“Blam! Murdered you!”
With this line, I knew that Rocket was not the character I had grown to love. Rocket had been striped of his intelligence and cleverness, his depth and humor, and he’d become some sort of monster. Any character that Rocket had had been replaced with a label “raccoon with guns” and that was the only trait that mattered anymore. For some reason, the fact that Rocket happened to be a raccoon that welded guns destroyed everything else that Rocket had been and he’d been turned into an unlikable psychopath.
I feel like such a comic nerd in whining about how much the Guardians of the Galaxy suck in their current comic run. For some time I thought I was just being too picky and I wasn’t giving it a chance because they weren’t written by Dan Abnett and
Andy Lanning of the 2008 series. But as time went on, I realized that wasn’t the issue. They are no longer the Guardians of the Galaxy because the current writer, Brian Michael Bendis, missed the brilliance which made the 2008 team so awesome.
(Quick aside: Full disclosure here, I have not read any of the original Guardians of the Galaxy team issues. If I’m being completely honest, I started reading Guardians of the Galaxy because Rocket Raccoon was there, and stayed around because I ended up liking a lot of the other characters too. In this entry, I will be only comparing the 2008 Guardians of the Galaxy run with the 2012 Guardians of the Galaxy run.)
Early on, I disliked the Guardians of the Galaxy 2012 comic run, but it took me a long time to untangle why I disliked it so passionately.
At first I thought it was because the comic tried to pander to the audience to make the Guardians relatable. The first issues follow the Guardians having to save Earth because Peter Quill’s dad causes Earth to become a target and in the process they team up with Iron Man because it’s so awesome that this obscure team gets to team up with someone as famous as Iron Man isn’t it cool?
No, not cool. Highly dissatisfying and shallow, yes. From the very beginning it seems Bendis did not trust the Guardians to carry their own comic. At first I thought this tone would just be used to introduce the characters, then let them head off on their own over-the-top adventures throughout the galaxy to let their characters breathe and develop.
That never happened. The comic continued to rely on stunt casting with each passing issue. After Iron Man, they teamed up with Angela. After Angela they teamed up with the X-Men. After X-Men stuff was resolved, Venom joined their ranks. After Venom came in, the team was split up immediately because of Events! After those Events! got finished, Captain Marvel joined the team.
Point is: THERE HAS NOT BEEN ONE DAMN ISSUE WITH THE GUARDIANS JUST BEING THE GUARDIANS!
But maybe that’s not a bad thing because all the Guardians kinda suck now.
Peter is pretty much a douche with daddy-issues in the vague form of a human. Gamora is the Most Dangerous Woman in the Galaxy, a fact that no one seems to shut up long enough for her to have a personality. I can’t recall one defining characteristic of Drax at all. Rocket is a murder-obsessed psychopath. Groot is Groot…which is actually just fine.
The Guardians comic keeps telling us that the Guardians are an unconventional team that’s so quirky and fun, but the Guardians comic is unwilling to show us any of that. The comic is so busy with stunt casting and shallow plotting that it’s forgotten to ever flesh out any of the characters. The thing that made me love the Guardians in 2008 is that no matter of the over-the-top conflicts they faced, the comic knew that the true power of the Guardians was the characters, and they took the time to make sure the characters showed through no matter what was happening.
Now everything the Guardians are is defined by “clever catchphrases” like “Blam! Murdered you!” Or Rocket’s murderous reaction to being called a raccoon.
And I’ll dwell on that a bit because it annoys me so much when people bring it up. His sudden and homicidal anger when called a raccoon makes no damn sense. In the GotG 2008 series Rocket was called “Rocket Raccoon” and his species was never an issue, period. Also, Rocket was a more measured and even-tempered character. Yes, he welded a big gun, but in the way it was portrayed, he did so because he thought big guns were awesome, not because he was a short-tempted maniac that wanted to kill everything. The old version of Rocket was also clever and intelligent, a weapons expert and a tactical genius, skills he showed off throughout the series.
That is why him going off the handle when being called a raccoon confuses me. If he just said something like: “Dude, I’m not a raccoon, I just look like a raccoon” in a calm way I would be cool with that, but usually his reaction is threatening to blow someone’s head off. His anger seems completely out of place of the character, because Rocket is smarter than that, and if he’s going to get angry about something like that, he would have good reason.
The way the Guardians of the Galaxy movie dwelt with it was much better. When “raccoon” is mentioned he has no idea what a raccoon is.
He does get angry when called “rodent” or “vermin” because he is familiar with those terms, and they are used in demeaning ways, and because he is insecure with himself and where he came from, those terms hurt him. It makes much more sense to me he doesn’t know what a raccoon is than getting crazy homicidal every time the word comes up. And if he gets angry about it, there should be a reason he gets angry about it. If Rocket actually knew what raccoons are I fail to see why he would be so angry about looking like one. Did he have a bad experience with a raccoon? Did someone try to show him some cute raccoon videos and he was offended? What would cause him to become so utterly unhinged?
From what we’ve been told in the comics, his angry reaction has no reason rather than to be “funny” just like his homicidal nature. The writer of the comic does not understand Rocket because instead of seeing a character, he sees a raccoon with guns who angrily shoots things and that’s enough for them. Rocket is a hollow husk of what he used to be. All of his cleverness and intelligence has been removed for the sake of making him “funny” while in the process making him an unlikable ass.
Part of me was hoping that the current reboot of the Marvel universe would fix the issues with the Guardians of the Galaxy and its characters, but as information has come out, I don’t have much hope of that. The same writer is back and the tagline is “The raccoon is in charge!” which I read as trying to be funny, as if it’s funny that Rocket would be the leader of the Guardians. Rocket has always been capable of being the leader of the Guardians and has practically the co-leader with Peter Quill in the ’08 comic. Rocket as a leader is not a crazy concept, but in the terrible way that Rocket is written in the comic, it totally is.
People joke that I read Guardians of the Galaxy because there’s a raccoon, and they are partly true. I found out there was a raccoon in the Marvel Universe and discovered he was going to be in a comic called Guardians of the Galaxy (he first re-appeared in a great comic arc called Annihilation: Conquest, teaming with some of the members who would become the Guardians, which I totally recommend checking out if you can). I bought the comic and found that Rocket was mostly drawn terribly, because comic artists don’t really know how to draw a mysterious species known as raccoon, and his artistic interpretation got progressively worse with each passing artist (with a few exceptions). But the writing was good, and so I kept reading, and no matter how badly Rocket was drawn, I loved the team as a whole.
When Guardians of the Galaxy came back, Rocket is actually drawn competently overall. Besides some weird stylistic issues, Rocket usually looks badass from issue to issue. But the overall writing is terrible, so I started buying the Guardians of the Galaxy comic for the art of a raccoon, and little else. The Guardians of the Galaxy comic as it stands is middle-of-the-road shallow comic dreck, which has forgotten how to be fun.
If you’re going to read something recent to do with Rocket Raccoon, do yourself a favor, skip the Guardians of the Galaxy comic and stick with the recent Rocket Raccoon run by Skottie Young. Or, even better, check out the new Groot series, which has some of the best portrayals I’ve seen of Rocket and Groot, period.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m holding on too deeply to my nostalgia of the previous series. Maybe I’m not being open-minded enough and I’m being too picky. I still think comics can be better, and that Guardians of the Galaxy deserves better. Just look at other Marvel offerings like the recent Ms. Marvel series (something I need to read more of) and the Squirrel Girl series (something I have read more of, which is amazing). Marvel can do much better for a quirky team of characters like the Guardians, and especially Rocket.
Though I may be a little bias.
If you’ve read the new series and disagree with me, please let me know, I’d totally be willing to discuss. If there’s someone out there who has happened to have read the 2008 series of GotG and the new series, and things I’m completely off in my opinions, also let me know. I would love for someone to tell me this is all in my head and the new comic has some merit that I’m somehow missing (though I would need to hear some damn good arguments for that).
I may have more to discuss on this on a later day, but that’s for another entry.
Something Red, Something Blue, Something Fuzzy, Something New 