Considering A Thread From Nova That May Have Been Dropped

Last year, Garthan Saal showed up briefly in Nova #26. Garthan Sall was the last person before Richard Rider to house all of the Nova Force, and it drove him mad, since he didn't have the Worldmind along to help him. Saal was talking to Malik Tarcel, who had taken over for Richard as Nova Prime, only to be roundly thumped by Gladiator in the early stages of War of Kings.

Since then, Saal's made nary an appearance. Today, I was thinking about that and a couple of other threads Abnett and Lanning have started in the cosmic books that haven't paid off as yet. I was thinking perhaps these will be more of those storylines we never see any resolution of. You know how that goes, the book's direction gets hijacked by bigger events, it's canceled, the writers leaves, the writer decides to go a different way. It happens.

Then it occurred to me, what if Garthan Saal is from the universe on the other side of the Fault? The Fault itself didn't exist yet, but there were other tears in space-time before then. The Guardians of the Galaxy had been dealing with some of them in the first arc of their title. Once the war started, there were even more, caused by Vulcan and his reckless use of Nega-Bombs. At the same time this story was going in Nova, Adam Warlock had been sealing up just such a hole in Guardians of the Galaxy. That was a large rupture, and Warlock handled it before anything emerged. However, with possibly multiple large rips in the universe, it's possible a few smaller ones were missed, or were deemed low priority. If so, there's an opportunity for someone to come on through. Garthan Saal perhaps.

We know the other universe has versions of characters common in the Marvel Universe, so there could easily be a Garthan Saal. There's no death in the universe, so no matter how crazy the Nova Force might have driven him, he couldn't have been killed. He could easily still be active in that universe, and could be acting on orders from the higher powers in his universe, or he could have simply seen a tear in space and decided to investigate. Remember, he may be as crazy as the 616's Saal was, so that might seem a perfectly reasonable idea.