Groot
In the late fifties, Marvel Comics had fallen on hard times and laid off nearly its entire staff. In the months before 1961’s
The Fantastic Four marked the rebirth of the Marvel superhero, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby turned out a parade of bizarre aliens and monsters that menaced American cities, with names like Monstrom, Krang, and Droom. And then there was Groot, the Monarch of Planet X, a walking and talking tree that consumed fences, cabinets, and barrels. Or, as one member of the panicking populace exclaimed, "A creature
of wood, who
feeds on wood!" He was primed to become the overlord of all the timber in the galaxy, had a shrewd scientist not thought to breed termites and let them loose on the barky beast. Over the next 45 years, Groot appeared exactly twice.
Drax the Destroyer
After the evil alien Thanos — a.k.a. "The Mad Titan," a death-obsessed, craggy-faced bruiser from one of Saturn's moons — thought that pipe-smoking, saxophone-playing real-estate agent Arthur Douglas had blown his cover, he aimed a death blast at Douglas's car, killing him and his wife. Shortly thereafter, Thanos's estranged father merged Douglas's spirit with
a bunch of earthen rubble to create the green, caped, and very powerful Drax the Destroyer, whose all-consuming mission was to destroy Thanos. Writer-artist Jim Starlin introduced Drax in the pages of
Iron Man in 1973; within a month, Stan Lee had him removed from the title. In 1982, Marvel's editor-in-chief Jim Shooter wrote an issue of
The Avengers in which Drax was killed. He remained dead for the rest of the decade, until Starlin revived him in the early nineties. Giffen, who dusted Drax off again in 2004, says that although he increased the character's intelligence, he remains "too macho for the room," noting, "I just turned him from a green imbecile into a green douchebag."
Gamora
After Jim Starlin was booted from his
Iron Man gig, he continued to chronicle the dastardly actions of Thanos in both
Captain Marvel and
Warlock. By this time, Starlin was having problems with editorial constrictions, and the 1975story in which the alien assassin Gamora debuted was, in part, a metaphor about Marvel Comics as a purveyor of conveyer-belt junk. Green-skinned and decked out in a fishnet unitard cut down to the navel, Gamora wielded a dagger and called herself "the Deadliest Woman in the Whole Galaxy," but when she tried to slay her adoptive father Thanos, he killed her instead. She was out of the picture for nearly a decade and a half, until — as he had done for Drax — Starlin raised her from the dead.
Star-Lord
Test pilot Hal Jordan became the Green Lantern when a dying alien bestowed a powerful ring upon him. Astronaut Peter Quill, on the other hand, achieved the Star-Lord power a little more dishonestly — by taking out his compatriots with a rifle, hijacking a rocketship, and flying off to visit the godlike Master of the Sun. Steve Englehart, who created the character in 1976, intended to write a series of adventures for the hero — a love story on Venus, for instance, and a war story on Mercury. "I deliberately made him a complete asshole," Englehart says, "with the idea that I was going to write twelve stories about him as he worked his way through the galaxy, and by the end of it he would have become this great hero." But Englehart, citing editorial interference, quit Marvel Comics soon after the first issue was published.
X-Men writer Chris Claremont experimented with a less prickly version of the character before abandoning it completely in 1981, and 23 years passed before he was revived again. However, the character's very name still carries the seeds of Englehart's sharp humor. "Peter Quill —
Peter as a reference to a dick, and
Quill as a reference to a dick," he explains. "I wanted him to be
completely unlikable."
Rocket Racoon
Originally named Rocky Raccoon, this gun-toting alien from "somewhere near the black holes of Sirius Major" debuted in a 1976 short story by Bill Mantlo and Keith Giffen in the back of
Marvel Preview, a black-and-white magazine-size comic. The legal department was skittish about the prospects of a character named after a Beatles song, so five years later, when he finally returned for a guest appearance in
The Incredible Hulk, he was given the sobriquet Rocket Raccoon. Writer Bill Mantlo received considerable amounts of hate mail for that issue ("Are you all regressing to your childhoods?" wrote five enraged University of Maine students), but in the wake of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phenomenon in 1984, a four-issue
Rocket Raccoon miniseries was green-lit. It was hardly a best seller; the character popped up exactly four times over the next two decades.
Guardians of the Galaxy
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Originally Posted by Albershide
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