rocket raccoon

Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.

The Marvel Unlimited app is a gigantic, messy cache of awesome and terrible old comic books: a library of 13,000 or so back issues of Marvel titles, available on demand for subscribers with tablets or mobile phones. Like any good back-room longbox, it’s disorganized and riddled with gaps, but it’s also full of forgotten and overlooked jewels, as well as a few stone classics. In Marvel Unlimited Edition, Eisner-winning critic Douglas Wolk dives into the Unlimited archive to find its best, oddest and most intriguing comics. Two spin-offs of Guardians of the Galaxy launch in recent weeks: The Legendary Star-Lord and the already-surprise-hit Rocket Raccoon. Marvel Unlimited's got a fairly thorough, if not quite complete, selection of most of the Guardians' previous appearances, especially the ones in the Annihilation/Annihilation: Conquest/Annihilators sequence. But their prehistory is worth digging into, too, and there's some choice proto-Guardians material in the archive.

I promise I mean this in the best possible way: Writer/artist Skottie Young and colorist Jean-Francois Beaulieu's Rocket Raccoon #1 reads like a comics version of a LucasArts computer adventure game. I realize that comparisons like that can be a backhanded insult. Saying that one piece of media is like another is an indirect way of saying it's derivative or wears its influences too clearly on its sleeve. That isn't what I'm trying to say here. What I mean is that Rocket Raccoon has a particularly appealing sense of humor to it, a specific style to its art, and its characters -- even those that appear in the margins -- feel alive.

Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.

In the year 2014, a single comic book selling 300,000 copies in a single month is a very big deal. For perspective, the top comic from March was Batman #29, which sold just about 117,000 copies. April's top seller was Amazing Spider-Man #1, which managed a jaw-dropping 532,000, but was bolstered by numerous retailer incentives tied to variant covers. The first issue of Skottie Young's new Rocket Raccoon series is a bit of an anomaly, though. Yes, it has reportedly sold 300,000 copies according to Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso, and without much in the way of arcane retailer incentives, but it seems that about 100,000 of those comics were all ordered by one source: Loot Crate, a service that sends subscribers monthly boxes of "geek and gamer" merchandise.

Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.

Look, I'll admit that I haven't been completely excited about the upcoming Rocket Raccoon series by Skottie Young. Don't get me wrong, I love Bill Mantlo and Keith Giffen's spacefaring guardian as much as the next guy, and I'm pretty sure it's just our signature brand of ComicsAlliance Elitist Hipsterism creeping through that made me a little dismissive since the upswing in popularity that's keyed to this summer's big-budget Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but I just wasn't really into it. And then I found out that the first issue is about space-wrestling.

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We've already heard about the new Skottie Young Rocket Raccoon series coming this July, but it's not the only Guardians of the Galaxy solo title that will be hitting shelves that month. Marvel has announced the first issue of a new Legendary Star-Lord series, which will also be coming in July, just in time for the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. The new series will be written by Sam Humphries (Aven

Marvel Studios has released four new images from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, two of which are official stills and two of which go behind the scenes. The most interesting of the bunch is a shot of Chris Pratt's Star-Lord running along the terrain of an alien planet, with the wall behind him just a flat wall of blue. It's not all that different from an old Star Trek set. It just goes to show