Something I did not anticipate, going into Guardians of the Galaxy Epic Collection: Earth Shall Overcome, was a lingering sense of existential horror.
Marvel Comics
I was familiar with the characters from the 1990s run of the book, though perhaps I was too young to pick up on such a thing. More classic readers would recognize them from the influential Korvac Saga, a story more Avengers than Guardians. Modern readers may remember the short-lived Marvel NOW! offering Guardians 3000, which landed after the title had been coopted by the film-famous lineup of contemporary characters. None of these seemed steeped in the terror of existence.
None of these, of course, were written by Steve Gerber.
Though the characters were introduced by writer Arnold Drake and artist Gene Colan (whose pencils in Marvel Super-Heroes #18 are utterly mind-blowing) in 1968, it was Gerber who latched on to the concept, reviving the characters in 1874’s Marvel Two-in-One #4. A year into Man-Thing and two years before Howard the Duck, Gerber was entering the most iconic period of his career (pre-Howard lawsuit). It seemed like all his ideas were big, weird, just left of the Marvel Universe’s center. He had, by the time he began working with these characters, become canonized as an Earth-616 resident.
Marvel Comics
Gerber’s work was skewing weird, and the Guardians had just that potential. Set in a far-flung future, the team was made up of the singular survivors of their people, all of whom had been wiped from the playing field long before we enter the story. This tragic loneliness is alarming in itself, with all the potential for the existential unease saturation. Vance Astro, a mummified survivor of contemporary Earth 1000 years past his relevance, might alone be the focus for a sort of interior dread.
None of that is enough for Gerber; over the 15 issues he handled the characters, they brushed up against Universe-upsetting forces. The near-end of human civilization and an intergalactic war are the boring bits of narrative here – essentially every time the Guardians interect with time-traveling heroes of the 20th century are the ho-hum low points of the adventures. It’s the star-traipsing oddities that are the true gems of these comics.
A Topographical Man – a light-years-long corpse made of planets, shackled by twin stars – is only briefly a concern. There is a cult whose members touch galactic enlightenment, only to dissipate to holy ash. There is a death-obsessed game show planet; a reprogrammed eel man runs amok through contemporary New York. In the year 3000, a quarantined planet full of problematically insane aliens recreates that New York as the natural evolution of their insanity, as if to say that only madness could produce the very society in which we live.
These stories are issue-fillers, barely concerning enough to effect a larger narrative. The social commentary Gerber would later hone to a comedic edge in Howard the Duck is here a blunt club of a thing. Gerber wants the reader to understand a discontent with modernity, a fear of society.
The characters themselves, each with their own unique central weirdness, can scarcely breathe, let alone develop; it isn’t until Roger Stern takes them over in the final three issues of this book that answers are provided for the long-running mystery that is Starhawk, The One Who Knows. Those answers still include a massive bird god, the bodily and reproductive joining of adopted siblings, and psychic vampire children, and all of these things are tame compared to the day-to-day happenings in these characters’ lives.
Which is to say that Guardians of the Galaxy Epic Collection: Earth Shall Overcome is a collection of mind-bending strangeness, a workshop of madness for a writer who would later introduce a talking duck and his bell-headed and root vegetable-based villains. It isn’t a book that introduces and grounds its characters, nor does it build an ongoing mythology for them – that work would be done two decades later.
It is not a book for people curious as to the origins of our modern-day Guardians; for that, readers can wait for September’s release of Somebody’s Got to Do It.
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