Marvel Preview (1975 series) #4

It is February 4, 1962, in the rural western United States, and the planets align in a rare conjunction as a woman named Meredith Quill gives birth to a son under extraordinary circumstances. Her husband Jake, convinced the child is not his due to the boy's unusual appearance, abandons the newborn in the cold night air before suffering a fatal heart attack, leaving mother and infant alone. Meredith names the boy Peter Jason Quill and raises him in near isolation, her health slowly deteriorating while rumors swirl through the small town around them. 

Peter grows up fascinated by the stars, inspired by Star Trek reruns and the Apollo moon landing, until the spring of 1971 when he discovers a strange charred circle in a valley near his home. His mother dismisses the story of spacemen, but Peter never forgets. In August 1973, a spacecraft lands near their home, and the aliens kill Meredith when they spot the two of them together. Eleven-year-old Peter watches his mother die, tells the truth to Sheriff Barnes, and is disbelieved and sent to an orphanage. He swears vengeance on the spacemen who murdered her. 

By November 1981, Peter is a NASA trainee at Houston, technically the most gifted astronaut anyone has seen, but emotionally cold and impossible to work with. His one companion is an owl named Al. Rejected from the Mars mission roster due to his personality, Peter snaps, assaults a superior officer, and is demoted to a posting on Earth orbital station Eve. From the station he finally feels at peace among the stars, until a mysterious being transmits a vision during a lunar eclipse, announcing that one person from the station will be chosen to become the Starlord. Peter volunteers but is passed over, and in a desperate act of insubordination he steals a scout ship and launches himself toward the pickup point. Guards fire on him, but he vanishes into space and finds himself transported to a strange alien city, where a powerful cosmic figure informs him that he was always the intended choice, grants him a helmet, a universal energy weapon, and the ability to fly, and sends him back to exact his vengeance on the aliens who killed his mother.

The Sword in the Star! Stave 1: Alas, the Seeds of Man!

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

On the dying world of Ithacon, a great battle is being lost against the invading Haamin, a race of conquerors whose black ships have devastated the planet from the sky. The aging king of Ithacon lies mortally wounded on a hilltop battlefield, his internal organs destroyed by a Haamin warhead, watching the last of his warriors fall around him. At his side is his son, a young warrior prince known as Wayfinder, fierce and proud and trained from birth for combat. Also present is Delphos, an ancient wizard of uncertain age who speaks in a jarring, anachronistic street slang that contrasts sharply with the medieval-flavored world around him. The king reveals to Wayfinder, through Delphos, a prophecy recorded in the holy star-annals at the time of his birth — that Wayfinder is the sixteenth in the royal line of the House of Ithacon, that the line was fated to end at number fifteen with his father, and that Wayfinder's destiny lies not on this world but out among the stars. 

The king commands his son to leave the field of death accompanied only by Delphos, who will guide him, and Wayfinder is furious at being denied the right to die in battle defending his home. He reluctantly obeys, cursing the prophecy, as his father dies and the last warriors of Ithacon are annihilated by the Haamin fleet. Delphos leads the grieving and rage-filled Wayfinder away from the carnage into a hidden underground sanctuary, a secret base of ancient and incomprehensible technology that the wizard has maintained for an extraordinary length of time. There Delphos reveals that he is roughly ten thousand years old, kept alive by a lost science, and that he was a friend and mentor to Wayfinder's father before him. 

Using a device called the Teacher, which delivers compressed knowledge directly into the brain through electrodes, Delphos shows Wayfinder a sweeping vision of human history — how mankind spread from Earth across the stars, how civilizations rose and collapsed, how fear of difference drove human worlds into isolation and barbarism, and how that long dark age ultimately produced the Haamin, a branch of humanity so altered by evolution and technology as to be almost unrecognizable, now returning from beyond the galactic fringe to conquer the known worlds. 

Delphos tells Wayfinder that his father had pinned all hope on a legend — a weapon of staggering power hidden by scientists just before the Haamin came, a weapon capable of restoring humanity's fortunes, known only as the Sword in the Star. Before Delphos can explain further, Haamin sensors locate the hidden cavern and the two are forced to flee. They reach a hidden ship called the Star-Seed, a solar-sail vessel of ancient design guided by a computer navigator named Alkinoos who has something resembling feelings. Wayfinder fights off pursuing Haamin soldiers on the deck as the ship launches, and once clear of the planet's atmosphere Delphos, badly wounded in the escape, gives Alkinoos the coordinates for their quest and urges Wayfinder to find the Sword — but also to think carefully before using it when he does. The story ends with the wounded Delphos fading and the young prince alone among the stars, bound for an unknown destination, carrying nothing but a prophecy, a dying guide, and the rage of a man who has lost everything.