Everything you need to know about Guardians of the Galaxy (but didn’t bother to ask)

Hello, my name is Virgil, and I’ll be your guide to hell this week.

Dante jokes aside, I’m pretty sure the entire internet is on fire after the first full Guardians of the Galaxy trailer dropped last Tuesday, and there have been approximately three squadillion blog posts trying to explain GotG to people who just now found out that it exists. Allow me to add to that number with a five-part (ye gods!) daily series on everything you need to know. While I won’t assume that you’ve read those other posts, I will try to include information that doesn’t seem to be readily available elsewhere just in case you have read them. Oh, and there’ll be a reading list. Yes, that’s right; this blog comes with a bibliography, a shortlist of comics and graphic novels that you can read to get caught up on the GotG oeuvre. I’ll also include (as briefly as possible) my own sole objection to the movie as portrayed in the trailer, which led me to coin the term “nerdsad.”

Sounds good? All right, then. It’s time to put Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” on loop, strap in, and buckle up, because this ride will be long and this ride will get bumpy. Guardians of the Galaxy is probably the strangest choice for a comic-book movie since Howard the Duck, but it just might be awesome.

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.”
 

Not that this narrows it down.

TWO WARNINGS BEFORE WE GET STARTED

First, you need to know that the Cosmic Marvel stories, including Guardians of the Galaxy, are unusually complicated. We’re talking about 40-plus years of comics written by writers who weren’t in the same universe, let alone on the same page. GotG itself—the comic series that directly inspired the movie—is largely an ensemble piece, one equally well-suited for reading as a sprawling space opera and for focusing on individual characters. I read the series largely for one character—Star-Lord—so these blog entries will focus a bit more on him than on anyone else. But I’ll try to be fair to the other characters. Especially Rocket Raccoon and Groot.

Second, all of Cosmic Marvel is batshit crazy. You’ve now been warned. 

Why yes, that IS a dog in a spacesuit.

DAY 1: WELCOME TO THE COSMIC NEIGHBORHOOD

Silver Surfer in NYC. Duh.

The Marvel cosmos
The first thing you’ve got to know is that there are basically two versions of the Marvel Comics universe that don’t interact very much. There’s everything that happens on Earth—the stuff with the Avengers, the X-Men, Spider-Man, and so on—and then there’s everything that happens everywhere else. Sure, once in a while the Fantastic Four or the Avengers will go on an adventure in space or another dimension, but for the most part, the heroes you know stay on Earth, there’s another set that hangs out in space, and the two groups don’t have much to do with each other. The space stories mostly have their origins in the 1970s and early 1980s, when space fantasy was really in vogue (think Star Wars), so the science is kind of bonkers and the outfits are now profoundly embarrassing to fans. That means that almost nobody at Marvel Comics touches the space stuff—and when they do, it tends to be very, very different from the Marvel stories you know. So here are some basic pointers on the world of Cosmic Marvel. 

Rule 1: Don't look up Galactus' tunic.

It’s weird out there. Seriously. You can’t imagine how bizarre it gets. There are millions of wacky inhabited worlds, thousands of which have shown up in space stories over the years. And because Cosmic Marvel is Marvel’s redheaded stepchild, it tends to get handed to writers who don’t talk to each other, and the result is stories that vary widely in content and tone. A completely psychotic array of alien life, alien cultures, alien planets, and adventures that run the gamut from Robert Heinlein to Clive Barker, often with a side order of Chuck Jones. Basically, no matter what crazy alien or bit of technology shows up in Guardians of the Galaxy, you have to roll with it, because this is not a master-planned fictional world. Words cannot express how bizarre Cosmic Marvel can get … though you’ll see plenty of crazy in this blog series. 

No. No, it will not.

Earth is the insane asylum of the universe. Amusingly, that big psychotic universe is full of life forms that consider Earth to be truly bonkers. By the standards of the denizens of Cosmic Marvel, Earth is a pathetic little backwater full of squishy pink hairless monkeys who’ve barely made it to their own moon … and who then inexplicably gave up any plans for larger space exploration. And it’s full of superpowered freaks with conflicting agendas who might do any nutty thing imaginable because nobody’s in charge. Oh, and they think they’re the most advanced species in Creation, because most of them don’t know there’s other intelligent life out there. From the perspective of millennia-old alien empires, that’s hilarious.  

Peter Quill, "primitive Terran." He's used to stereotypes.

Except Earthlings have nuclear weapons and mutants and Asgardian gods and whatever insane thing Doctor Doom has invented this week, so it’s also terrifying. Earth is periodically put under quarantine and made off-limits to all aliens … except nobody really pays attention to that, because it’s so much fun and/or so lucrative to land on Earth and mess with the inhabitants. Basically, when Captain America and the Avengers fly out into space to stop the Kree-Skrull War (yes, that was a thing), it’s like North Korea sending its synchronized dance team to fix the Middle East. Completely baffling, and sort of scary because anyone might have a nuke hidden in his or her tights. Earth-born heroes who make their lives in space spend a lot of time claiming to be from somewhere else, defending their homeworld, or being profoundly embarrassed. Sometimes all three at once.

Get used to it, Captain Universe. Glaring comes with the spandex.

Abstracts happen. On top of the various alien empires and other craziness, most of the really big powers in Cosmic Marvel are, well, cosmic. The Marvel space stories are the ones where you’re most likely to run into Galactus, a giant alien who eats planets for lunch, or the living embodiment of Eternity, or Death. Yes, actual Death. A skeleton in a robe (well, sometimes she’s a skeleton in a robe) will sometimes show up in the middle of your story. And people will mostly act like that’s normal … because it is. Take this conversation between Star-Lord and Nova from a few years ago:

Someday I will form a band and call it Oblivion's Pants.

Nova is a relatively sheltered kid from Earth. Star-Lord, while born on Earth, has been around the cosmic block a few times. To him, this stuff is pretty run-of-the-mill. See the culture shock?

In our last exciting episode …
The Guardians of the Galaxy comic-book series that inspired the film is rooted in a few big storylines that came out of Marvel Comics in the early to mid-2000s. Here’s a (very!) short summary of what happened in those storylines so you don’t have to actually read them yourself. You’re welcome.

What is even going on here?

The Annihilation War: Basically, a giant tyrannical bug named Annihilus left his home in the Negative Zone (an antimatter universe—don’t ask!) and tried to take over all of known space. Lots of people and planets died. The cosmos was saved at the last moment thanks largely to a group of cosmic superheroes, a couple of them from Earth. Most prominent among these was a superpowered rookie space cop named Nova (henceforth known as Richie, because there are lots of Novas in the Nova Corps) and a half-alien cyborg ex-superhero named Star-Lord (also known as Peter, because he hates being called Star-Lord now). So Richie and Peter killed the bugs. Got it? 

Okay, it was mostly Richie. Yuck.

Annihilation: Conquest: But nobody got to sit around for very long, because maybe two weeks after the good guys stopped the Annihilation Wave, the universe was under attack again, this time from a technological virus-civilization called the Phalanx that pretty much took people over and turned them into zombie cyborgs. More cosmic battles happened, but what matters to GotG is that a) Richie got taken over by the Phalanx for a while, causing a lot of problems; and b) Peter was the one who accidentally let the Phalanx into the universe in the first place. He meant well. 

He was sorry after his cyborg pals shot him.

Anyway, Richie eventually got better, Peter got his cyborg implants removed to avoid infection, and Peter ended up leading a tech-free team of alien convicts into the Phalanx’s citadel in order to save the universe. And because he realized the universe pretty much couldn’t go ten minutes without exploding, Peter decided to turn his motley crew of space loonies into a kind of starfaring Avengers. So Peter killed the computers and started a superhero team. Got that?

Pictured: Motley space loonies.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Starting in 2008, Peter’s team of butt-kickers had their own title, Guardians of the Galaxy. They pretty much flew around space, kicking butt and getting absolutely zero respect because they were a bunch of criminals, psychopaths, outcasts, and one or two people from Earth—a.k.a. escapees from the insane asylum. Also, there was a lot of infighting and personal drama because these people are extremely dysfunctional. Not just standard Marvel dysfunction, either—the X-Men thought these guys were messed up. Major opponents included the Universal Church of Truth (a pseudo-Catholic space cult that can literally blast you with the power of faith), all the participants in several minor space wars, and catastrophic rips in the fabric of space and time. The Guardians spent a lot of time arguing with each other, shooting at their enemies, getting entangled in interstellar diplomacy, and (in Peter’s case) hoping to God that coffee was readily available.

Peter apparently drinks an entire pot of coffee at every team meeting.
The only thing he misses about his home planet is the caffeine.

The Thanos Imperative: Thanos, an insane alien dictator who is literally in love with death (as in sending valentines to the skull lady … except the valentines are mountains of corpses), was dead. Everybody was pretty happy about that, including Thanos. Except then the universe got invaded by the inhabitants of a neighboring universe where death didn’t exist—or, as they put it, “life won”—and which was literally stuffed to bursting with living things. This place was known as the Cancerverse and it was full of evil versions of Earth superheroes and lots of creatures that looked suspiciously like what happens when you give H.P. Lovecraft a boatload of hallucinogens. It turned out that the only way to beat the Cancerverse was to re-introduce death, which meant resurrecting Thanos, which really ticked him off. The whole thing ended up with Peter, Richie, and Thanos trapped in the Cancerverse as it imploded. Peter and Richie spent their last moments alive blasting away at a pissed-off Thanos to keep him from jumping through an interdimensional gate and destroying the surviving Marvel universe. Yup, they died. 

Peter and Richie go out like Butch and Sundance.

The new series: Okay, if the team leader’s dead, how can there be a new series of stories? Not by getting a new leader, if that’s what you’re thinking. No, the current Guardians of the Galaxy series, which began last year, focuses on pretty much the cast of loonies you see in the film … including Peter. There’s been no explanation yet of how he got out of the Cancerverse, though he seems sort of traumatized by the mention of it. Thanos is back, too, also without explanation, though Richie still seems to be dead. Major opponents in the new Guardians of the Galaxy series include pretty much everyone who wants to mess with Earth and/or destroy the universe, plus Peter’s father, an alien king who wants Peter to grow up and accept the crown, or possibly just die quietly somewhere. Peter is doing neither of those things.

He is, however, recruiting Iron Man.
And wearing tap-lights on his chest.

Tomorrow: A breakdown of all the most important stuff in the trailer. See you then!

In the company of my tribe

I’m writing this blog late because I am still exhausted from Saturday.

On Saturday, I cleared my schedule except for two engagements—getting some emergency last-minute business cards printed up, and driving umptyfratzmumble miles across huge swaths of Los Angeles to a little town called Beverly Hills for a grad-school reunion. Now, I don’t think of myself as a Beverly Hills kind of person. In fact, thanks to a childhood spent among the children of much wealthier families (my parents sent me to private school despite not quite being in a private-school tax bracket), palatial houses make me itch. I always think I’m going to breathe wrong and break something that costs more than my car. I just about had a heart attack when I rang the doorbell and it was opened by a tidy woman in a serving uniform. (My immediate thought was “butler”, but I was too nervous to ask.)

I was wearing black combat boots with my best jeans and a button-down shirt because it was too hot, miserable, and hilly to bother wearing a dress and heels. Try talking to a polished domestic servant while you’re wearing combat boots and hoping nobody notices; it’s quite an education.

But once I got over the heart attack and was escorted inside, past some statuary that wouldn’t have been out of place in Wayne Manor … once I’d introduced myself to the group and tried not to stammer … once I’d politely explained to the well-dressed woman, in a whisper, that I was serious about not drinking the champagne and plain old ice water would be just fine … I was home. Because among the dozen or so alumni sitting in the professor’s Beverly Hills living room was at least one guy who hadn’t come in combat boots, but had come wearing green sneakers, red pants with blue plastic spikes sticking out of them, a black shirt printed with neon orange chili peppers, and what appeared to be a crown made out of dark-blue felt with rhinestones hot-glued all over it. Oh, and a black vest, but I found my eye tended to slide right over that unaccountably drab piece of the ensemble. 

Oh, right, I thought. I am among writers.

My graduate school happened to be the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California, and while I don’t often go out of my way to attend USC alumni events (like this one, they’re usually held far from where I live and are full of people who dress a lot better than I do), I would probably set myself on fire and crawl over broken glass to hang out with Professor Gina Nahai. She taught one of the most useful classes I took in grad school, a fiction workshop, and helped me learn not only basic workshop skills but also a rule that I still quote to my own students and any newcomers to any workshop I’m in: “Ninety percent of the feedback you will get in this room is crap. Your job is to find the other ten.” 

A wise woman, Gina. I will never forget the evening when one of her students suggested to me, with a straight face, that Masks would be a lot better if I just changed the ending so that it turned out Rae was an inmate in an insane asylum and had hallucinated the entire story. Horrified and not sure I’d heard right, I stared at the student and asked, “So, you’re saying that I should have it turn out that it was all a dream?” “Yes!” the student replied, without a trace of irony, as our classmates looked on in disbelief. And Gina, bless her heart, said nothing about it—she just quickly called on someone else to give me their notes, and shot me a look that said If you think that advice is in the ten percent, then you are an even bigger fool than you think you are. 

A wonderful woman.

So I spent four hours on Saturday afternoon chatting to other members of the Gina’s Kids club, networking and exchanging contact information and swapping story ideas and attempting to eat the delicious food spread out on a nearby table but totally failing because I was talking too much and there were too many other people in the way. (Somebody once told me that the way to get reporters to show up for any press conference, no matter how pointless, was to announce that there would be free food. Writers have elevated munchie-mooching to an art form, but I’m strictly an amateur.) I met several lovely new people—alumni from other years—who asked to be added to an online writing circle that I’m starting up. Other people took my cards and promised to use or recommend my services as an editor. A high-school teacher in the group asked for Masks bookmarks. We made jokes at the expense of Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, and a number of much more obscure books. Gina looked on, smiling. She’d beat her students with sticks if she thought it would get them to network. I even stopped compulsively monitoring the location and structural stability of nearby statuary.

The guy with the spiked pants turned out to run a comic-book company called Graphation, and he invited everyone to his zombie dog walk the following day. Writers!

We scribblers are a solitary bunch, for the most part. The most important part of what we do takes place in quiet rooms, or in corners of coffee shops, and always inside our own heads. I sometimes think we write to break the isolation—to try to communicate to the world all the astonishing things going on in our brains. But when we get together and support each other, we’re better for it. We find out that the writer in the next chair isn’t drinking the champagne either, and was equally embarrassed about it until she found out she wasn’t the only one. We find out that the writer we’ve been swapping editorial notes with is actually writing a novel with a plot that parallels one we’re writing, but with a completely different take on the subject that both precludes any possibility of plagiarism and reassures us that we’re not so crazy for chasing this idea after all. We find out that other people also wonder whether a zombie dog walk is a dog-walk for zombies or a walk for zombie dogs. (The answer, as far as I could tell, was yes.)

We find out we’re not alone. That’s worth driving umptyfratzmumble miles any day.

And the shoe situation turned out fine, too. Combat boots are hilariously clever when someone wearing stilettos accidentally steps on your feet …

Free Comic Book Day preview!

It’s almost that time again!

Yes, this coming Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, and you know what that means—Masks is back!

On Saturday, I’m posting a new story on Pocket Coyote and on this blog. It’s called “Ghost Dance,” and it will introduce at least two heroes you haven’t seen in Masks before, including the man who gave his name to heroes who might be nonpowered but are never powerless—the Black Mask himself! And that’s not even the best part!

Set in 1947, “Ghost Dance” follows Clayton Ross, a.k.a. the Black Mask, as he tracks down an old ally and recruits him for a daring rescue mission. Clay hasn’t seen Ben Wise, a.k.a. Eagle Eye, since the early days of the Second World War, and while he’s heard a few rumors about what happened to the kid behind enemy lines, nothing can prepare him for what he finds. Once a costumed vigilante who relied on a pair of mechanical wings to fight crime, Ben was captured by the Nazis and subjected to horrific experiments as the scientists tried to discover the source of the powers he didn’t actually have. Ben emerged from the ordeal with a set of Pyrrhic superpowers and a growing distance from the people he once loved.

Can Clay remind him of what it means to be human before it’s too late? And can Ben pull it together enough to help save an old friend from a fate worse than death? The answers lie in the southwestern desert, along with a few surprises that will lay the foundation for Volume 2 of Masks …

Did I mention that’s not even the best part?!

I am so excited about this that I am literally vibrating as I type, so pardon the typos, but here it is—I wrote a comic book!

An actual comic book! With pictures and everything! I’m hoping it will be done in time for FCBD, but if it’s not, it’ll be because I was late finishing the script and not because of the artist because the artist is freaking amazing, you guys. No, you don’t have to put up with my art this time around—I’ve got THIS GUY!

 Yeah, the guy who drew, oh, the best Masks art ever. His name is Derrick Fleece, and if you’re not already a fan of his work, you should be. He was the first guy to give Trevor a face that actually made sense—a face I liked so much that I immediately changed the way I drew Trevor just so he’d look more like Derrick’s interpretation. 

 The 8-page story, titled “Pick Your Poison”, should be available on or shortly after Free Comic Book Day, and it picks up where “Ghost Dance” leaves off, with Clay making a decision that will change his life forever—and turn Rae’s and Trevor’s lives upside-down. Derrick wanted to draw some noir, so I gave him all the shadows and muddled morality I could, and the results are unbelievably awesome. And if all goes well, you’ll get all of it this coming Saturday.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to go find a way to speed up time …