4 out of 5

I do appreciate the “Saga” books.  Massive crossovers are read in full only by the most fervent readers, so having something that boils down all of the crossovers into one issue is nice not only to catch up on what you might have missed, but, as a reader who doesn’t really are but might care (like, if the story sounds good I’ll pick it up), these one-issue summaries are a good way to get a taste of it without trying to sift through an overlong wiki description.  Plus: pictures yaaayy.

Unfortunately, over the years, as Marvel has pretty much turned into mega-crossover after mega-crossover (DC too – these are no longer once-a-year events, for fuck’s sake.  It’s like, after ’52,’ everyone just started doing this shit forever.  Can we just have books unaffected by anything but whatever that title’s writer/editor deems appropriate?), the mega-crossovers have lost their effect in terms of being anything other than silly excuses to slap a similar looking frame on every comic on the rack.  War of Kings had the sorta nerdy boon of being a total science fiction push, coming from the Starlin era of space and Thanos storylines, and Hoskins keeps this summary very focused on the core elements.  It really does feel like the cosmic, space soap-opera it is/was instead of some (completely) cash-grabbing title crossover nonsense.  Sorry I can’t rate it higher than that, Mike, as I bet this stuff is actually harder to write than a book of your own (you try boiling entire storylines down to one sentence that isn’t 100% glib), but it’s still just “and then this happened!”, and jumping between various titles it can’t help but feel at least a little silly.

This lil’ freebie does exactly what it should – if I cared about heroes and space, you could hand me this and I’d be interested to pick up some of the books from the full series.