophisticated ways of actually determining what rating they are going to give a book, and I suspect that they might even go as far as creating some proprietary algorithm to assist them, and then you have me – I basically pick a random number (usually between one and ten namely because a rating out of five doesn't give me the flexibility of being able to say whether a book is any good or not) and leave it at that. Okay, if I enjoyed the book I am hardly going to give it a one, and if I hated the book I am hardly going to give it a ten (or a five as the case may be), but as for this story, well, it was entertaining, and falls into the science-fiction genre, oh and also had pretty pictures and a psychotic raccoon, so I guess I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't be looking for some deep, post-modernist meaning, in the text.

Oh, one other thing, it would be interesting reading this one in German because the person who takes over Rocket Raccoon's body has a German accent and I would love to see how the Germans do a character with a German accent when the entire comic is in German. I make mention of that because when I was in Germany I bought an edition of Guardians of the Galaxy that was in German, if only to practice my German, and then promptly gave it to a friend because I don't like marvel superhero comics cluttering up my house (though I believe he does speak a bit of German).