Superhero movies are better when they actually talk to comics

In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the film about the talking raccoon battling the cape-swishing villain, perhaps the most comic-book-ish thing about it is Adam Warlock’s quick introduction. That may sound strange to those who only know superheroes from the cinema. After all, Marvel movies do this stuff all the time – Monica Rambeau / Spectrum was a supporting character in WandaVisionbut she gets the highest bill The miracles. Dane Whitman/Black Knight was a minor player in Eternalsbut is confirmed for a bigger role whenever Sheet finally happening.

But Gunn’s take on the old Marvel tee-up is uniquely deft and insightful. GotG3 omits nearly all fictional-factual details of Adam’s Marvel Comics character in favor of establishing the emotional hook that has endeared him to readers: he’s a person of indescribable power who figures out where his own choices fit into the rigid responsibility of his fate. It’s a smart choice, and the right one, and that Gunn made it is a testament to his genuine care for the source material – and, more pertinently, his understanding that comic book superhero universes are a conversation.

In GotGGamora is Gunn’s conversation with Avengers: endgame‘s Russo Brothers and Adam Warlock is Gunn’s talk with the future MCU filmmaker picking up on Adam’s story. But what’s truly remarkable about the Guardians of the Galaxy movies is how they’re arguably the biggest conversation the MCU has ever had with Marvel Comics.

And when movies and comics are in real dialogue, we get good stuff.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Origins

Did you know that when James Gunn and Nicole Perlman put together the screenplay of Guardians of the Universewere they, in a very real sense, only the second creative team to work with the concept?

Many of the characters in the MCU version of the Guardians that dates back several decades. Created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Dick Ayers, Groot himself technically predates the Fantastic Four, albeit almost unrecognizably. The idea of ​​a team called “The Guardians of the Galaxy” emerged in 1968 from an idea by Roy Thomas that was taken in a completely different direction by Stan Lee, writer Arnold Drake, and artist Gene Colan, and it bore little resemblance either. to the Guardians we know today.

The comic that first placed the Guardians of the Galaxy in today’s Marvel Comics continuity rather than the distant future, the comic about Peter Quill who founded the Guardians, the comic that featured Rocket Raccoon, Groot, Drax, and Gamora (to not to mention Mantis, Adam Warlock and Cosmo, the talking Russian space dog) mainstays of the team, hit store shelves in 2008. Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s co-written Guardians of the Universe (with multiple artists) was only the second comic series called “Guardians of the Galaxy” that Marvel had ever published.

It ran for a spare 24 issues – a moderate, but not groundbreaking, success – with a bit of a sequel in 2010’s Thanos forcing miniseries, also written by Abnett and Lanning and starring the Guardians. It was a popular new title from a well-aligned creative team; no Marvel Comics pillar, indelibly marked on the house Spider-Man and the X-Men built.

The last issue of Thanos forcing hit the shelves in November 2010. In July 2010, Kevin Feige had spoken vaguely about a Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Two years later he revealed Guardians of the Universe was in production, alongside the initial character lineup and concept art of Marvel Studios’ version of the Abnett/Lanning team and look. A perfectly responsive six months after that, in early 2013, Marvel Comics kicked off with the first new one Guardians of the Universe book in five years.

From the pen of Marvel superstar writer Brian Michael Bendis, it featured a team consisting of Starlord (not hyphenated in the comics), Gamora, Rocket, Groot, Drax and face-of-the-MCU Iron Man, and a first issue featuring 29 speculator market friendly variants. No less than five new ones have been added Guardians of the Universe Number 1 since, of four creative teams.

Comics have always talked to movies, but movies don’t always talk back

Image: Ron Marz, Ron Lim/Marvel Comics

Did you know that there is a clear moment shortly after the release of Guardians of the Universe to theaters, when the Marvel Comics version of Nebula will look exactly like the movie version? It is no enormous change, to be sure, but for a character who appeared in about two stories after her big feature in The Infinity Sagathe switch from “bald lady with one cyborg eye who doesn’t believe in pants” to following the MCU design as a point of reference is very clear.

Gunn’s Guardians aren’t the only place to find this phenomenon in the modern day superhero blockbuster (although nothing on the scale of Guardians’ transformation from a singular comic book into one of Marvel’s forever franchises). Ryan Coogler Black Panther borrowed key visual elements from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther: A Nation Beneath Our Feet – and in the aftermath of the movie, Coates took his much-needed reinventions of Killmonger, Nakia, and M’Baku and crafted recognizable (and awesome) Marvel Comics counterparts for them. Meanwhile, the Valkyrie, whose name is simply Valkyrie, is finding its place in the Thor mythos, and Marvel’s Shang-Chi comics are diligently working on a new kind of Ten Rings in the comic cosmos.

Image: Brian Bendis, Art Adams/Marvel Comics

Comics have always pulled the best bits of their adaptations into the main story, whether from other mediums or just a non-canon comic strip. Always. Superman’s flying power, perhaps the most fundamental and iconic abbreviation for the superhero genre, was actually invented for the second episode of his 1940 radio series, two years after his first comedic appearance.

But even though comics love an idea that isn’t broke, when superhero characters quickly pivot to mirror a modern-day movie adaptation, eye rolls often follow. These days it can be more difficult to do that sort of thing without interrupting the immersion. Smaller cosmetic changes are the easiest, like the streamlined shape of the Batmobile giving way to the chunky Nolan-era Tumbler. But visuals aside, the movie incarnations of characters are often so far removed from their counterparts that a change to align with them is obvious in timing and obvious in motivation.

Never say never in the endless timeline of a superhero universe, but one of the reasons you won’t find Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker in a Batman comic as anything more serious than a cameo or a wink is because the character wasn’t really designed to fit in with a wider superhero universe led by multiple creators. A lot of superhero movies can’t really talk to each other, let alone comics.

2014 Guardians of the Universe, on the other hand, was an adaptation essentially based on a single comic book, rather than the culmination of decades of storytelling. It’s not a revamp, or an attempt to “fix” the characters’ comic heroism. It’s a simple retrofit of Abnett and Lanning’s very contemporary Guardians team in the conversation of the MCU, jettisoning the character’s fictional-factual details that conflicted with MCU logistics in favor of a more immersive and familiar emotional core, overlaid with Gunn’s personal style and humour.

Did you know that in Marvel Comics Drax is a human saxophonist called Arthur Douglas who was on a family car trip where she happened to see a UFO and that UFO happened to be piloted by Thanos, who killed them all and then a cosmic dude captured Drax’s soul and re-embodied him in one buff alien body for the purpose of kill Thanos? Now it is! But you didn’t need to, and Gunn grokke that.

Misfits, spaceships, weird monsters and cosmic megalomaniacs. Abnett and Lanning founded the Guardians, but Gunn’s Guardians kept them going, first through pure commercial impulses and, from 2014, through the same kind of mechanism that all interconnected superhero universes operate on: simply telling more stories that rhyme with the latter. .

Gunn has so many projects grappling with dark or unusual reversals of the superhero formula that it can obscure the truth. When he sits down to tell a superhero story in a superhero universe, his work – all three Guardians movies, Peacekeeper season 1, The suicide squad — would make great (albeit sometimes adults-only) in-continuity comics. This isn’t just because Gunn likes comics; there are a lot of from filmmakers who love comics. But there are far fewer whose work is so familiar with what really happens in comics Today.

Gunn doesn’t just like ‘comics’. He loves specifically comics, as any look at his lineup for DC Films’ new slate will tell you. And watch Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, I had a very specific comic book thought. When the movie’s climax underlined the primary emotional colors of Gunn’s version of these characters, and the final scenes then sent them into a wide and wild universe to stories unknown, I thought to myself: He does this much like the end of a long-running comic book series.

It takes someone who not only loves superhero comics, but also loves how they talk to each other, to understand that it’s not just a creative job – it’s also a custodial job. Part of the mandate is to maintain the concept you work with (note: maintenance includes both restoration and maintenance). And renovation), not only for the public but also for the artists who come after you.

In the final of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Gunn does the narrative equivalent of wiping down the counters and putting all the chairs down on the tables. It’s respectful, it’s professional, it’s humble. It shows a love not just for the genre, but a love for the formwhat a conversation is.

As a seasoned backpacker on a Pennsylvania campground, James Gunn left the Guardians better than he found them – to filmmakers and comics creators alike – just as the best comics creators do.