THOSE PEOPLE ARE NOT GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

After having given their biggest characters to Fox and Sony in order to avoid going out of business altogether, Marvel Comics made enough money from their share of the success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Bryan Singer’s X-Men films to firstly stay alive and then later start up their own movie studio. Against the odds, they somehow had a huge mainstream hit with the character Iron Man, and struck gold with the Avengers movie. Now though, Marvel have pretty much ran out of already popular and famous characters. They are aware of this, and quite cleverly, if cynically, factored it in to the first trailer for the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy...

“Who are you?” 

“Star Lord” 

“Who?”

Then a roll call of the characters as Peter Serafinowicz is told who they are.

I remember Rocket Raccoon from The Hulk’s 20^th anniversary issue, so that’s 1982. He was a bit of a joke character really, with his name a play on the Beatles song. Hulk even complained about him on the cover...

A bit later, there was a lovely looking 4 issue series drawn by Mike Mignola, prior to Hellboy...

Gamora was a terrific character from Jim Starlin’s Warlock series in the mid 70s...

Groot was another one who guest starred in Hulk; in the 1976 Annual drawn by Sal Buscema, to be exact. Groot was originally drawn by Jack Kirby in the old Marvel monster comics. This story had a bunch of old weirdos reappear so the Hulk could smash them to bits one after another. Quite literally in Groot’s case…

Starlord was a good comic by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in the late 70s. Some visceral violent action, shades of Star Wars – “a sith lord” even turns up...

A bit later I bought black and white Star Lord comics aimed at a slighly older audience, with Carmine Infantino drawing a sexy lady called Caryth. Here is her emotional (and topless) death scene...

Star Lord’s costume is completely different in the trailer, I observe.

And wait, why is Star Lord in this film ? Why are any of these people in this movie?
Because I read Guardians of the Galaxy too, and none of these jokers were in there.

The Guardians of the Galaxy were first featured in Marvel Premiere 18 in 1969. I was lucky enough to pick it up in the late 80s for 10p in a second hand bookshop.

It had intriguing concepts . The characters were from different planets in the solar system and so their bodies had grown differently due to their native atmospheric conditions. As well as being a good sci-fi idea, this also gave scope for the characters being distrustful of other “races”.
Then there was poor old (very old) Vance Astro, who had set off on a thousand year space mission in hibernation to the nearest star system, only to find humanity had developed faster than light travel and arrived there hundreds of years before him. They still gave him a hero’s welcome, but he was tortured by the events. And the Badoon were scary villains (I thought the Judoon from Doctor Who owed something to them).

Beautifully drawn by Gene Colan, as you can see above.

I recall the Guardians reappearing to guest in Avengers comics with a few more characters added. 

At some point Marvel must have completely rebooted the Guardians of the Galaxy comic, ditching the original characters, and the movie is based on that.

I feel like I turned up for a Temptations concert and nobody’s left in the band.

WILD SPACE

I’ve been looking forward to this book for months. It’s a collection of odds and ends.

Back in the 70s and 80s Marvel UK reprinted Marvel US comics. They generally did so in black and white on a weekly basis instead of monthly, and hence used up more of the material than was being produced.  For Spider-Man and the Hulk and the other heroes, there was a ten year backlog of comics, and so this wasn’t going to cause a problem any time soon. For Star Wars though, there was a problem, and so Carmine Infantino got to work pencilling, with two inkers alternating to get the stuff produced more quickly. The result was that uniquely, Star Wars Weekly was printing the stories before they were appearing in the US comics. The Marvel US comics are the reprints.

By the time The Empire Strikes Back movie was released in 1980, there were a good few stories that were just dropped from the Marvel US schedule. I didn’t realise the extent , and was surprised that so many are therefore seen as obscure.

Also from Marvel UK are a series of original comics produced in the UK by creators such as Alan Davis, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, John Stokes, etc. Some of these were already reprinted in the 1990s by Dark Horse in colour, and are presented as such here. With these stories, original covers like this one by Alan Davis aren’t included in the book.

A cheeky thing to note is that although Dark Horse are not hiding altogether that these are Marvel Comics, they have gone to the trouble of whiting out “Stan Lee Presents…” from the start of every chapter and replacing it with “Lucasfilm Presents…”

Of note too are Blackthorne’s 3D comics, published between the 1986 cancellation of Marvel Star Wars and the 1991 Dark Horse series starting up. All three are here, starting with the “Tenth anniversary” #1. The 3D effects have been done away with, and it’s nice to look at these for the first time in 25 years without straining my eyes. I do miss the effect Blackthorne created for the camouflage net on these pages though.

A lot of nice curiosities here, nice to have the Pizzazz magazine stories by Howard Chaykin and Tony Dezuniga, and Gary Erskine’s art is good clean fun too.

R.I.P. CARMINE INFANTINO

Another great artist has died.
Infantino was the regular Star Wars artist when I was growing up:

I also got a Marvel Team Up he drew. Steven Grant wrote this story featuring Spider-Woman and the Hulk:
 
Detective Chimp. No credits on this one, so I don’t know who wrote it. Possibly John Broome. Not sure when it was first published either, as I read it in the British Superboy Annual 1967:
Howard the Duck written by Steve Gerber:

Star Lord written by Chris Claremont. This was spookier than the regular Marvel comics. It appeared in the black and white magazine format aimed at older readers:

Infantino is famous for revamping The Flash. What a great character when you’re a kid. “The Fastest Man Alive!” I always loved the way his costume shot out of his ring and expanded. This character is very indicative of Infantino’s style, all those speed lines. This page from "Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt" written by Robert Kanigher:

He did Batman too in the 60s. No credits here either, probably written by Broome again:

I have to admit there was a bit of a lump in my throat at this news. My gran bought me his comics.

R.I.P. Carmine Infantino.

MARVEL STAR WARS #108 (or MUG ME, MARVEL)

Marvel was licenced to make Star Wars comics in the 70s and 80s, creating the original run which featured many creators including Howard Chaykin, Mary Jo Duffy, Michael Golden, Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino, Cynthia Martin, David Mazzucchelli, Tom Palmer, Walt Simonson and Al Williamson.

Being a big Star Wars fan, I read all of them. The series ran from 1977 to 1986. The next Marvel Star Wars comic was scheduled to be a series called Dark Empire by Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy, but the rights lapsed and Dark Horse picked it up instead. They’ve published Star Wars comics since 1991. Unlike Marvel, who put out one ongoing series with limited related titles, Dark Horse have continually brought out an ever changing roster of series. It was too much to keep up with for me. I still keep an eye out for good Star Wars comics, but haven’t felt the desire to buy them all since after Dark Empire 2 back in 1994.

Now that Disney has bought Lucasfilm, speculation is rife about Marvel getting the licence back. Disney owns Marvel, so it might make sense. However there have been other Disney properties which feature in comics not made by Disney, so it’s not a certainty. And anyway I thought to myself, who cares? Doesn’t make any difference to me who’s publishing Star Wars. But then it occurred to me: Marvel could get the rights back and publish Star Wars #108.

The completist in me would find it very hard not to buy that!