Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Marvel's sort-of LEGION: the GUARDIANS of the GALAXY

I liked the early 90s revival but it turned right into cheese casserole when Steve Valentino left to co-found IMAGE.

One of the 70s issues haunts me to this day-- the issue where Starhawk and Aleta's children Tara, Sita & John are aged to adulthood, attack Starhawk and crumble to dust before his eyes!

I liked the characters -- Yondu, Vance Astro, Martinex, Charlie-27, etc. -- but can't remember many memorable stories, aside from the DEFENDERS arc which introduced Starhawk. I remember it being a very confusing story.

I read the early '90s revival, the first 20 or so issues. But it escapes me, now.

Quite possibly the most memorable story that featured the G o/t G took place in THE AVENGERS-- THE KORVAC SAGA.

I believe it was maaaaaaaaybe issue # 177 or so when Korvac/Michael/the Enemey and his wife killed every single member of the Avengers and the Guardians except for Thor and Moondragon. That the carnage took place in a suburban house really shook me up when I was a kid. Still one of the most memorable battle-issues I've ever read....

That full-page splash showing all the dead characters in Korvac's living room was pretty haunting....

Lash, that's one of the best Avengers saga's I've ever read. The image of Dr. Don Blake hammering away at someone's chest while all the other Avengers were dead was pretty amazing too!

That's a great saga, if for no other reason than that it had pretty much every Avenger ever in it with the Guardians at the same time! This led right into the story were Gyrich tells them all but seven have to go.

Something else else I've always wondered, but am no longer sure on: What's the connection between Vance Astro and Justice of the New Warriors?

Aren't they one in the same? Or at least in an alternate universe?

Marvel Boy/Justice is indeed suppossed to be Vance Astro, Guardian of the Galaxy.

But it was revealed that the Guardians' timeline diverged from regular-Marvel earth's in some issue of Marvel Team-up starring Spidey and the G o/t Gs.

Of course, the 90s series did its best to retcon that out by featuring decendants of -- or the actual characters of-- the X-Men, Iron Man, Silver Surfer, Firelord and many many MANY more...

I'm right in the middle of doing a CAPTAIN MARVEL retrospective feature for KLORDNY, and have just re-read Arnold Drake's run of 8 issues. Here's a guy who had a great talent with both sci-fi and humor, wedged into a book with a bad premise, 3rd-rate art and hopeless Marvel-style soap-opera.

So I notice, RIGHT in the middle of his CM run, Ardnold ALSO goes and creates his OWN sci-fi feature from scratch: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. This debuted in MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #18 / Jan'69, with art by Gene Colan & Mike Esposito. Gene left CM just as Arnold arrived, so this may be the only time they got the chance to work together. For whatever reason, the story was NOT followed up during Stan Lee's run as editor, although the story was reprinted years later in ASTONISHING TALES #29 in 1975.

Steve Gerber & Sal Buscema deserve the credit for reviving the GUARDIANS in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #4-5 / Jul-Aug'74, when The Thing & Captain America travel to the future when the Earth is ruled by the alien lizard race, The Badoon (who originally made their debut in SILVER SURFER #2 / Oct'68).

Steve followed up on this in THE DEFENDERS, in a 5-part story that ran from GIANT-SIZE DEFENDERS #5 and DEFENDERS #26-29 / Jul-Nov'75, with art by Don Heck, Mike Esposito & Dave Hunt, and Sal Buscema, Vince Colletta, Frank Giacoia & John Tartaglione. (GIANT #5 was plotted by Gerber, Gerry Conway, Roger Slifer, Len Wein, Chris Claremont & Scott Edelman-- must have been some weekend party!)

My favorite GUARDIANS stories were when they received their own series in MARVEL PRESENTS #3-12 / Feb'76-Aug'77 (why didn't they just start with their own title and a #1???). Gerber teamed with Al Milgrom, who between this and CAPTAIN MARVEL was making a rep for himself as Marvel's "sci-fi superhero" artist. they had a different inker every issue for awhile, with Pablo Marcos, Milgrom, Howard Chaykin & Terry Austin taking a stab at it before Bob Wiacek settled in as regular inker for 6 issues running.

MP #3 introduced "Nikki", the young flame-haired girl from Mercury, who saw nothing wrong with being attracted to a "much older" man in Vance Astro. A few years later, I SWORE the character of red-haired "Niki" in SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE (played by a young Molly Ringwald) was partly inspired by her!

For reasons that have never been clear to me, Gerber left after MP #9 and Roger Stern took over, though never got to make much of a mark as the series was axed after he did only 3 episodes.

A few months later they turned up in THOR ANNUAL #6 in a story featuring Korvac, who'd earlier appeared in GIANT-SIZE DEFENDERS #3. This led into the year-long epic planned by Jim Shooter & George Perez in THE AVENGERS, which unfortunately, Perez dropped out of midway due to his then-incessant problem of taking on too many projects at once and blowing deadlines on ALL of them.

Wow, THANK you for the early G o/t G history, Pro!

I loved this series Lash!!!!!

I remember getting that issue and the Legion tabloid of Lightning Lad and Saturn GIrl's wedding on the same day.

JIM Valentino, I think you mean

And apparently, he\'s going to post th...cs.com/guardiansofthegalaxy.html]website soon.

And, interestingly, he said in the thread I linked a moment ago that:

And I read those issues recently Lash, and I have to agree - it did a treble backflip with pike over the shark after he left.

MLLASH:

Close. It was MArvel Two-in-One # 69, starring the Thing and the Gs ot G.

I was quite the FF fan back then.

ah the possiabilties of a Legion/Guardians of the Galaxy crossover.....to quote Hank Hill when he found out about about the Texans football team and harbored the thought of an all texas Superbowl between the Cowboys and the Texans: "Yes,...this must happen!"
but i must addmit that Valentino's run on th book was great. the introduction of the Stark and how they twisted and perverted Tony Stark's inventions, the introduction of the universal church, that fanatical faction that spawned the Magus who turned out to be the most powerful mutant ever. think he even brought to light what happened to a number of earth's heroes in the aftermath of their War of the Worlds when martians invaded earth and conqured it. he even reserected Simon Williams aka WonderMan and the Vision, you found out that they survived the the W.O.T.W massacare and were now known as "Hollywood" and Viz gave up his android body and merged with a Supercomputer and was now known as "Mainframe". who along with the 31st century's Phoenix formed a spin-off group called the"Galactic Guardians".
also during Valention's run the Guardians went through some changes, Vance lost his containment suit, gained Caps' sheild. Yondu found out that he wasn't the last of his kind, and they gained 2 new members; a young Skrull tenager (i forgot her name.) and Talon a feral character who you found out later was a deciple of that century's Sorcerer supreme.
after Valentino left the book i still collected it because i am a fan of the group but they weren't IMO as good and when it ended i was still scratching my head. the origin of StarHawks parents still left me confused.
but all in all if anyone out there that hasn't read the series you should check it out you just might like it.

He's started posting stuff on the rebooted Image board (although it's not reached the point of where he would have gone yet) now:

http://www.imagecomics.com/messageb...tdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

And now he's reached #50.

I loved the '90s series, and y'know...it's just about time for a revival.

J

Between the fact that it's set far in the future but has been dormant for ten+ years, and the unholy mess the last series ended with (between Gallagher's plain bad writing of the whole team and throwing them into an alternate timeline at series end), the chances of a continuation are zero. Nil. Naught. Less than none.

We kinda got this in the Spidey-Boy Team-Up issue of the DC/Marvel Amalgam 2 line. Well, merged version of the characters, in both Pre- and Post-Boot flavours. Some of the characters I remember the names of were Martinex 5, Star Charlie and Vance Cosmic. Not too familiar with the GotG so it's hard to recall anymore.
Oh - I remember some more! Living Lighting Lad and Lass! (Even though Living Lightning isn't a GotG? And Multiple Maid? It seems Kesel (was he the writer?) was all over the infinitely dividing Luorno idea way before Waid ever tried it in the Rebooted Legion. )

I was always more fond of Marvel's other sort-of Legion, The Shi'ar Imperial Guard. They were actually almost cool when Jim Lee was drew them during his "X-Men" run.

Funny, i thought Lilandra's Imperial Guard was "spun off" from the Legion, you have to take a closer look of the members to spot the parallels: Phantom Girl/Astra, Shadow Lass/Midnight, etc.

Was this Dave Cockrum's payback for being taken off artwork duties for the Legion?

You gotta wonder....

I was introduced to them in the Avengers. I believe issue #181. I'm a sucker for cosmic stuff so i wanted to learn more.

I got the 90's series and I somewhat liked it. It wasn't my favorite...sort of a guilty pleasure.

GoG are no Legon however. They need someone with a strong sci-fi background to develop this universe. Less Marvel proper connection or atlest more subtle. I would love to see Ladronn do a painted mini like he did with the Inhumans years ago. Much the like the DC/Marvel differences I believe that GoG need to be much darker than the Legion.

I believe Steve Gerber's wasn't all that cheery to begin with. Part of that Marvel 70's stuff profh0011 and I are fond of. The intellectual side of Marvel.

There was a recent GoG right? I remember the art looked cool or was that the last Starjammers mini>? geez.

Check this out, from San Diego...

http://www.comicartfans.com/Gallery...866&GSub=12698&GCat=0&UCat=0


All the way on the left, Arnold Drake & Gene Colan-- the 2 guys who CREATED the Guardians of the Galaxy! (I couldn't miss that hat...)

So, there's a NEW "Guardians of the Galaxy" series coming out. Or would these be the "original" GotG since these guys are in the present day. Anyways, here's an article:

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=148414

Sounds promising enough.

If it were DnA plus an artist I don't like, I'd read the first arc in the store. On one hand, I loved DnA's (and Chris Batista's) recent arc in Superman Confidential that flashed back to Superman's first encounter with the New Gods. But on the other hand, their Legion did nothing for me, and neither have the more recent Annihilation: Conquest mini or Nova ongoing (although in the case of that last one, it's because I have no interest in a Nova solo book no matter who does it.)

But since it's Paul Pelletier, whose art I love, I'll definitely buy the first arc (he was the only reason I bought the first few of the ill-fated Black Panther/Storm issues of Fantastic Four.)

I feel the just about the same, except I also liked their first Marvel-Two-in-One appearance. I'm glad that the new series is not using those characters, because I think Steve Gerber was the only one who knew how to write them. Which is why it was a shame that he left the ongoing abruptly; it feels incomplete.

And I couldn't get into the Valentino series at all (it didn't help that Valentino hated Starhawk, my favorite Guardian.)

And with Perez gone, there went any possibility that the enormous amount of guest stars had any reason to be there or that Shooter wouldn't pull his default ending of the Avengers suffering a humiliating defeat against the excessively powerful villain, only for said villain to be defeated by a plot contrivance. And Moondragon's awful speech added insult to injury (roughly, it was "Boo hoo hoo, his heart was in the right place; we were the villains and he was the hero") Puh-leeze. :rolleyes:

I read it in my early twenties, which might be why I had the opposite reaction: eye-rolling followed by disgust followed by anger at having actually spent money on the trade.

By that reasoning, the likes of Infinite Crisis and Secret Wars are "great" stories.

Me, too. That's why I do Imperial Guard fanfics, because Marvel doesn't seem to have a clue what to do with them (Emperor Vulcan, anyone?)

IMO, they were much cooler when they appeared in Operation: Galactic Storm. I don't like Jim Lee to begin with, and it bothers me that the horrible makeover he gave Oracle has somehow stuck.

Totally agree. After reading this thread and writing this post, I miss Steve Gerber more than ever now.

To be contrary, the completely self-contained nature of the Korvac story was what appealed to me. It was an 'epic' story in that it had everyone in it, without being splashed across 24 comic titles for an entire year. In and done.

I miss tight storytelling, before everything had to be an 'event.'