Very Krutacking Decent: Guardians of The Galaxy #1 Review

Let’s stop for a second and remember that, back before the turn of the century, Guardians of The Galaxy writer Brian Michael Bendis got his start writing small-scale indie crime comics. There was Jinx, about a small-time bounty hunter, and Goldfish, about a small-time grifter, and Torso, about a real small-time serial killer (yeah, his victims would probably argue the “small-time” point, but let’s face it: “The Cleveland Torso Murderer” ain’t no Jack The Ripper. That name sounds dangerously close to “The San Diego Goofball”). When he moved into superheroes, it was Powers – more about a couple of street-level detectives than about superheroes – and then Alias and Daredevil for Marvel – again, street-level, crime-based superheroics.

It’s easy to forget now how nervous many of us were when Bendis took over Avengers back in 2004, because there was just no indication that the guy could really handle anything beyond street scumbags bullshitting each other, or maybe a mildly depressed former superhero taking it in the corn chute from a 70’s B-Lister. But if you take a step back and really look at Avengers Disasssembled, part of why it works is that, at it’s lowest level, it’s about a depressed woman who is lying to and betraying everyone in sight to hide her most personal shame. That’s a noir femme fatale story right there… sure, one that includes Hulks and exploding arrows, but a femme fatale story nonetheless. Bendis found the street-level story in the superhero epic, and made it pretty damned good.

So it has been a long ride for Bendis to go from giving us stories about no-hope dickheads running the Three Card Monty scheme in Portland to a story about the son of a planetary king and his alien buddies trying to defend the Earth from alien invasion. But the good news is, it generally works. If you’re a fan of Star Wars or the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, you’ll find some good stuff to like in Guardians of The Galaxy #1.

You’ll find those things because they are really damn reminiscent of those properties, but still: they are there.

We meet Peter Quill – half-human space adventurer, heir to the throne of Spartax and the designated Star-Lord – in a bar trying to lay into a blue chick dressed in the manner of a 1980s pre-Internet pornography poster available at Spencer’s Gifts. Enter Peter’s father, the King of Spartax, who advises Peter that Earth has been declared a no-fly zone. Peter, being half-human and from America, does everything but tell his biological father, “You’re not my real dad!” and immediately takes his team toward Earth, where he runs into Iron Man, who despite being in every Avengers title currently published, is still somehow on his space walkabout first referenced in Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man. Anyway, they all meet up just as the Badoon materialize and start an attack run toward Earth, with Peter realizing that his father used reverse psychology on him to con him into going to Earth, laying the groundwork for the king to eventually tell Peter that he doesn’t want him to finish his milk and take a nice afternoon nap.

So what works here is the lived-in feel of the Guardians of The Galaxy universe. By having the action start in a cruddy space bar and culminate in a brawl with the cops, it makes Marvel’s outer space universe feel lived in and realistic. There are real people living and working out here other than space kings and warring starships, which helps with suspension of disbelief… but the problem is that the use of backwater bars and barfights in space goes back to Star Wars in 1977, not to mention similar scenes in Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Hell, even the space skank Star Lord’s hitting on is one tick of the electromagnetic spectrum away from being one that Captain Kirk would try and bang. So while it’s an effective sequence, it’s not like it’s groundbreaking space opera.

Peter Quill is a reasonably compelling character, set up as a reluctant prince with a chip on his shoulder due to his regal father abandoning him and his mother on Earth, and as an irreverent adventurer, more interested in kicking around the galaxy with his buddies and picking fights than in any real kind of sense of duty. Which is fine and dandy; God knows that people like their Devil-May-Care space captains. However, everyone know that we like this because of Han Solo and Mal Reynolds. So he’s a likeable character, but in a low risk kind of way. Star-Lord isn’t a character that we’ve never seen before – a blonde guy raised away from his imperious father with a yen for adventure and a term for the cosmos in his name celebrates his 36th anniversary on May 25th – but he’s likeable enough to help keep you in the story.

The most disappointing thing to me was that the story spent the bulk of its character time with Star-Lord and Iron Man, giving Gamora, Drax, Groot and Rocket Raccoon really short shrift. We’re told by Peter’s dad that Gamora is the most dangerous woman in the galaxy, and we see that Rocket is willing to risk his life to save Groot, but otherwise, we only see them shooting up the Badoon spaceship and really not talking very much. Now, I am not a rube; I know that this is serialized fiction, and that we will spend more time with these secondary characters in future issues, but as a reader without a lot of experience with this team, the others seem like just that: secondary characters. And thankfully Star-Lord is a likeable enough character to carry the issue, but Bendis is taking one hell of a risk that readers like me won’t say, “Yeah, an anti-authoritarian starship captain and his female killing machine crew member bust up a bar. I liked them a lot when they were named Mal and River,” and maybe tuning out. Bottom line: I want to learn more about the crew; I already know the rogue spaceship captain archetype, and I already know all about Iron Man. Talk to me about the foul-mouthed raccoon!

And speaking of “foul-mouthed,” this book fires on one of my pet peeves: made-up curse words in science fiction stories. Battlestar Galactica had it’s “frak” and Firefly had its “gorramit,” and now Guardians of The Galaxy has its “krutack.” As in: “Go krutack yourself.” And I get why sci-fi properties do it; it’s a different universe, and you want to seem edgy, so just claim some foreign space language and curse up a storm under the censors’ radar. But the fact of the matter is that it is distracting. Every time you use one of these fake words, my brain disengages for a second, translates it to “fuck” the way God intended, and then I need to drop back into the story. This book is rated T+ guys, and I defy you to find a teenager who hasn’t seen Internet video of a pervert fisting a horse. Live a little and just use “fuck,” guys. If a parent demands that their teenager stop reading Guardians of The Galaxy, it’ll be because they see a talking raccoon and think their kid is ready to buy a fluff suit and start yiffing up a storm.

Steve McNiven’s art is extremely detailed. He works in a very fine line, with extremely expressive faces and realistic body types. His pacing is solid, for example, the argument between Peter and his father uses small panels to speed the reader along and show the escalation of the tension, while pulling out to a big panel on Gamora stopping mid bar fight so the reader can linger on the image of one woman taking on a bunch of armored space cops. And the detail is accentuated by inker John Dell’s work; he inks every line on every character’s face in a generally realistic manner, with every tension line on every character’s forehead visible, but generally without resorting to a bunch of arbitrary crosshatch lines that many artists believe constitutes “detail” (although we do see that conceit in a few panels). The overall effect is to give a layer of realism to this fantastic tale, and it works for the story.

Look: if you’re a space opera fan, you’re going to find things to like in Guardians of The Galaxy #1. The tricky part is that you will like those things because you have seen them in other space operas. So far, there’s not a lot new and groundbreaking in Guardians of The Galaxy, but what is there is well-executed, and since it mirrors archetypal elements that I like from the space operas that inspired it, I’m on board so far. But while I want more from the supporting characters, I can already see Bendis working in a simple, street-level conflict to ground the story: a guy working on the fringes while his dad is simultaneously disappointed… but no so disappointed that we won’t stoop to lying to him to use him as free muscle. Change the title of the king to “Don” and rename Peter to “Michael” and you’ve got a crime story. And since Bendis knows crime stories, I think it’s worth hanging in to see how this goes.