Review: Guardians of the Galaxy #0.1 by Brian Michael Bendis & Steve McNiven

Reviews, Top Story

Guardians of the Galaxy #0.1

Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
Pencilled by: Steve McNiven
Inked by: John Dell
Colored by: Justin Ponsor
Lettering by: VC’s Cory Petit

Published by: Marvel
Cover Price: $3.99

Note : This review is for the digital version of the comic available from Marvel on Comixology.

Warning! This review contains quite a few spoilers!

Summary (contains spoilers): This issue starts thirty years ago. A woman named Merdith is sitting on her porch, in Colorado when am alien space ship crashes in her yard.  The pilot is named J’son and he is royalty on a planet called Spartax. While J’son is repairing his ship, the two of them fall in love. J’son has to return to space to help his people fight the Badoon. He reluctantly leaves Meredith, planning to return as soon as he can. He does leave behind his gun (which seems to be an important family heirloom) and a bun in Meredith’s oven. Meredith….use protection next time you decide to have a one night stand with a space man. Haven’t you ever heard of sonic space herpes, the not-at-all-silent killer?

Ten years later, their son, Peter Quill reads comics and dreams about creating his own superheroes. Over the playground, a bully is picking on a girl, so Peter rushes over and starts to beat up the bully. He later explains to his mother that he had no choice, no one else was helping. As he heads in to clean up, two Badoon soldiers arrive, killing Meredith and looking to wipe out the entire “Spartex bloodline.”

Peter manages to kill them both with a shotgun. In the process, he finds his dad’s gun. Moments later, the house is blown up by an attack from the sky, but Peter manages to survive. He ends up in the hospital, and later the orphanage, the whole time keeping his father’s gun with him.

He found out that Peter is telling this story to Iron Man and his team, the Guardians of the Galaxy, in modern times. He thinks his father was an ass for letting the Badoon attack Earth and kill his mother. Peter is determined to make sure space threats stay far away from Earth, especially the Badoon. Hearing Peter’s story, Iron Man agrees that Peter’s cause is worthy, and he wants to work with him.

Review: Okay, this is a message to James Gunn. We don’t know each other, and I know jack and squat about making movies. But, you pretty much need to take this comic and turn it the opening of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. And the gorgeous cover needs to be the movie poster. Usually, I take the time to find different images for my banners and the little 120X120 image that appears on our news listing. But I loved the cover of this issue so much, I just used it as many times as I could get away with.

I was surprised by how similar this book was to last week’s Nova. They even started with the same “shot of space with a caption telling us when this takes place” following by a massive two-page title/credits page spread. And both stories are about a young kid with a connection to space and serious daddy issues who end up in a hospital with an artifact belonging to his father.  The Badoon feature heavily in both stories too. Don’t get me wrong, both books were very different, and both books were excellent, but I couldn’t help but wonder about those parallels. I assume a lot of them were intentional.

I actually haven’t read too much with this incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy (which is strange, since I love Abnett and Lanning), but I think it’s a pretty cool cast, and I am looking forward to the movie. Marvel might be taking a huge chance with that one, but I hope it pays off! More creativity and diverse movies are always a good thing!

One thing odd about this comic is that it really didn’t seem like a normal Bendis comic. I don’t mean that as a knock on Bendis, there are many, many book he’s written that I love (including Ultimate Comics Spider-Man), but Guardians of the Galaxy feels very different than anything else I’ve seen him do. The pacing feels fast, and this comics covers a lot of ground.   Despite this, the characters are still very well developed, and at the end we are left with a great place to start the series next month.

As for the art, I first fell in love with Steve McNiven’s art on Meridian. Over the years, his style is constantly evolving  and he continues to always be one of my favorite artists. He always manages to bring a lot of emotion out of each character, and there is a great attention to detail.

The entire art team does a great job of setting the mood through this entire book. There are just so many perfect lighting and coloring choices through this entire comic. The tone of this book changes quite a bit as you go, and the look of the comic shifts accordingly several times in some really clever ways:

The one small gripe I have with this comic…and I feel petty even mentioning it, is that the entire issue is Starlord-heavy, and we don’t even see the rest of the team until the last panels. But I guess since this is a .1 issue and not technically a first issue, they felt they could get away with using it purely to tell Starlord’s origin. But the terrific quality of this issue makes it easy to ignore that this was a team book without the team.

Last night, when I was working on my Nova review, I felt that it ranked up there with my favorite Marvel Now launches. And now Guardians of the Galaxy has topped that one as well. I give Marvel a lot of credit, this line continues to give me a lot of faith in Marvel moving forward, something I have not felt since before House of M.

I still hate that Marvel doesn’t price drop their digital comics, and charge 4 bucks for too many series, but when you have books as good as Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy, it reduces the sting somewhat. MY FAVORITE COMIC OF THE WEEK!

Final Score: 9.0: A great lead in to the new Guardians of the Galaxy series. With a movie on the way, if the comic is always this good, Marvel is going to have a huge hit on their hands here.

Mike Maillaro is a lifelong Jersey Boy and geek. Mike has been a comic fan for about 30 years from when his mom used to buy him Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Adventures at our local newsstand. Thanks, Mom!! Mike's goal is to bring more positivity to the discussion of comics and pop culture.