Guardians of the Galaxy, Day 5: What to Read

DAY 5: WHAT TO READ

Well, if you’re still reading these entries on my fifth day of obsessive fangirling, you’re probably serious about digging into the world of Guardians of the Galaxy. So here you go—your dubious reward. The reading list. And if you’re in a big hurry to start reading, scroll down to the bottom—there’s two books that are both great starting points. If you don’t read any other GotG titles, read these.

One quick thing
This list is by no means complete. I haven’t read all of Cosmic Marvel, or even all the storylines that have come out since the mid-2000s, when things really started kicking into high gear. This list is based on my own collection and the bits I think you’ll find most helpful as you investigate this new-to-you corner of comicdom. These are the books I would lend to my friends—in fact, in many cases they’re the books I have lent to my friends. They’re good books.

But they’re not self-contained. Cosmic Marvel is big, it’s complicated, and its branches are heavily intertwined. Major storylines move from one comic-book title to another, and one book will often reference events in another book as if everyone in the story has heard of them. (Of course, that’s because those events tend to be big things—such as the destruction of a populated planet—that you’d expect people in the story to have heard about.) There’s some stuff you’re just not going to get unless you read every single issue of every single title, and unless you’re way more of a completist than I am, it’s not worth your time to do that. So expect to do a little Googling, and expect to leave a few questions unanswered. The stories are still good, and the books I’ll list are still ripping good yarns, but you will need to make your peace with incompletion here.

Still with me? On we go!

Early stuff
If you want to read the oldest Guardians of the Galaxy stories, be prepared to do a lot of digging. I’ve been collecting Star-Lord adventures since I was 13 years old, and not only do I not have them all, I don’t even have a complete list of them. The same goes for Rocket Raccoon, Drax, Groot, Gamora—everybody’s history is all over the place. But here are two good starting points, recently published, that will help to catch you up on two of the most popular Guardians.

None of the stories in here involve this outfit.
Thank God.

1. Star-Lord: Worlds on the Brink. This was a big fat comic book—cover price $4.99—that came out a few months ago, reprinting classic Star-Lord adventures. It includes the best version of his origin story I’ve ever seen (okay, it was the one I grew up on) and a couple of the better stories from the classic run. There was even a story I’d never seen before from the 1980s. All in all, it’s well worth your five bucks if you want to see Peter and Ship soaring around the cosmos before everything went wrong.

2. Rocket Raccoon: Tales from Half-World. Another reprint issue, also $4.99, this one reprints some of the better Rocket stories from before he joined the Guardians. At least, I think they’re the better stories. I didn’t actually read anything with Rocket Raccoon in it before GotG came along, so I wouldn’t know. They’re definitely good stories, though, if a bit weird. But come on, it’s a gun-toting space raccoon. You were expecting maybe a comedy of manners?

DnA kick off
If you’re going to dig into the stories that inspired the movie, learn the acronym DnA and the two names behind it: Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. The two were a writing team for a number of years, though they’ve recently broken up, and their names appear together on most of the Cosmic Marvel titles that reinvigorated that whole universe and gave rise to the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Here are the titles that will give you the best insight into how the Guardians formed.

1. Annihilation: Book Three. Yes, I’m starting with Book Three. I’ve read some of the earlier stuff. It’s nice, but if you want to know where Star-Lord becomes a player—and where his relationships with Richie and other characters lead to the formation of the Guardians—this is it. This volume covers the climax of the Annihilation War (remember, the one with the bugs?) and there’s a whole lot of shooting, blowing up, major characters dying, emotional trauma, and space cussing. Here’s a hint—“das’t” and “flark” mean about what you think they would …

2. Annihilation: Conquest: Book One. This book collects two limited series, one of which (Annihilation: Conquest: Star-Lord) shows the formation of Star-Lord’s first team, his spacefaring Dirty Dozen homage. It also marks the first meeting between Rocket and Groot, and one of the few comics where Groot says something other than “I am Groot.” In fact, he’s quite chatty; apparently the writers decided only later that he shouldn’t be able to say things like, “This will be a glorious death, as befits one of my stature.”

The main event: The Guardians of the Galaxy title
Obviously, if you want to know about the Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s a good idea to pick up one of the Guardians of the Galaxy collections.

1. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Legacy. This collection covers the formation of the team, including the discovery of Major Victory, the beginnings of their conflict with the Universal Church of Truth, and the revelation of a secret that very nearly causes the team to disintegrate. In fact, a bunch of people quit and Star-Lord goes missing. I won’t spoil the secret, though. It’s way too much fun.

Yes, it's the same cover layout.
But look! It's a gun-toting raccoon!

2. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2: War of Kings, Book 1. This book picks up where the previous one left off, with the team in tatters and Star-Lord AWOL. Most of the volume is about Star-Lord getting involved in an extradimensional prison break (hello, Jack Flag!) and Drax and Phyla going on a quest to bring Moondragon back from the dead. Rocket is awesome in this book.

3. Volumes 3 and 4: War of Kings, Book 2 and Realm of Kings. Honestly, I haven’t bothered to pick these two up yet in trade form, though I bought the original comics. There’s more fun space stuff. People die. People come back to life. Rocket is hilarious. Peter is harried. Explosions happen. Time travel and magic continue to screw everything up. If you liked Volumes 1 and 2, then 3 and 4 will be your cup of tea.

Oh, and about the “War of Kings” / “Realm of Kings” thing you’re seeing in those titles … GotG often tied in heavily to whatever bigger storyline was going on in Cosmic Marvel. There are collections of the main War of Kings storyline and the like, but I didn’t buy those series and enjoyed my comics just fine. Seek them out if you’re interested; otherwise, don’t bother.

4. The Thanos Imperative. This is worth your time, I can pretty much guarantee. Besides being the storyline that ended the main Guardians of the Galaxy title (well, until it was restarted), it’s the storyline that exemplifies Cosmic Marvel under Abnett and Lanning better than anything else. There are about twenty different plotlines running at once, the cosmic abstracts get involved, and not one but two universes come crashing down around everyone’s ears … but ultimately, as you know, it all comes down to two guys in a crater, screaming into the face of Death. Epic.

5. The Annihilators and Rocket Raccoon & Groot: The Complete Collection. These two titles came out of Thanos Imperative, and they go in very different directions. Annihilators follows a team of high-powered cosmic superguys, including the Silver Surfer, the Quasar who’s not Phyla, and an alien version of Thor named—I kid you not—Beta Ray Bill. Basically, all the big guns who wouldn’t return Star-Lord’s calls jump into saving the universe now that he’s dead. It’s a fun punch-em-up, with a lot of humor from Cosmo.

Rocket Raccoon & Groot was originally a backup feature in Annihilators, a series about Rocket and Groot roaming the galaxy, starring in a horrible reality TV show, and discovering that Rocket’s origin story isn’t exactly what he thought it was … and just maybe Groot’s isn’t, either. Well worth your dollar if you’re interested in those two characters.

5. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Cosmic Avengers. This is the rebooted GotG title. It’s pretty much about the movie lineup of characters getting into trouble—most notably, trouble that results from a bunch of alien leaders declaring Earth off-limits to extraterrestrial meddling. This, naturally, attracts all the most determined meddlers, and trouble ensues. Subplots include Peter’s escalating war with his royal father and Tony Stark’s little space vacation, which starts out as a lark and ends in tears before bedtime. Not least because he sleeps with Gamora. Doesn’t anybody watch old sci-fi movies anymore? Stay away from the green girls! Long story short, this book is amusing and a good introduction to the current GotG series, but I’m still annoyed that it stars the dumbest version of Peter Quill I’ve ever met. It’s probably closest to the movie, though. Sigh.

If you’re interested in Thanos …
1. Thanos Rising. This series came out last year and purported to be the definitive origin of Thanos, exploring his twisted romance with Death as never before. And … yeah, it did. Thanos is one sick puppy. If you want to know what makes the purple guy tick, Thanos Rising is your book.

Two great books to get you started
You just scrolled down here from the top, didn’t you? Oh, fine. Here you go.

If it was worth using once, it's worth using twice.

1. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1: Legacy. This book is the best guide to the GotG oeuvre, in my humble opinion. You’ve got the big cosmic conflicts, the team infighting, the talking animals … it’s just bonkers and it’s great. If you can handle a story that doesn’t wrap up in one volume, this is your entry point. If you like it, read more. If you don’t, now you know.

2. Avengers Assemble Vol. 1. If you’d prefer a more accessible and self-contained version of GotG, perhaps in more familiar surroundings, check out this collection of the Avengers Assemble comic, which was designed to present self-contained stories featuring the Avengers that everybody saw in the movie. This story is mostly about Thanos messing around with Earth and trying to gain ultimate power. The Avengers fight him off once, and then the Guardians of the Galaxy show up to reveal the bigger plot and drag the whole team off into space for some true Cosmic Marvel insanity. The action and banter are dead-on, and the story’s not too concerned with continuity—which is probably why Star-Lord spends the whole story wearing his pre-Kyln costume and his team flies around in a craft that looks remarkably like Ship. Still and all, it’s a good story and a great introduction to the characters. Oh, and it contains one of the better “I AM GROOT!” moments ever.

Well, that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this entirely-too-long magical mystery tour of Guardians of the Galaxy and my own minor obsession with the title. With luck, you’ve come away with a clearer understanding of how the story works and whether you want to see it on the big screen. If you enjoyed this series, let me know in the comments or on Facebook and I’ll do another on Captain America: The Winter Soldier before that movie comes out. I’m not sure I’ve got five days’ worth of stuff, but I can probably string together a few interesting entries for you.

Thanks for reading, and until next time, if Death ever comes your way and won’t let you pass, make sure you scream right back in his face.

But then, you really shouldn’t trust anything I say. Most of the time I just make stuff up.

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.