Age of Marvel

I think it is safe to say we are now living in the Age of Marvel.

This blog post come with a quick test on whether you should stop reading right now.  When you read the phrase “Age of Marvel” did you think the capital M was merely superfluous capitalization or a proper noun?  If the former, you can safely stop reading now—nothing to see here.

One of my Christmas gifts this year was a copy of Guardians of the Galaxy: Prelude

It is a Marketing Stunt comic book, an advertisement for a movie which you, the Reader, saw if you both heeded the warning in the second paragraph and are still reading this blog post.  It is a trio of short stories providing the immediate background to the movie plot lines plus a quartet of rather old comic books which were the first introduction the assorted characters in the Guardians of the Galaxy.

I learned something from reading this.  There was a reason I knew next to nothing about the Guardians of the Galaxy before the movie announcement.  And therein lies a fascinating tale leading to the conclusion in the first sentence.

I have the 2006 edition of the Marvel Encyclopedia in my office.  A useful, as my father-in-law put it when he saw it on the Christmas Day I received it many years ago, reference book for fake stuff.  There is an entry for the Guardians of the Galaxy in it.  It is some 31^st century superhero group.  None of the people in the group are the ones in the movie you saw.  After reading my new prelude comic book, I realized that the characters in that quartet of introductory stories had no real reason to ever band together.  So, I looked up the whole matter.  Fascinating.  The Guardians of the Galaxy in my 2006 encyclopedia were dropped long ago.  In 2008, there was a new comic book run featuring this new set of superheroes.  That comic book run lasted 25 issues, and then was dropped.

The reason nobody really knew about the Guardians of the Galaxy before the movie was because they were never worth hearing about.

Even the characters are an odd set.  Strangest was Rocket Raccoon.  He first showed up in The Incredible Hulk’s 20^th Anniversary issue.  The opening tagline: “Now somewhere in the Black Holes of Sirius Major there lived a young boy name of…Rocket Raccoon.”  Rocket Raccoon on a quest to find, you guessed it, Gideon’s Bible.  Ha ha.  That is the sort of lame joke Marvel specialized in during the Dark Years (which  included 1981).  There is nothing in this comic book which would make you ever want to read another comic book about Rocket Raccoon.

Groot was also odd.  First shows up in a quick story in Tales to Astonish as an Evil Tree Being, who is thwarted by a nerdy scientist which allows the nerdy scientist to revel in the fact that his gorgeous girlfriend now thinks that maybe the nerdy scientist guy is better than the strapping young man in which she was starting to show interest.  That is old style Marvel fare.  But, again, there is no reason to think Groot would ever merit your attention. 

Indeed, neither Groot nor Rocket Raccoon merit entries in that aforementioned 2006 Encyclopedia—encyclopedia!—and for good reason.

So, they and a few other minor characters get thrown in a comic book called Guardians of the Galaxy which lasts a little over two years and dies.  End of story.

Well, except there is that mega-blockbuster movie about the characters from a failed comic book.  And that mega-blockbuster movie will have sequels because it was a mega-blockbuster movie.  Marvel is cranking out Movies about Nobodies and they are Huge Hits.

Why do they need the movies about Nobodies?  Oddly, Marvel has a problem.  They sold off the rights to make Spider-Man and Fantastic Four movies some time ago.  Then, they sold off the rights to X-Men to a different company.  Marvel is left with the ability to make movies with the leftover characters—which included, fortunately, the Avengers characters.  They have done an amazing job.  But, how to keep going?  Who is left?  Enter Guardians of the Galaxy.

And they turn that into a hit.  They also now have TV shows featuring nobodies.  (Never seen the TV shows—are they any good?)  At this point, I think Marvel could make a blockbuster movie based on Agent Pratt, John Prester, Princess Python, Presence, and Pretty Persuasions all teaming up to stop the Sons of the Serpent and the Soviet Super Soldiers.  (Picking two pages at random from the aforementioned encyclopedia.)

This is the Age of Marvel.  And I am really glad to be living in it.