Written by Tony Bedard; Art by Kalman Andrasofszky, Derec Donovan, Joe Prado and Karl Moline; Cover by Kalman Andrasofszky
As told in the solicits, this Annual gives us the origin of Starro the Conqueror. It is broken down in chapters, each one featuring a story relating to the subject character. Two of these chapters tell the origins of the top-two members of his Vanguard, Astrild Storm-Daughter and General Smite.
Claude St. Aubin, the monthly title's fill-in artist for Andy Clarke, does the framing artwork and it looks beautiful. In my opinion, these pages should have been featured in the preview instead of Andrasofszky's. It's not horrible, but St. Aubin's work is more smoother and looks closer to Andy Clarke's style (which, in my opinion, is utterly fantastic).
All in all, an excellent issue packed with lots of action and a few surprises. Although it is a stand-alone issue, if you wish to put it in some type of reading sequence with the monthly title, place it before issue 9 since that would loosely connect it to the last page cliffhanger of that issue.
