Issue(s): Warlock and the Infinity Watch #9
Cover Date: Oct 92
Title: "Old wounds"
Credits:
Jim Starlin - Writer
Angel Medina - Penciler
Bob Almond - Inker
John Lewandowski - Assistant Editor
Craig Anderson - Editor

Review/plot:
This issue shows Gamora's quest inside Eternity, to bring him out of the catatonic state that he's been in since the beginning of Infinity War. She finds Eternity's "core essence" trapped by mystic bands. Galactus says that Eternity would have inevitably escaped on his own, but the Infinity War crisis requires a more immediate resolution. So Gamora destroys the bands.

A surprise is that Infinity was wrapped up with Eternity. It's not a surprise to Galactus, who says that they are "different sides of the same coin".

Gamora is unhappy about being "used" throughout this issue, and we learn the reason for that in parallel to the rescuing of Eternity thanks to a flashback. It takes place while Gamora was a still a girl being raised by Thanos.

They stopped at a planet and Thanos left, telling Gamora to wait at the ship. But she didn't, and wound up in a seedy part of town, where she was attacked by thugs, suffering "abuses never imagined".

Thanos found her...

...and brought her back to his ship (Sanctuary II, already) and rebuilt her body.

Then Gamora made a vow to never let anyone "use or abuse" her. So after performing the task for Galactus, she swears vengeance on him.

The main quest could only merit a full issue if Gamora got into pointless fights with antibodies inside Eternity or something like that, so i'm glad that Starlin used the issue to give us some background on Gamora. I'm not sure if we needed yet another woman with trauma and abuse in her past as motivation, though (and it's not like Gamora's people hadn't already been wiped out, which seems traumatic enough). I also think the connection between what happened to Gamora in the flashback and what Galactus uses her for is pretty flimsy. So overall i'm a little disappointed by this. But Starlin and Medina depict the scenes nicely, and i find the idea of Thanos raising Gamora to be inherently interesting and i'm glad to see more of that.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: This takes place during Infinity War #5 (a footnote says between #4 & 5 but it's really an expansion of a scene from #5). Gamora's actions free the Necromancer, so this takes place before Doctor Strange #46-47.

References: N/A

Crossover: Infinity War

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

" So after performing the task for Galactus, she swears vengeance on him"
Yea, good luck with that Gamora.;)

I thought "No more tears. I rerouted those ducts." was a great bit. Perfectly rational, perfectly missing the point and perfectly horrible.

Agreed that the connection between Galactus using Gamora to save the universe from the Magus (isn't that what she was trying to do already?) and the thugs abusing young Gamora was ridiculous. That's like saying that cutting off a man's leg to save his life and cutting off a man's leg out of sheer sadism are morally equivalent.

Reexamining Starlin's output of this time as I now do, with the belief that he was mostly working out his parental/authority issues, I do not think we are supposed to focus on whether those as equivalent. Instead, the point is that we can't expect Gamora (or anyone) to accept the pressure. Above all, we should not expect her to accept that pressure in silence.

Far as I know, this is also the first time that Infinity is presented as "the other side of the coin" that is Eternity, a point made explicit by the two entities in Infinity War #6.

At the time I wondered what that meant. Now I wonder if it wasn't meant to tell Marvel and Gruenwald that he would not give up control of the cosmic corner of the MU for Gru. Starlin sure did not feature Infinity as anything more than an extension/aspect/lover of Eternity, even as he also seemed to make a point of ignoring her link to Quasar. We learn in Quasar #53 that Gruenwald has not entirely forgotten the title of "Avatar of Infinity" that was given to Quaze in #25, but other than that and cameos in #37 he, too, did not really use Infinity nor Eternity anymore.

As fnord mentions in his review of Infinity War #6, though, Gruenwald went out of his way not to step on Starlin's toes with his Infinity, trying to clarify that no, she didn't have anything to do with Starlin's Infinity stuff. It would seem odd for Starlin to bring in Gruenwald's Infinity, and thus legitimize her, just to subordinate her to Eternity, after Gruenwald already backed away from any idea of horning in on Starlin's turf. Unless the message is that Quasar shouldn't be doing cosmic storylines at all, but if Quasar's hanging around Earth there's no reason for him not to participate in the Infinity Sagas, so presumably Starlin would prefer Quasar was doing something space-bound...

Starlin did not acknowledge Quasar's costume change nor Eon's death and the existence of Epoch in Infinity Gauntlet. I think that is fairly good indication that he wasn't going out of his way to accomodate for Quasar plotlines.

Of course, that does not mean that he is wrong.

@Luis: I think that was just a case of the changes happening too close to production time to accommodate. For example, Eric Masterson is very clearly a last-minute addition to the first three issues of INFINITY GAUNTLET; some of his text is obviously altered, and the cover of issue #3 originally featured Thor before being tweaked to have Eric-Thor instead.

I think Starlin using Infinity definitely helped the character stick beyond Quasar. Compare and contrast to Oblivion.