So, after the conclusion of Ignition, the Cancerverse is invading the 616, lead by a version of Mar-Vell loyal to the Many-Angled Ones. He seeks the Avatar of Death, meaning Thanos, so he can perform a ritual to kill Death in the 616 as well. To that end, he and his "Revengers" are gathering up every "anomaly" person they can find. Like Major Victory, who's from the future, or Namorita who came out of the Fault.
Thanos is, unhappily for everyone involved, with the Guardians of the Galaxy, who infiltrate the Cancerverse to try and figure out how Death was killed there to possibly undo the process. Meanwhile, Nova is trying to halt the invasion, without much success.
That's basically all the plot there is. The Guardians snoop around the Cancerverse, rendered by Sepulveda and Ramos as a muddy, destroyed mess. I don't know why life overtaking everything results in everything falling apart. I guess if you can't die, you don't worry about protecting yourself from the elements or maintain infrastructure. Drax (donning the classic purple cloak look but still carrying alrge firearms) eventually loses it and tries to re-kill Thanos, only to find he can't (as in, Thanos just regenerates from a skeleton) and ends up dead himself. Nova grabs a bunch of heavy hitters for a surgical strike on Mar-Vell's ship. They mostly get their asses kicked. I don't recall Mar-Vell being enough of a force to shatter the Surfer's board, but I guess that's the boost from the Lovecraftian horrors.
There is a nice bit where the Scarlet Witch is revealed to have been a sleeper agent for the Vision and other artificial intelligences, only pretending to serve Mar-Vell all this time (which was nicer than Wanda had been treated in the Marvel Universe at that point in like 10 years.) but it really does feel like a lot of running in place that could have been pared away.
End result, Thanos pretends to switch sides, offering Mar-Vell the chance to kill him so he can be dead again. I thought the idea was he can't die, so this lets him see the ritual and reverse-engineer it to destroy Mar-Vell. Wrong. What it does is, bring Death from the 616 into the Cancerverse, and she just kills Mar-Vell herself. Which trashes the Many-Angled Ones, since he's their connection or something, and will supposedly cause the collapse of that universe from the immense loss of mass. Seems contrary to how I understand current theories on universal expansion, but sure.
Death basically leaves Thanos, having gotten what she needed, and he's insanely pissed and still unkillable. So Nova and Star-Lord stay behind to try and keep the Mad Titan there until the universe collapses. Otherwise he's headed back to the 616 and everybody's fucked. Nova's got the entirety of the Nova Force and Star-Lord has that damaged Cosmic Cube.
I mentioned last week to keep in mind that, during Ignition, Star-Lord announces the Cube is exhausted. No power left. He and Rocket had been running tests together, so they both know this, and they were telling Moondragon, a telepath with less regard for the sanctity of other's minds than your typical Marvel telepath. No indication he was lying, until it just suddenly has enough for two or three more uses. What? How?
The plot elements don't really add up. Most of the casts of the books Abnett and Lanning had been writing up to that point, the ones we'd presumably be most invested in, are useless. The other Guardians don't get to do much but tag along behind Thanos and Star-Lord. The rest of the Nova Corps is barely involved. Now, that could be by design. We'll see next week that Abnett and Lannig did have a sort of plan behind the Guardians' ineffectiveness.
There is a point made, that this war is on an entirely different level from the previous events. The Cosmic Abstracts, the Celestials and Galactus and whatnot, all show up to confront the invasion from the Cancerverse. None of them bothered when Ultron conquered the Kree with the help of the Phalanx (Annihilation: Conquest), or when Kree and Shi'ar went to war (War of Kings). Galactus was dragged into Annihilus' plan by Thanos' scheming, but the moment he gets free and exerts himself, he wipes out like 80% of Annihilus' army in one shot. The point being, all that stuff was ultimately the concerns of little mortals, and didn't matter a whit to the truly big guns.
This? This requires their involvement. Sepulveda mostly shows them floating there, but the Surfer tells us the Abstracts are fighting on levels mortals can't perceive. Taken from that angle, that this ends with Nova and Star-Lord just trying to slow Thanos down long enough for a collapsing universe to hopefully kill him, could almost be seen as a logical end. They've survived a lot of close calls going back to Annihilus, but this is another scale. Against that, all they can do is fight until they can't any longer.
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