"The End" Week: Guardians 3000 #8!

For a couple years there, Marvel seemed to be flooding the racks with series, most of which lasted four or five issues, tops. Were they just limited series that weren't marketed as such? Would they have continued if the sales numbers had been there? I don't know if that's any way to run a railroad, since a creative team might not hang around waiting to hear if they should work on more issues or not. So, I wonder if this was intended to go on, or if it was written with this end in mind: from 2015, Guardians 3000 #8, "World Enough and Time" Written by Dan Abnett, art by Nico Leon, color art by Edgar Delgado and Antonio Fabela. Cover by Gerardo Sandoval and Edgar Delgado. (Just uploaded that to the GCD! Hopefully it doesn't have my big ol' thumbprint on it.)

With the reality of the 31st century collapsing, the future Guardians of the Galaxy have travelled back to 2015, and worked with the present Guardians team on the problem. Time was collapsing, with the problem centered on an unassuming home in Forest Hills, NY; and this issue, Yondu and young Geena Drake enter the home...of Michael Korvac. Geena was a new addition, a refugee with the "ability to sense time structure," and she was named after the team's original creators, Arnold Drake and Gene Colan. (Her middle name's probably Roy, since somehow Roy Thomas also has creator credit!) While both Guardians teams and the Avengers were stuck outside fighting the "A-Sentience" robots (possibly related to the Stark, from early on in the 90's series!) Korvac explains how he's creating a new order, even if it looks like he's destroying realities. He describes Geena as a singular point, that there was only one of her in the multiverse, which makes her a stable reference point...and right about there, Yondu puts an arrow in Korvac's head.

This stops the fight outside, just before Rocket hacked the A-Sentience! The present Guardians and the Avengers disappear, and time continues glitching, as the future Guardians keep changing looks. The damaged Korvac explains, this wasn't his doing, but something else, something from outside. Geena implores him, to do what he had planned, to save some reality; but that just throws her through multiple changes, including a quick stop in Avengers #177! Finally, she finds herself, with the five original Guardians, in their earliest looks; and Starhawk tells her Korvac had failed to stop the incursion, but the reality failure has been localized to...the entire multiverse. Still, maybe if Geena holds on...as everything fades to black, she screams, what did that mean? Secret Wars #1, that's what! Which was kind of a hard stop to a number of series.

I'm not sure the classic Guardians have appeared since, although it's been almost 10 years, so they could have. Korvac's appeared since, after all.