A review by thecommonswings
Guardians of the Galaxy by Jim Valentino Vol. 1 by Tom DeFalco, Al Milgrom, Ron Marz, Len Kaminski, Ron Lim, Jim Valentino, Herb Trimpe

3.0

The late eighties were a weird time to be buying Marvel comics: I gravitated to stuff like Walt Simonson’s Fantastic Four run but although I bought a lot of other superhero comics around that time, they seemed a bit directionless and lacking in the focus of some of the more author driven stuff. This early Guardians book typifies that feeling, with some great ideas - the Stark, in particular - lost in a sort of weird mush of generic heroics and even more hackneyed villains. One of these, the amazingly named Taserface, eventually turns up in the second GOTG film mainly so they can laugh at his name (a little harsh, as it appears a ten year old literally came up with it), but generally as characters go, both the goodies and baddies are less defined in terms of their writing and more by their archetypes. If you kind of like your heroes like Ben Grimm, here’s Charlie 27 for example. As such there’s some pleasure to be had in a bunch of catchphrases slugging it out, but it wears itself out fairly quickly. The latter Korvac stuff is a bit more sprightly but feels like it’s cramming in a lot more exposition instead of actual plotting plus it does tend to show you how dull, say, said Charlie is when he’s literally with the Thing and you realise how much of a knock off he is