A Sense of Doubt blog post #3246 - Guardians of the Galaxy first appearance

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3246 - Guardians of the Galaxy first appearance

I have always loved the Guardians of the Galaxy; however, I was a fan of the original group, even with the addition of Starhawk and then Nikki in 1975. Thank you Steve Gerber!

I was okay with the middle era adding Warlock and Nova, two of my favorite characters.

But it took me a while to start to love this current cast, even before and despite the movies.

Though the current group will not replace the original cast in my heart, I am okay with them.

Here's some commentary on the original issue from 1969 but editor and comic maven extraordinaire Tom Brevoort and his newsletter.

Thanks for tuning in.



via Tom Brevoort - newsletter #81: Ore Wa Senshi - Oct 15th 2023

Even ten, or twenty, or thirty years after this comic book first came out, most would consider the feature that debuted in its pages to be relatively obscure and unheard of. And yet today, it’s a name that is well-known to viewers of a trio of popular films as well as a very cool Holiday special. Which only goes to show, at Marvel even the failures are successes if you simply wait long enough. 

In any event, Fifty-Five Years ago, the first story to feature the Guardians of the Galaxy was released in the pages of MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #18—and thereafter promptly forgotten about for several years more. MARVEL SUPER-HEROES had started out as FANTASY MASTERPIECES, a reprint title that re-presented stories done by the current Marvel artists back in the company’s pre-super hero days. Eventually, it expanded its focus to reprint first Captain America stories from the Golden Age (as Cap co-creator Joe Simon was attempting to recapture the copyright to that material, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman wanted to reprint those stories to assert his rights to them) and thereafter Golden Age stories of the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner as well. 

With issue #12, the name of the book became MARVEL SUPER-HEROES and rather than an all-reprint format, each issue led off with a new story starring a different character in emulation of DC’s successful SHOWCASE series. But MSH’s batting average was relatively poor. The first two issues featured Captain Marvel, the Marvel version intended to capture the copyright and trademark to the name away from a rival publisher, and which consequently received its own series thereafter. From there, the book fielded a lot of odds and ends: a rejected Spider-Man story illustrated by Ross Andru that Stan didn’t think was good enough for the main series, solo adventures of Medusa and the Black Knight and a new WWI character, the Phantom Eagle. And after this issue, stories starring Ka-Zar and Doctor Doom. None of these later efforts spawned any sort of follow-up, though a few of them would get regular strips in the years ahead. 

But let’s look a bit more at the Guardians of the Galaxy. It was the creation of writer Arnold Drake and artist Gene Colan, and for all that it was dressed up a bit to look like a super hero series, it was actually a science fiction adventure. Martin Goodman notoriously didn’t think that SF was saleable in comic books, so there was a need to obfuscate the genre here in order to get the okay to proceed with it.) It was set a thousand years in the future, in the 30th Century, where astronaut Vance Astro awakens after a Buck Rogers-like voyage through space and time to find himself in a solar system that has been conquered by the alien Badoon, a race that had recently been introduced in Stan Lee and John Buscema’s SILVER SURFER series. 

On the defensive almost from the start, Vance winds up teaming up with a trio of fellow travelers, each of whom comes from a different planet in the solar system and beyond it and who have been genetically modified to survive in the ecosystem of those worlds: Martinex from icy Pluto, Charlie-27 from massive Jupiter, and Yondu from Alpha Centauri, an actual alien. Vance has also gained telekinetic abilities during his thousand-year sleep, but his body has atrophied, and so if he removes his skintight space-suit, his body will decay into dust in instants. 

Battling their way clear of the Badoon and gaining an early victory over the Earth’s oppressors, the quartet decide to band together to liberate all of their homeworlds as a freedom fighter unit. And that’s all we heard from the Guardians until Steve Gerber brought them back in the pages of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE many years later. 

As for MARVEL SUPER-HEROES, issue #21 was intended to feature a new character, Starhawk, but like Guardians of the Galaxy, the series was science fiction rather than super hero, and this time Martin noticed. He had the strip spiked—it was never completed, and the book went back to being all reprint, albeit reprints of more recent vintage starring the Avengers and Daredevil and the X-Men at the start.



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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2401.07 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3110 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.