Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and seventy-seventh week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.
Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends.
NOTE: I noticed that the the CSBG Twitter page was nearing 10,000 followers. If we hit 10,050 followers on the the CSBG Twitter page then I'll do a BONUS edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed during the week that we hit 10,050. So three more legends! Sounds like a great deal, right?
COMIC LEGEND:
Gamora's betrayal of Thanos that led to her death ended up not actually getting printed!
STATUS:
True
As fans of the Guardians of the Galaxy films (and now Avengers: Infinity War) know, Gamora, the adopted daughter of Thanos, is one of the coolest comic book characters around.
She showed up in Strange Tales #180 (back when Warlock's stories were in that series) to befriend Pip the Troll (Adam Warlock's only buddy) and to then help Warlock with his fight against the Magus and the Universal Church of Truth, but she quickly notes that she could just as easily kill Warlock if that's how things go...
The next issue, Pip discovers just who this interesting woman is, when he learns that she is the deadliest woman in the whole galaxy!
Okay, so she teams up with Pip and Warlock, but then story continues into the pages of Warlock #9 (Starlin picked up the numbering from the previous Warlock series, which had been canceled a few years earlier), where we discover that she is working for a secretive master...
After she and Warlock fail to kill the Magus, her secret master steps in and reveals himself and, sure enough, it's Thanos!!
Thanos teams up with Warlock to take out their mutual enemy, the Magus, which occurs in Warlock #11, at which point Thanos and Gamora go back to their own stuff...
They pop back up in Warlock #15, where Thanos clearly has a secret plan in the works for the future that he does not want Gamora knowing about, so he sends her on a mission to befriend Warlock again. This was just to get her out of the picture while his plans were furthered...
However, before she could reach Adam Warlock, she is intercepted by Drax the Destroyer, the being whose whole existence in life is to destroy Thanos...
The problem, then, is that Warlock was then canceled with this issue.
A couple of years passed and Starlin was lured back to Marvel to wrap the story of Warlock and Thanos up and in the first pages of Avengers Annual #7, we see that Gamora is dead!!
He absorbs her soul into his soul gem.
Later, he explains to the Avengers how Gamora turned on Thanos and he killed her for it...
In the end of the issue, Warlock dies, as well, but he ends up in soul gem along with Gamora and Pip (who Thanos also killed in that issue and who Warlock also absorbed into his soul gem)...
As you might imagine, that's a whole big gap there. She went from being attacked by Drax while still loyal to Thanos to being MURDERED by Thanos in a flashback in Avengers Annual #7 with nothing in between!
As it turned out, this was because Jim Starlin had started writing an issue of Warlock before the book was canceled that would have addressed this. He told my buddy, Zack Smith, about it at Newsarama...
"That was supposed to be Warlock #16, which never happened – I had a few pages penciled, but I’ve got no idea where they are. They were loose pencils, and then things fell apart with Marvel."
Heck, maybe someone else can do a story now to fill in the gap of how the Drax/Gamora thing was resolved and how Gamora came to betray Thanos!
Thanks to Zack Smith and Jim Starlin for the information!
Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed - Was Animaniacs originally going to star three duck brothers?
Check back later tonight for Part 3 of this week's legends, which will probably be Infinity War related still! Feel free to write in with suggestions for future legends to either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com!