Guardians of the Galaxy, Day 3: What's NOT in the trailer

DAY 3: STUFF THAT’S NOT IN THE TRAILER
One of my favorite games when I sit down to watch a new comic-book movie is catching all the little references to the larger body of source material. Little things like Bucky picking up Captain America’s shield in The First Avenger, just as his comic-book counterpart was carrying it around in the comics.

This can't possibly be a reference to that, can it?

So here are a few bits of Guardians of the Galaxy lore that might—or might not—show up in the movie. Apologies in advance if any of this turns out to be spoilers.

The original GotG
You know comics—there’s no such thing as an original concept. The GotG we know is actually the second major incarnation of the team. The first Guardians of the Galaxy first appeared in 1969 and popped up sporadically from the 1970s through the 1990s. They were a 31^st-century superhero team fighting a race of alien would-be conquerors known as the Badoon. They played an interesting role in the 2008 GotG series, when they were revealed as one potential future of Star-Lord’s team. They also inadvertently gave the 2008 team their name when Major Victory, a mutant telekinetic who had inherited Captain America’s shield, traveled back in time and joined up with Star-Lord’s gang of misfits. He introduced himself (shortly before passing out) like this:

Hello, my name is Vance, and I will be your mythos for today.

Rocket Raccoon decided he liked the name:

Star-Lord makes his best command decisions based on what will shut Rocket Raccoon up.

And the rest was history. The only member of the original Guardians who’s shown up in the movie so far is Yondu, a blue-skinned archer from Centauri-IV who was sort of a cross between Hawkeye and Tarzan of the Apes. His name shows up as an associate of Peter Quill’s during the lineup scene.

Oh, look, it's a set photo of Yondu. And some dead guy.

The rest of the GotG
What, you thought that was the whole team in that trailer? Please. GotG went through team members like James Bond goes through love interests. Here are some members whom you haven't seen, but who might show up anyway.

Phyla during her Quasar phase.

1. Phyla. A.k.a. Quasar, a.k.a. Captain Marvel, a.k.a. Martyr. Phyla-Vell is a Kree superheroine related to Mar-Vell, the original Captain Marvel (a big-time space hero of the 1970s whose death from cancer in a 1982 graphic novel is considered one of the foundational storylines of modern comics). She’s gone through a lot of different superheroic identities, but she’s always been very powerful, highly idealistic, and a bit unsure what to do with herself. She dated Moondragon for quite a while (see below) and as a result she developed a father-daughter relationship with Drax after Moondragon’s apparent death.

Mantis knows everything and tells the most irritating bits.

2. Mantis. This storyline is … complicated. Short version? Mantis was a half-Vietnamese, half-German martial artist and occasional barmaid who was identified as the Celestial Madonna, the woman destined to mate with a Cotati (alien—don’t ask) and bear a universe-saving messiah. She did that, and then apparently died, and moved through a couple of other comics companies, and then turned green and grew antennae … even I can’t follow this one. But by the time she joined Star-Lord’s team, she was still an accomplished martial artist and also a talented telepath and precognitive. She got her job by telling Star-Lord’s Kree handlers all about the upcoming sabotage mission before she was briefed. Mantis acted as advisor and support staff to the Guardians, occasionally going with them on missions and occasionally messing with people’s brains when Star-Lord asked nicely. In the new series, she’s still advising Peter, though she’s not officially with the team anymore and she emphatically turns down an offer of companionship. Pete, you’ve really got to stay away from the green girls …

Not Karen Gillan.

3. Moondragon. Drax’s daughter from before Thanos killed the rest of their family, Moondragon holds the interesting distinction of being a cosmic superhero with (at least originally) no superhuman abilities. After Thanos orphaned her, Heather Douglas was adopted by Thanos’s dad, who had her trained by a bunch of monks until she basically kicked butt at everything it was possible for a human to kick butt at. They also helped her develop her latent psychic powers, which got her in trouble when she started mind-talking with the sinister Dragon of the Moon. She served with the Avengers, was passed over for the job of Celestial Madonna, switched sides a few times, slept with a whole bunch of superheroes and occasionally their wives, and finally she ended up in a fairly stable, healthy-seeming relationship with Phyla-Vell. Then she died. Then Phyla and Drax brought her back to life. Then it got way too complicated for me to follow. But if the producers of GotG are looking to up their Bald Women in Armor quotient, Moondragon and Nebula are likely to appear in the same shot.

Nickname: "Loverbug". Not embarrassing at all.

4. Bug. Bug is a bug—and he used to be an action figure. Originally created for the Micronauts toy line, Bug was morphed into a comic-book character, an insectoid warrior who really didn’t look like the toy (and thus belonged to Marvel rather than the toy company). He hasn’t got much of an origin story, other than being assigned to Star-Lord’s original Dirty Dozen for sex crimes. (He got a Kree technician pregnant, and the Kree are basically space Nazis—see below—so they didn’t like that.) Bug is good-natured, sarcastic, and a good hand-to-hand fighter who’s always a little slighted at not being one of Star-Lord’s first-choice team members. Somehow he always gets over it in time for the big fight, though.

Jack Flag and his unofficial battle cry.

5. Jack Flag. Jack began life as a Captain America groupie who accidentally got Cap-lite powers from the superhero equivalent of Dr. Jekyll’s serum. He was strictly a C-list character until the United States temporarily passed a law (in the comics) requiring all American superheroes to register with their government. Captain America opposed that law, Jack backed him up, and Jack ended up stuck in an extradimensional prison with a severed spine. (To be fair, Cap had a tough time, too—he got murdered at the end of that storyline.) When the prisoners started a riot, Star-Lord showed up to try to negotiate a cease-fire, leading to one of my favorite panels ever:

I can't read this panel without giggling hysterically. Only Star-Lord gets captured by bad guys who take his pants.

Jack joined the Guardians not long after he found out that, as much as he hated cosmic spacey-wacey stuff, there was alien tech out there that could restore his ability to walk. His major function on the team, besides punching and shooting, was providing an Earthling’s point of view (something Star-Lord hadn’t had in quite a while) and giving Peter somebody to reminisce with about the bad old days on the old home planet.

Nice accessorizing.

6. Major Victory. As mentioned above, the Major was part of the original Guardians and later joined the 2008 team for some time-bending craziness. A time-lost astronaut who bounced from the 20^th century to the 31^st and then back to the 21^st, his major function in most stories was being confused about what year it was, mumbling vague clues about what was going to happen next, and being a pretty unerring moral compass for the team. This is no small feat when your heroes include several mass murderers and a psychotic raccoon. Everybody pretty much liked Major Victory, though nobody quite understood the ideals he stood for—except maybe Star-Lord, who at least knew what the shield meant.

No explanation would be sufficient, ever.

7. Cosmo. Oh, I hope Cosmo makes it into the movie. This is my favorite batshit-crazy space character. Cosmo is a Soviet space dog who got lost in orbit sometime in the 1960s. Somehow that led him to develop psychic powers, the ability to speak (or maybe just send telepathic messages that sound like it), and enough charisma to become chief of security at Knowhere, the end-of-the-universe space station where the Guardians make their home. And he does all this while speaking in a cartoon Russian accent worthy of Boris Badenov. He and Rocket Raccoon do not get along, for obvious reasons, though they seem to have saved each other’s lives enough times now to agree to a truce.

Peter's thoughts need no translation here, I think.

The Kree rock the underwear-outside look.

8. The Kree. The Kree are one of the major alien species that show up in the Marvel Universe. They are a highly regimented, extremely orderly society run along a strict genetic hierarchy. Blue-skinned Kree outrank pink-skinned Kree, and anything Kree outranks anything else in the universe. Basically, the Kree are Nazis in space. Sometimes they’re useful, as when they produce people like Phyla-Vell. Sometimes they’re a pain in the ass—see Ronan the Accuser and Korath the Pursuer from yesterday. Every once in a while they try to conquer Earth. It never works. They will probably show up in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and Peter Quill will definitely mouth off to several of them if they do.

Star-Lord on diplomacy.

They don't always have wings, but they're always like flying monkeys.

9. The Skrulls/Chitauri. Remember the Chitauri from The Avengers? They might be better known as the Skrulls, a group of shape-shifting green aliens with pointy ears, bumpy chins, and a penchant for purple costumes. The name “Chitauri” first appeared in a Marvel comic that needed a cooler-sounding name than “Skrull” for aliens who were basically Skrulls, so a lot of geeks were surprised when the Avengers version of the Chitauri didn’t do any shape-shifting. Whatever. Whether they’re the same species or not, the Skrulls/Chitauri are major players in Cosmic Marvel, not least because of their centuries-long war with the Kree. Amusingly, the Skrulls are a communitarian race, and that and their shape-shifting, along with their origins in comics of the early 1960s, make them a pretty obvious parallel to the Soviets. Yes, they’re space-commies, and they’re at war with space-Nazis. Oh, and there’s a big breakaway contingent that are fundamentalist religious nutbars. Because life wasn’t interesting enough. Watch for Skrulls impersonating any and every important character in the story.

Adam and Adam. Don't trust the smiley one.

10. Adam Warlock. A big player in the Guardians universe, Adam was both a team member and a major adversary. An artificial human created to be perfect (and superpowered, of course), Adam spent most of the 1970s using his “soul gem” and assorted other nifty powers flying around space and alternate universes as a kind of cosmic messiah. (No connection to Mantis, though. Cosmic messiahs just kind of turned up in the seventies.) He’s died and come back to life a bunch of times, and somewhere along the way picked up an evil version of himself, which he can sometimes turn into if you screw up his timeline. This evil version is basically a silver-tinted Adam Warlock called Adam Magus, and he is big, big trouble. In Adam’s run with the Guardians, he started out as their navigator slash mystic advisor slash big gun, and he ended up (SPOILER ALERT) having to sacrifice his “good” future to save his team and the universe. He turned into the Magus, nearly killed all his teammates, and forced Star-Lord to shoot him in the head in what’s arguably the biggest emotional gut punch of the entire series. “Damn it, Adam,” Star-Lord mutters, as he stands alone on a platform, surrounded by the bodies of his teammates. “Look what you made me do.” If Adam shows up, expect to soil your pants, cry, or both.

Beam me up, Scotty ... er, Cosmo.

Any of the big “cosmic” storylines

I covered this on Day 1, for the most part, but feel free to watch for references to any and every storyline in the Cosmic Marvel universe. Invading antimatter critters and/or bugs? That’s Annihilation. Nanotechnology turning people into zombies? Annihilation: Conquest. Shape-shifting aliens causing widespread paranoia? Secret Invasion (which was pretty much what it sounds like). Conflict between the various alien species who are inexplicably ruled by monarchs? War of Kings. H.P. Lovecraft monsters invading from a parallel universe? The Cancerverse storyline, possibly including The Thanos Imperative. And then there are classics like the thousand-and-one fights over the Cosmic Cube (movie buffs know it as the Tesseract), the Infinity Stones (the Tesseract is one, and you saw another at work in Thor: The Dark World), and Galactus (he eats planets; ignore the stupid space-cloud in that stupid Fantastic Four movie).

Skulls. What a surprise.

Thanos
Why does he get his own section? Because he’s pretty much guaranteed to show up, even though he wasn’t in the trailer. We know from the advance materials that Ronan is working for Thanos, we saw his bumpy purple face at the end of The Avengers, and if there’s any villain who consistently ruined the Guardians’ day, it was him.

Thanos is a big purple alien who can’t be killed very easily and who is in love with Death. Yes, the skeleton in the robe. He’s got a thing for her. He would get her flowers, except she doesn’t like flowers, so mostly he gets her mountains of skulls. They have a stormy on-again-off-again relationship, and whenever he’s not dead (i.e. spending time with his lady friend), he really wants to be dead so he can be with her. Except he’s really hard to kill, partly because Death gets tired of him and periodically decides she doesn’t want anything to do with him … so he can’t die. This ticks him off. Anyway, Thanos’s major thing, other than being in love with Death, is wanting to kill every living thing in the universe in order to impress her. To do that, he periodically goes after the Infinity Stones, a group of magic gemstones that control things like psychic power, all known energy, or the fabric of reality itself. They can be conveniently mounted into something called the Infinity Gauntlet—a big golden glove with slots for each of the Stones. If you looked closely, you saw it in Odin’s treasure room in Thor. Obviously, the Infinity Gauntlet is just dandy if you want to kill a universe. Which Thanos does.

Here’s Thanos having a fight with his girlfriend. Sums him up nicely:

You thought YOUR breakup went badly? You didn't have a talking raccoon and a space dog in the peanut gallery.

I guarantee you, Thanos will be showing up in the GotG movie. Watch for a bumpy purple dude who really likes skulls. You heard it here first.

Tomorrow: Why I invented the term “nerdsad” for this movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Day 2: The Trailer

HOW THIS SERIES WILL RUN:

1. DAY 1. Background information that will help make Cosmic Marvel (as it’s sometimes called) make sense. Highlights include Oblivion’s pants.

2. DAY 2. Stuff that’s in the trailer—who all those people are, what you ought to know about them, and what they might be doing in the movie. Highlights include steampunk in space.

3. DAY 3. Stuff that’s not in the trailer—other notable GotG characters and storylines and miscellaneous stuff that might show up in the movie. This post will contain potential spoilers, natch, though I won’t know what is and isn’t a spoiler until the movie comes out. Highlights include a talking dog with a Russian accent.

4. DAY 4. Why I invented the term “nerdsad” for this movie. There’s one thing in the trailer that bugs me … and while it probably won’t bug you like it does me, I’ll try to be entertaining as I whine. Highlights include my secret theory on why the movie might not suck after all.

5. DAY 5. The dreaded bibliography, including capsule descriptions and what to read in order to catch up on the different bits I’ve talked about. Highlights include descriptions like “This is the book where Rocket shoots everything.” [Rocket shooting]

DAY 2: STUFF THAT’S IN THE TRAILER
Today’s blog entry is all about people and things you’ve seen in the trailer, and how they connect to the comic-book GotG. To refresh everyone’s memory, here’s the trailer in question:

Characters
So who are these crazy people, anyway?

1. Peter Quill / Star-Lord. This one will take some explaining, not least because Star-Lord is one of my favorite characters and the reason I started reading GotG in the first place. Plus there are five different versions of him, more or less.

Peter Jason Quill is the son of an alien prince and his human one-night stand. Peter didn’t find out about his dad until a gang of reptilian aliens showed up to murder his mom. Orphaned Peter grew up bitter, antisocial, and determined to get out into space and show those aliens a thing or two. He did manage to make it as an astronaut, despite having a personality like a chainsaw, and he lied and connived his way onto a space station, where he then lied and connived his way into getting selected by the Master of the Sun (God? An alien? We don’t know) to be a new superhero called Star-Lord. Version One of Peter Quill is Asshole Peter. The writer who created Star-Lord was going to write a long, drawn-out space epic transforming Peter into a true hero and cosmic messiah … but then he quit Marvel, and Peter kind of stayed an asshole.

The 1970s rolled along, and Star-Lord starred in a series of pretty decent science-fiction stories. With his element gun (it fires fire, water, earth, and air), his ability to fly and survive in space, and his sentient starship (cleverly named Ship), he zipped around the galaxy saving people from themselves and having a very strange romance with his mode of transportation. Yes, he was in love with Ship … or at least, she was in love with him, and toward the end there it seemed like he was reciprocating. The relationship was good for him; he ended up almost human. Version Two of Peter Quill is Hero Peter. The series trailed off around the mid-eighties.

And then this happened!

Then the 1990s came along, and award-winning science-fiction novelist Timothy Zahn ended up writing a four-issue Star-Lord series (1996-1997) in which Peter has disappeared, Ship is wounded and amnesiac, and she finds herself teaming up with a lonely telepath who’s willing to impersonate a missing superhero for the greater good. That guy’s name is Sinjin Quarrel, and so version three of Peter Quill is Not Peter. The series was well-written and good fun, but there’s been no sign of Ship or Sinjin since 1997. I’m a bit sorry about this, as it was the series that got me into Star-Lord in the first place. Seeing how much Ship missed Peter made me want to meet him as well as her. But you’ll hear more about Ship later in this entry.

Peter in prison, doing his Snake Plissken impression.

Around 2001, Peter reappeared without explanation in the Thanos monthly comic book as a cyborg inmate in the worst prison in the galaxy, The Kyln. While his reason for being there was not immediately revealed, it eventually came out that he had, as Star-Lord, stood up against a big cosmic monster and nearly gotten killed because he was too proud to call for help. Never one to learn from his mistakes, he picked himself up and went after the guy again … and in the ensuing fight, had to destroy a planet with a few thousand sentient life forms on it in order to save several million others. He claims Ship died in the confrontation, though he might be lying or misinformed. In any case, his personal code required that he surrender himself for trial, and he was sentenced to the Kyln for mass murder. He left the Kyln somehow during the Annihilation War, and offered his services as tactical advisor to Richard Rider, a.k.a. Nova. The two became friends as Peter guided Richie through a galactic catastrophe, and Peter redeemed himself enough to help rebuild the galaxy after the war … which resulted in the Phalanx invasion. Whoops.

Much shooting ensued.

But Pete’s nothing if not stubborn, and he eventually takes his strike team from the Phalanx war, who were basically a space version of the Dirty Dozen, and turns them into the Guardians of the Galaxy. Much butt-kicking ensues, some of it due to Peter’s still-prickly personality and the fact that most of the people who meet him either a) don’t recognize him and write him off as a freaky Earthling; b) recognize him and hate him for blowing up a planet; or c) recognize him and try to tell him he made the right decision. Pete hates all of these scenarios. So version four of Peter Quill is Antihero Pete. This period ends with the Thanos Imperative storyline, in which Peter and Richie apparently die to stop Thanos from destroying the universe. GotG was canceled at that point.

Death = costume change, but only for Pete.

Except Peter mysteriously pops back up again, first in the Avengers Assemble comic series and then in a new GotG series that’s still running and has not yet explained how he escaped from the Cancerverse. The closest we’ve gotten is this panel from Avengers Assemble #8:

Would somebody please tell Pete that a pregnant silence is not an answer? Aargh. *fanrage*

The new GotG Peter is pretty similar to Antihero Pete, but a bit dumber. Now written by Brian Michael Bendis rather than Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (the guys responsible for Antihero Pete), Peter spends an inordinate amount of time trying to pick up green women in space bars, and he’s not even bright enough to figure out when his drink’s been spiked. So I tend to think of this version as Idiot Pete.

Also Worst Costume Ever Pete.

Overall, though, you might have noticed that none of these versions of Peter Quill is a petty crook and sex offender (well, maybe Idiot Pete), unlike the guy you see in the trailer. I’ll address that little problem on Thursday.

One more note on Peter Quill—yes, I know his hair changes color. His early appearances were mostly in black and white, so all we know for sure is that his hair wasn’t meant to be black. I’ve seen it both blond and brown, and once even orange. As a general rule, Asshole Pete and Hero Pete were blond, Not Pete had brown hair (because he was Sinjin, remember?), Antihero Pete had brown hair, and Idiot Pete is back to blond again. Just go with it.

2. Gamora. This character is pretty much as she was portrayed in the trailer. Routinely described as “the most dangerous woman in the galaxy” or “the most dangerous woman in the universe”, she’s the ultimate badass. She’s got the usual comic-book enhancements to her strength, speed, and constitution that enable her to pretty much kill anything and, because she’s female, wear practically no clothing if that’s what the artist wants. And she’s green. Most importantly, though, she’s the adopted daughter of Thanos, the purple guy from the end of The Avengers. He found her after her species was wiped out, raised her to use against one of his enemies, and then lost control of her. She bounced around from comic to comic for a few decades as one of her foster father’s most implacable foes. He’s still got a soft spot for her, though; he’s been known to avoid invading and/or destroying planets she’s on. Their relationship is complicated.

Oh, and she goes through male partners even faster than Captain Kirk; she’s most notably linked to Adam Warlock (more on him later) and Nova—Richie. Comics still has quite the double standard where sex is concerned, but Gamora comes closer than most to breaking that particular glass ceiling.

3. Drax the Destroyer. Another guy who seems to be pretty much the same in the movie as in the comics, although he’s got more layers in the comics. Drax began life as a human named Arthur Douglas. He and his family were murdered by Thanos, after which one of Thanos’ enemies put Douglas’s spirit into a new, amped-up body and programmed him to kill his own killer. He used to be able to fly and shoot energy blasts out of his hands, but now he’s just really strong, really tough, and really vicious. He makes a good tank in a typical GotG fight, despite a near-permanent attitude problem and an obsession with killing Thanos (which is an issue on the rare occasions when the Guardians need Thanos to stay alive for five minutes). A couple of years ago, after dying and being resurrected, he reunited with his human daughter, Heather, a telepath who survived Thanos’ attack and joined the Guardians under the name Moondragon. Drax’s daughter, or girls who remind him of her, are his major weakness. If you want Drax to go postal, threaten a little girl.

4. Rocket Raccoon. Oh, where to start? Rocket’s had a bunch of different origin stories, but the one that’s probably current is that he was the chief of security at a planet-wide insane asylum called Halfworld. Rocket left the planet against his will because something in his biology was altered to make him the only “key” that could release a particularly dangerous inmate. To avoid inflicting that inmate on the galaxy, he became a permanent exile. Rocket understandably has some unresolved anger issues—being a little furry alien surrounded by people who keep calling you a “raccoon” will do that to you—and he mostly deals with them by using unreasonably large automatic weapons on anyone foolish enough to tick him off.

It's a coping mechanism.

The other interesting thing to know about Rocket is the reason he was recruited to Peter’s Dirty Dozen in the first place. He’s got a set of instincts that border on precognition; he always knows the right thing to do, or almost always, even if he doesn’t know why. Rocket is a nearly infallible guide to when and how the situation is going to go south. He’s also an understandably lonely guy; his only friends in the world are Groot and Peter, and he’s had his issues with Peter. He might have a case of OCD; he’s been seen compulsively hand-washing objects he’s given, and he keeps the cleanest arsenal any of his teammates have ever seen.

5. Groot. Obviously, Groot is a gigantic walking-and-talking tree. Normally he says exactly one thing—“I am Groot”—though there are a few comics where he’s quite a bit chattier. There are different explanations for why he sticks with one sentence, but the most popular is that his species’ vocal cords stiffen up as they age, so eventually their range of expression is quite limited. People around Groot can usually understand whatever he’s saying, even though it’s just “I am Groot” in the speech balloon. Rocket can always understand Groot, and everyone else’s understanding comes and goes according to the writer’s taste. Groot is big, strong, tough, and unfortunately flammable, so he gets blown up or burned quite a lot. Luckily for him, he can grow back from just a splinter, though it takes a while. So you can expect to see a tiny Groot sitting in a pot at some point in the movie.

The Monarch of Planet X enjoys his sprinkle-baths.

Groot originally appeared as a supervillain, capturing humans for experimentation, but he’s been reinvented several times in the comics. He now claims to be the last of his species and the “Monarch of Planet X,” his homeworld, though some comics have indicated that he’s lying about all of that and he’s actually an escaped sapling—the equivalent of a joyriding teenager claiming to be President of the United States. And as for “I am Groot” meaning lots of different things, that might be a hallucination, too—the character who gave us that explanation of Groot’s speech, and claimed to understand his explanations of complex scientific phenomena, was the unironically named Maximus the Mad. Groot was part of Peter’s original Dirty Dozen and has hung around with the Guardians (whom he apparently calls “Groot and Branches”) ever since.

Richie. Looking more competent than usual.

6. The Nova Corps. These are the guys discussing the prisoners in the trailer. They’re pretty much space cops and Marvel Comics’ answer to DC’s Green Lantern Corps. They get wiped out on a fairly regular basis; at last check, there were only a couple of Novas zipping around the universe, and at one point Richie was the last Nova standing. Novas are strong, fast, durable, and blessed with energy blasts that got Richie nicknamed “the human rocket”. They’re also very rule-oriented, as space cops should be, and don’t take kindly to the Guardians’ chaotic rannygazoo. Expect at least one Nova to get blown up, and possibly another to get pantsed. That’s sort of what they’re for.

Oh, and did you catch that line in the trailer about how the characters were “arrested on Xandar”? Xandar is the home planet of the Nova Corps. That means that either the speaker picked up a group of prisoners who’d been arrested by the Novas and held temporarily on Xandar (which seems like an odd procedure) or the Novas arrested a bunch of loonies who were trying to cause trouble on Xandar itself. Right now it amuses me to imagine Peter and the Guardians trying to break into Nova Prime’s office for some reason. Maybe she took Pete’s coffee.

7. Ronan the Accuser. Blink and you’ll miss him, but he’s the big hooded guy with the hammer holding Drax up by his throat. According to advance materials for the movie, Ronan is the main antagonist of the story, a general working for Thanos who’s after the Guardians because Peter Quill stole a macguffin identified only as an “orb.”

But really, sometimes you just want to choke Drax.

That’s not quite square with Ronan from the comics. The comic-book Ronan was a major straight arrow, a warrior and jurist of his people, the Kree. Basically, he was judge, jury, and executioner all at once, and he used that giant hammer for a lot of his work. He eventually ended up ruling the Kree Empire for a while, and although he didn’t see eye to eye with the Guardians very often, the two parties didn’t usually have a problem with each other unless Ronan was being unusually rigid or Peter was being unusually assholeish. Sounds like movie-Ronan is quite different.

8. Korath the Pursuer. To save you time, he’s the guy who arrests Peter early in the trailer and doesn’t seem to have heard of this particular “legendary outlaw”. Korath was another super-agent of the Kree Empire, and his thing was making cybernetically enhanced super-warriors. No idea what he’s doing arresting a petty thief, or turning him over to the Nova Corps; the Kree tend to stick to their own justice system rather than calling in the Novas.

9. Nebula. Hello, Karen Gillan! Nebula is the bald blue woman with the metal bits on her face. All the filmmakers have said about her so far is that she’s the major female villain and has a “complex relationship” with Gamora. I don’t know what that’s about, because in the comics she was a space pirate, mercenary, and all-around psycho who fought the Avengers and who once claimed to be Thanos’ granddaughter. We’re pretty sure she was lying about that, though. Oh, and she and Ronan beat the stuffing out of each other during the Annihilation War. Ronan won.

10. The Collector. Here’s an oldie but a goodie. By pure coincidence, the Collector was one of the first supervillains I encountered in one of the first comics I ever read, so I remember him quite well. You last saw him in the credits scene from Thor: The Dark World—he was the spacefaring Liberace guy played by Benicio del Toro. He’s one of the Elders of the Universe—one of the most powerful beings in Cosmic Marvel, though not quite up there with Oblivion and his pals. The last of his species, the Collector is just what his name suggests—an obsessive collector of anything rare or valuable. Naturally, he’s tried to collect Earth superheroes a few times, partly because he’s sometimes focused on preserving life forms, especially unique ones, in order to protect them from Thanos. Imagine the ultimate fanboy, obsessed with having one of everything, mint in the box. Now give him cosmic power, near immortality, and the ability to see the future (sometimes). Scary? Oh, yes. But he still dresses like a disco.

Worlds
There are a few planets of note that show up in the trailer—Xandar, of course, is mentioned by name, and the prison scenes match up well with comic-book depictions of The Kyln. The presence of two important Kree characters (Ronan and Korath) suggest that the Kree homeworld, Hala, may be important at some point, so look for a shiny, futuristic, obsessively master-planned city-planet with a lot of spires and people with blue skin. The presence of Rocket and Groot could pull in Halfworld or Planet X, though those are less likely. And Thanos, a major villain and a common threat among many of the characters who appear in the trailer, has been known to hang out on Titan, a moon of Saturn.

Technology
I could be here all day talking about the tech that shows up in that trailer, but there are only a couple of pieces that interest me. The first is the scene that shows a masked and helmeted humanoid stomping toward the camera, carrying two guns. Not long afterward, you see his back as he faces a door. That figure looks a lot like the version of Star-Lord that was running around with the Guardians from 2008 to about 2011, right down to the two guns. Those guns were not his trademark element gun from his Hero Peter phase—they were a pair of pretty ordinary space-age blasters that had a few different ammunition settings, most notably “knock people out” and “melt your face off”. So we might have Peter’s adjustable guns showing up here.

Let's just look at those again, shall we?

The piece of tech that interests me most, however, is this ship:

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's ... a cookie?

See that ship? See the gull-wing design, the zipping around, the dodging? See the round, glowing port on the front? It’s even on the poster. Does that ship remind you of anybody?

No?

Look behind his right shoulder.

That’s right—it looks like there’s a version of Ship, capital S, in this movie. Advance materials for the film say it’s Star-Lord’s ship, and it’s called the Milano. Why Peter would name his ship after a) an Italian city, b) an actress, or c) a cookie is beyond me (though I’m betting on the cookie). There’s no word on what, if anything, Milano does, but if she’s anything like Ship, she might have the ability to change her shape at will, send out versatile remote-controlled drones called “widgets”, take on humanoid form, and/or develop a romantic relationship with her pilot. Not too creepy or anything.

Costumes
Obviously, there are a billion and one crazy costumes on display in this trailer. But here are the bits that stand out to this particular GotG nerd:

1. Hmm, that’s a grittier-looking version of the Nova uniform.

2. Gamora is wearing clothes. Hooray!

3. Drax still has no shirt. Ho-hum.

4. Helmet and Mask Boy (who I’m guessing is Pete, based on the concept art where the helmet and mask go with the old Star-Lord insignia on his chest) looks a lot like the steampunk-inspired GotG uniform of 2008. While it wasn’t my favorite space-hero uniform ever, I did like the fact that the team uniforms actually looked like uniforms, and that Pete kept his face covered a lot. This aligned nicely with his desire to avoid awkward conversations with people who recognized him and a sort of passive-aggressive desire to get back at the people who took out his cybernetic implants. Because this is what they said about it at the time:

Before and after. HA HA, BLUE ALIEN GUYS. I PUT METAL BACK ON MY FACE ANYWAY.
This is why you should never try to dictate fashion to Peter Quill. Much as you'd like to try.

Tomorrow: A bunch of stuff that’s not in the trailer, but might be showing up anyway.