Winter Soldier Blogathon, Day 4: My Pet Theories

C'mon. Who did you THINK was going to be at the top of the conspiracy post?

Let's just dive right in, shall we? Here are the interesting, but not terribly well-supported, theories about this movie that appeal to me most.

THE LITTLE THEORIES

Let's start with Mr. Ominous View of the City.

1. Robert Redford is the Red Skull (or someone like him). All right, this isn’t so much my theory as the entire internet’s theory, which makes me a bit suspicious of it, but here it is. Alexander Pierce, played by Robert Redford, is apparently some kind of SHIELD mucketymuck. He seems to be more on the political and administrative end than Nick Fury, who’s more of a hands-on director. And he’s said some fairly innocuous-sounding things with fairly obvious double meanings—things like, “Are you ready for the world to see who you really are?” Now, SHIELD might be a bureaucracy, but the storytelling style in SHIELD stories is pretty anti-bureaucratic. I don’t think anyone’s counted the number of times Nick Fury has had to cut through red tape with a machete (or an M-16 … or a nuclear missile …), but it’s got to be big. So a SHIELD-connected bureaucrat is likely to be an enemy of Nick Fury’s, and even more of an enemy to Captain America.

Pictured: the Handshake of Evil.

So why do I, and the internet, think he’s the Red Skull? First, because the Skull absolutely loves impersonating people in power—senators, Cabinet secretaries, powerful CEOs, you name it. Second, there’s no conclusive evidence that the Skull is actually dead. Oh, sure, we saw him get apparently vaporized by the Tesseract in the first movie, but that means bupkes in comic-land. The Skull has placed his consciousness inside the Cosmic Cube at least three times that I know of, and we know SHIELD has that. Third, the Skull was pulling the Winter Soldier’s strings for quite some time while Bucky was under Lukin’s control and the Skull was living in Lukin’s head. He’d be a good candidate for the job in the movie, too. Nazis make perfect villains.

Look, he's even mean to Nick Fury. Classic Red Skull, right there.

Now, I’m not 100% sold on this. I’m pretty well convinced that Alexander Pierce is somebody big and bad, but I’m not dead certain it’s the Red Skull. It’s too obvious, not least because that’s just about how it went down in the comics. I’m not all that sure the filmmakers are interested in repeating a villain this early in a film series no matter how many times Cap fought the Skull in the funnybooks. But it’s sure fun to think about.

And now, a transition.

2. The nurse across the hall is Agent 13. Pure speculation on my part, I admit, but I’m a lot surer about this. Emily van Camp is listed in the cast of this movie as “Agent 13”, but she hasn’t been seen at all except for that extremely brief shot of her in the UK trailer. Considering the huge importance of Sharon Carter in the Winter Soldier comics storyline, her absence is conspicuous. So I’m calling it now—whatever Sharon’s doing in this movie, it’s supposed to be a surprise reveal. And I’m having some trouble believing that the writers would go to so much trouble to set up some random neighbor of Cap’s in an opening scene if she weren’t important somehow. So my current theory is that Sharon is a plant, keeping an eye on Steve Rogers from across the hall while pretending to be a civilian nurse.

Not pictured: nurse outfit.

Why would SHIELD do this? There are any number of reasons, but the first one that comes to my mind is that, aside from the Avengers, Steve has no friends in the twenty-first century, and doesn’t seem interested in making any. He apparently spends his free time alone in the gym. That kind of isolation is going to cause some real psychological trouble down the line, so I wouldn’t be surprised if SHIELD tried to set a valuable operative up with some “starter friends” to ease him into his new situation. The last thing SHIELD needs is a self-destructive superhero. Besides, why would Captain America have normal neighbors? Wouldn’t they at least need to be vetted by SHIELD just to live in the same building? I’m calling it now—that nurse is no nurse.

Still not buying it, Marvel.

3. The Steve-Natasha romance ain’t happening (but the Bucky-Natasha romance might). Yeah, I know there are set photos of Steve and Natasha making out (like that’s not the world’s oldest way to hide your face from security cameras and/or passersby). And there’s a shot in the UK trailer that shows Natasha sitting on the bed of what appears to be a shared motel room. But while all that’s a pretty good indicator that Steve and Natasha go on the run together in this movie, and it might even lead to the beginnings of a romance between them, I’m calling the ball now—that relationship is going nowhere. For one thing, if my theory about Agent 13 is correct, Natasha’s actively trying to set Steve up with somebody else. For another, I think Natasha’s past with the Winter Soldier is too good a twist for the filmmakers to pass up. I mean, is there a better way to ratchet up the drama than to find out that the guy who’s been trying to kill you all movie is a) your former best friend and b) the former lover of your current whatever-Natasha-is? No. No, there is not.

I can't tell whether Cap is looking at the Widow, the body, or the middle distance. It's quite distracting.

Plus there’s that body-under-the-sheet scene. Natasha’s touching the face like it’s someone who matters to her, and Steve’s right there, so it’s not him. Open speculation is that it’s either Fury or Bucky, and my money’s on the latter. Which brings me to:

Does Maria Hill never change her clothes?

4. Fake death(s). Fury gets visibly bashed up and possibly killed in those videos. Bucky’s always been high on the casualty list. Neither character is actually someone whom the writers would want to throw away, and both characters are known for faking their deaths on multiple occasions in the comics. You heard it here first—that’s a fake body under the sheet. And it might not be the only one in the movie. Didn’t The Avengers mention Life Model Decoys?

*************
And now, the big theories. I apologize in advance if I spoil something for you—I have no advance knowledge of this movie that the rest of the internet doesn’t have, so if I end up calling it right, just assume I’m psychic. Or psychotic. One of the two. But if you’re interested, here are the primary ravings of my mad, fannish brain.

OF COURSE my big theories are about this guy.

BIG THEORY ONE: Bucky is a super-soldier. I’m not just talking about the mechanical arm here. My personal pet theory—and the one I most hope to see on the big screen on April 4—is that James Buchanan Barnes was already a kind of super-soldier, sort of a B-list Captain America, before his apparent death in The First Avenger. Why do I think this? Well, let’s start with my (admittedly speculative) evidence, and then deal with the major objections to the theory.

Seriously, what drugs is he on here?

First, we know from The First Avenger that Bucky was a victim of some kind of Hydra medical experimentation. When Cap comes to break him out, he finds a bunch of prisoners (the future Howling Commandos) being used as a slave labor force … and he mysteriously finds Bucky in a separate medical wing, from which no prisoner has ever returned. When Cap enters the right room—from which mad scientist Arnim Zola has just conveniently removed a bunch of papers—he finds Bucky strapped down on a table, apparently drugged and deliriously babbling his name, rank, and serial number. It’s not likely he was just being tortured—the setup is too elaborate, and Bucky’s not likely to know anything the Skull wants to find out. But what kind of experimentation would Hydra be performing? What makes me think Hydra was trying to make Bucky into a super-soldier, in particular?

Aside from the fact that he was dating Clara Oswald from Doctor Who.

First of all, we know the Red Skull was obsessed with the super-soldier formula. That makes the formula, or a version of it, the most likely prospect for any human trials Hydra might be conducting. And no altered humans appear in Hydra’s forces in the movie aside from the Red Skull himself. That suggests that whatever the Skull was doing didn’t work, or (perhaps) that he couldn’t replicate the process—possibly because Zola took his notes and the primary test subject busted out and rejoined the U.S. Army before the Skull could dissect him. Again, Bucky as super-soldier looks good.

Okay, how are you walking and focusing your eyes now? Seriously, how?

Then there’s Bucky’s own behavior immediately after being released. He recovers insanely fast—goes from delirious and staggering to walking and asking pertinent questions inside a few minutes. (Kind of like how Steve came out of his procedure woozy, but quickly recovered enough to chase a taxicab. Of course, this might just be Movie Concussion Syndrome.) And what are the questions he asks? They’re all about Steve’s transformation. “What happened to you?” “Did it hurt?” “Is it permanent?” “You don’t have one of those [a Red Skull face], do you?” Never anything like, “How are we gonna get out of here?” or “Did you bring a division with you?” or “Where can I get a gun around this place?”

Or even, "Nice hat".

Now, I’m sure that if my suddenly superpowered best friend rescued me from an evil mad-science lab, I’d be interested in his well-being and ask about the superpowers thing. But I’d be way more interested in how we were going to get the hell out of Dodge. I would save my questions about long-term side effects for later … unless, of course, I thought I might be in for said side effects myself because I’d just been on Arnim Zola’s table. 

Bucky denies my theory with his closed captioning.

This would also explain (though it doesn’t necessarily need explaining) why Bucky drinks alone in the bar scene—if, like Cap, he can’t get drunk, he may not want his buddies noticing. And it explains why the last thing Bucky does before he gets blown out of the train car in his final scene is pick up Cap’s shield. Yeah, it’s great cover and he’s being shot at—but is he also trying the shield on for size? The comics have made a big deal out of how Captain America’s shield is nearly impossible to handle it correctly unless you’re a super-soldier. I can picture Cap letting the other Howlers try out the shield in camp some night, and everyone laughing when someone accidentally knocked over a tree with it … and I can just imagine Bucky lurking in the background, biding his time to try the thing in private, just in case he turned out not to suck.

And look! He doesn't!

But now we come to the primary objection. If Bucky did have some super-soldier-lite characteristics, why weren’t they covered in the first movie? Why wouldn’t Bucky tell his best friend what was going on with him?

Maybe not right now, but there had to be some downtime.

Well, the first question’s an easy answer—time. If you’re going to compress two or three years of war into a two-hour movie, you’re going to lose a lot of stuff. And it was Steve’s movie, not Bucky’s. And if we’re explaining, as of the second movie, why Bucky didn’t tell Steve about his burgeoning superpowers before, there are a hundred different potential explanations.

Like the fact that the talk would have given him this awkward face.

Maybe Bucky didn’t know, or didn’t know at first, that anything was different. Maybe he didn’t want to bring it up when it wasn’t interfering with the effectiveness of his unit. Maybe he didn’t want to admit weakness. Maybe he didn’t want to be packed off to a stateside lab. Maybe he was keeping his powers in reserve, as a surprise; he was always a hell of a poker player in the comics.

Bucky wins Nick Fury's Hershey bars. There are a LOT of Bucky-winning-at-poker panels I could've used.
He won a hundred euros off the Falcon one night, and Hawkeye still owes him $50. The moral of this story?
NEVER PLAY POKER WITH BUCKY BARNES.

Or perhaps the reason’s even simpler: maybe Bucky just wanted to kill or capture Arnim Zola and/or the Red Skull to avenge his treatment at their hands … and he knew his best chance of doing that was being the guy who went in right behind Captain America.

Hey, look where he is.

Perhaps the strongest possible explanation for Bucky’s silence is what Erskine says about the serum—that it exaggerates physical and psychological attributes. (“Good becomes great, bad becomes worse.”) Before the war, Bucky obviously had a darker temperament than Steve, but was strongly loyal to his weaker friend. After his escape, he becomes even grimmer, except when he’s kidding Captain America, but openly says that he’ll follow Steve anywhere. If that loyalty has been dialed up to eleven, did he keep the details of his ordeal quiet in order to avoid burdening his friend?

And so people wouldn't stop giving him guns?

But now we have that second objection. Does Bucky need to be a super-soldier, in order for Winter Soldier to work? Nope. The comics made it work with a biologically normal 19-year-old, and the movie could do that, too. But the Marvel movieverse seems to have a slightly different approach to death that might make this solution necessary.

Pictured: Tuesday at the X-mansion

While comic-book death is an established concept, and comic writers can bring a character back from the dead with little more than a wave of the hand (really, what made Bucky’s resurrection so unusual was that it involved so little hand-waving), the movies so far have reserved resurrection only for very special, usually superhuman characters like Thor and Iron Man. The only mere mortal I can think of who got the Lazarus treatment is Phil Coulson, and the rather squicky details of that have taken most of a season of Agents of SHIELD to uncover. This more serious approach to death means the writers of Winter Soldier must jump a higher bar in order to bring Bucky back. We saw him get blasted with a Hydra weapon and dropped from a great height, at high speed, into a frozen river. That’s usually pretty fatal in movieland.

OH, WAIT.

Unless, of course, you’ve already seen someone get dropped from a great height, at high speed, into an Arctic ice field … and survive. The only difference here is that Captain America is a super-soldier, and his survival might be attributed to the biological differences between super-soldiers and the rest of us. But Bucky isn’t a super-soldier. Unless he is.

Deep freeze in five ... four ... three ...

And even if we’re going to argue basic logistics—who pulled him out of the river and revived him? Who even knew where to look? Why would they care?—we’ve got a candidate with this theory. The mission where Bucky died was the mission that captured Arnim Zola, the one person who would have known the most about whatever was done to Bucky and the man who saw Captain America come running in personally to rescue this random test subject. And General Philips told Zola during his interrogation that his capture cost the life of “Captain Rogers’ closest friend.” Zola’s not dumb. He probably knew who Bucky was. And if something in those experiments made Bucky valuable, then Zola had motivation to retrieve Bucky’s body—or at least sell its location to the film’s bad guys.

Told you we'd see him again.

And the mention of those ultimate bad guys—who still haven’t been revealed in any of those trailers, remember—brings me to my absolute favorite batshit-crazy conspiracy-theory never-gonna-happen-but-wouldn’t-it-be-awesome-if-it-did hypothesis …

BIG THEORY TWO: The Winter Soldier is working for SHIELD. Not just the bad guys secretly running one of the SHIELD factions. SHIELD itself. The people pulling Bucky’s strings are the nominal good guys—and that makes everything worse for everyone.

Pictured: Nazis and the (possible) Nazi who sent Armstrong to the moon.

This theory begins with a bit of real-life history. After World War II, the various Cold War players rushed to recruit as many German scientists as they could. One of the best-known of these efforts was Operation Paperclip, which whitewashed many scientists’ Nazi pasts in order to bring them to the United States. (The most famous beneficiary of this was rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who went from designing V-2 rockets for the Nazis to building spacecraft engines for NASA.) So it’s not unreasonable that the Marvel Universe version of the U.S., and possibly even SHIELD itself, would end up with former Hydra scientists in its ranks—like Arnim Zola.

And his fedora.

As I mentioned above, Zola knew what (if anything) was done to Bucky in that medical ward, and knew approximately where and when he fell from the train. He knew the value of an abandoned asset and where to look for it. That’s something that might interest SHIELD. After the war, they were in a prime position to recover Bucky and turn him into the Winter Soldier.

And they didn't even give him a haircut.

But wait, I hear you saying. SHIELD is the good guys, started by the good guys after they beat the bad guys. And that’s true. Marvel’s “Agent Carter” short film shows the founders of SHIELD as Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, and possibly Dum-Dum Dugan. Surely they’d never be a party to brainwashing Bucky Barnes into doing their dirty work for them. They’d never do that to Steve Rogers’ best friend. Not to their comrade-in-arms.

From left to right: Bucky's best friend and his two other friends. Except maybe not.

But as it turns out, they might. Even in the comics, Bucky’s transformation happened over several years, as technology became available and the needs of his captors changed. Why wouldn’t it be the same here? All that’s needed for this theory to work is to get SHIELD involved in the recovery of the remains and start the ball rolling. If Zola offered up a dead super-soldier, Howard Stark (who, according to his son Tony in The Avengers, “never shut up about” Captain America in later life) might well jump at the chance to preserve tissue samples. Peggy Carter might see the recovery as a chance to bury Bucky, as Steve would have wanted—particularly since she never got to bury Steve. Dugan, if he were involved, would likely be on board with bringing a brother soldier’s bones home.

"Oh, look, new toys to play with!"

And then … well … whatever happened, happened. Maybe somebody took a chance on reviving Bucky, and it worked, albeit without his memories. Again, I could see Peggy and Howard putting Bucky back on ice until they could figure out how to bring him all the way back. I could even see Howard building Bucky’s metal arm for when he woke up—hell, it looks like the kind of design that might have inspired Iron Man a generation or two later.

Paint it red and gold and put it over an actual arm ...

And a few years after that … we know Peggy didn’t stay with SHIELD forever. We know Howard ended up in the private sector. We don’t know what happened to Dugan, but all in all it seems possible that one frozen semi-super-soldier got lost in the shuffle. Lost, and then found by someone who didn’t know him, didn’t care about him, but looked at him and thought: What a wonderful opportunity …

Obviously, his shirt had gone AWOL by then.

By this point, we’re getting into the 1970s, let’s say. An era of dirty tricks, in fact and fiction, and the decade that produced some of the spy movies that made Robert Redford famous. The oeuvre matches. Now Bucky comes out of the ice, perhaps under the control of a younger Alexander Pierce, and begins building his legend. Most people in the intelligence community don’t know about him. Most people in SHIELD don’t know about him, though the Black Widow hears about him somehow. And when the Cold War ends, Bucky’s put back into storage …

This is only here because it's awesome. Carry on.

And he stays there right up until Steve Rogers comes out of the ice, and Nick Fury catches a mild case of idealism in The Avengers. Then Pierce, or whoever is working through him, needs to consolidate his own power, and that means knocking Fury off his perch. The best way to do that is to make Fury fail, and publicly. And what better way to do that than with a big, splashy terrorist attack that nearly kills Fury himself? The Winter Soldier would make a good false-flag operative. The pieces all fit. Maybe Pierce (or whoever) knows that this move forces Captain America to fight, and possibly kill, his closest friend. If Pierce is the Red Skull, he’d enjoy that; anybody else might just find it amusing. Either way, it ratchets up the tension.

Everybody run. Bucky's got a gun.

Because the one big advantage to this batshit-crazy theory is that it actually ups the ante. If you thought the comics were emotionally excruciating, with Bucky working for the bad guys, I can guarantee it’ll be even harder with him working for the wrong good guys. This theory is actually harder on Captain America than the original books, because this time he has to save Bucky, and the world, with no SHIELD squad to back him up, no brilliant scientists or huge resources to fix what’s been done to Bucky’s mind, no friends he can trust. He’s alone in an unfamiliar world, with his past about to eat him alive … and if that’s not the man out of time, I don’t know what is.

But at least he knows that if they're shooting at you, they're bad.

Either way, I’ve got tickets to a pre-midnight premiere screening on April 3. And you’ll probably hear the squealing a long way off.

One last angsty face. The angstiest of them all. Eeeeee!

MONDAY: THE READING LIST

Winter Soldier preview: Watch ALL THE VIDEOS!

Hey, guys!

I’m finally bowing to Facebook pressure and writing a series on Captain America: The Winter Soldier to rival last month’s Guardians of the Galaxy five-parter. While I work on all that material, which will run through next week, I thought I’d kick things off by collecting all the various trailers, clips, and other videos in one place. There’s an awful lot of this stuff, and there’s an awful lot of stuff in it, so you’ll want to watch closely.

And maybe breathe into a bag. Or is that just me?

Seriously, though, I am insanely excited for this movie, and I’m equally excited to be sharing my stupidly encyclopedic knowledge of the Winter Soldier with you next week. There will be lots and lots of pictures, and quite a lot of humor, even though the Winter Soldier comics aren’t nearly as zany as GotG. But when your supposedly grim and dour comic includes a gorilla with a machine gun and a ruthless assassin who’s terrified of public speaking, you can’t be serious all the time.

So here, from beginning to end, are the videos we’ve seen so far.

First is the initial trailer, from back in October:

Then this spot aired during the Super Bowl in January, focusing on the origin of the Winter Soldier (and featuring a cameo by his de facto creator, Ed Brubaker):

Then there's the first TV spot:

Followed soon after by a TV spot that let slip the phrase “Fury’s last words”. Soooo, he’s dead? Not buying that:

And then there was this little gem, touting lots and lots of ’splosions. Even Nick Fury looks worried:

Then there was this Black Widow feature from Marvel UK:

And this paranoia-laden feature, also from Marvel UK:

All this was finally followed up last week by this Fandango spot, which combined an early scene from the movie (Black Widow should NOT be giving relationship advice!) with a bonus trailer on the end (why yes, that IS our first clear shot of the Winter Soldier’s unmasked face):

Are you excited? I am! But where did I leave that bag …?

See you next week!

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.