I've been thinking about Abnett and Lanning's Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy work, and I keep thinking of all the stories that were hinted at but never came up. I don't know whether they decided not to pursue them, or if the roughly annual cosmic events kept changing things too rapidly, or if the books were canceled too soon.
In Nova, we never did find out what happened to Ko-Rel's son, who she'd been separated from since sometime in Annihilation*. Considering how guilty Richard felt about her death, I was always surprised he never tried to hunt down the kid. Heck, ask Ronan to look into it, he owes Rich plenty, that would be the least he could do.
There was the surprise appearance of Garthan Saal (who had previously held all the Nova Force, gone CrazyEvil, and supposedly died) during War of Kings. He appeared before Malik tarcel, who was briefly Nova Prime after Rich was booted, but got beat down and imprisoned by Gladiator. Considering Saal's history of conflict with Rich back during Rider's New Warriors' days, that seemed ominous, but nothing ever came of it. The book brought Monark Starslayer in, and then the Sphinx, and then it was canceled.
I don't even know what happened to Tarcel. Hopefully he wasn't on one of those Shi'ar ships that was obliterated by the T-Bomb going off, but he's another character lost in the cracks.
Over in Guardians of the Galaxy, there was the brief emergence of the Badoon in the months before War of Kings started. They're apparently regarded as a second-rate power, but there were up to enough mischief what was left of the Guardians stepped in. The Badoon had been a major foe for the earlier versions of the Guardians of the Galaxy (the ones set in the future), so there was the sense something might be building there. Especially considering the Kree/Inhuman alliance was still working out the kinks, the Skrulls were basically exterminated, and the territories Annihilus' forces held were pretty torn up from the Phalanx. The Badoon had been largely unscathed, so perhaps it was their time. Again, never came up again.
The one that really surprised me was when Starhawk told Jack Flag he was fated to die saving existence, when half the team was bouncing from reality to reality. It ended up Star-Lord and Nova (probably) died saving the universe by preventing an enraged Thanos from getting back there. Jack could still end up making the ultimate sacrifice (maybe he'll show up in Heroes for Hire), but it seems that the timeline shifted enough with Thanos' reemergence it'll never come to pass.
I really do wonder what the reasons were for not pursuing those story arcs. If nothing else, I'd get a better idea of the creative process, which I'm idly curious about.
* Then she died during Conquest, which I still think was a major misstep by Lanning and Abnett. They did sort of bring her back, since her personality is the one the Worldmind assumed after its old one was too corrupted by Ego, but it's not really the same thing. She's never shown any interest in hunting him down since then, which kind of suggests the Worldmind adopts only parts of the base's personality, and ignores things which would interfere with its work.
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