Legendary Star-Lord #5 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

This series should ideally be about Peter Quill going around the galaxy righting wrongs and getting into bar fights.  Humphries totally, totally gets that.  After all, this issue involves Peter righting a wrong and getting into a bar fight.

After five issues, Humphries has slowly but surely started to develop this series independent from "Guardians of the Galaxy."  It seems unlikely that Peter is going to have an entirely separate supporting cast from the Guardians, since it would become difficult to explain what happened to them while he was Guardian-ing.  But, Humphries instead has found a way to turn this series into a sort of "Guardians Team-Up."  Sometimes, Peter acts alone, sometimes Drax or Rocket appear to help him with a problem.  So long as these guest appearances stay confined to "occasionally" and don't always involve the entire team, Humphries will be able to tell the story that he wants to tell, independent of Bendis' title.

In a good sign of how well we're progressing to that goal, Humphries is also developing Peter's own set of villains.  We've already met Mr. Knife, and we meet his crew, the Slaughter Squad, in this issue.  Now, I hope, at some point, we get a full on Guardians vs. Squad throw-down.  I want that in part because Humphries does a great job of establishing them as a legitimate threat, for all Peter's bravado that the Guardians could take them.

Moreover, Peter is also a lot sharper than he is in the main title.  Although he's not the snarky wonder that he was under DnA and Gillen, he's not a bumbling idiot, as he proves when he traps one of the Squad members who thought that he was trapping him.  Bendis can veer to Prattian idiot at times, but Humphries seems to be a good counterweight to that.

Through it all, Humphries uses a narrative structure -- of Peter interrupting the Squad member's forged recollection to order more drinks and take a call from Kitty -- that might be borderline clichéd but works if only because of Peter's charm.

In other words, I'm still a happy camper when it comes to this series.

*** (three of five stars)