Marvel Unlimited Edition: (G)Roots Of The Guardians Of The Galaxy

The first Guardian to appear was Groot, one of the monsters-of-the-month in the earliest incarnation of Tales to Astonish. (He was cover-featured there a month after Gorgilla, the Monster of Midnight Mountain, and a month before the oversized ant Krang the Unbelievable.) In this initial story, drawn by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers and apparently written by Larry Lieber, Groot -- or whichever member of his species shares his name -- is rather more articulate than his Guardians equivalent; he also ends up being defeated by termites. Really. Look, they had seven pages to wrap up the story.

This one-shot from last year is actually a reprint of the first couple of Star-Lord stories, both originally published in 1976: the potboiler-ish, astrology-inspired Marvel Preview #4, by Steve Englehart and Steve Gan, and the much stronger Marvel Preview #11, an extended salute to Robert A. Heinlein. The latter was the first collaboration between Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin, who would become the creative team on the golden era of Uncanny X-Men a year later, and you can see their chemistry fall into place almost instantly. The story is reprinted in the original black and white here, along with the brief prologue and epilogue that Claremont and Michael Golden created for a color reprint in 1982.

Rocket's first appearance, in Marvel Preview #7, isn't available on Marvel Unlimited; his second, in The Incredible Hulk #271, is one of the app's bizarre "phantom" comics -- it appears to be there, but can't actually be loaded. The ridiculous 1985 Rocket Raccoon miniseries by Rocket's co-creator Bill Mantlo and Mike Mignola, on the other hand, appears twice -- both in this original form and as a one-shot, Rocket Raccoon: Tales from Half-World, published last year. Very densely written, it starts out as a sort of hyper-violent pastiche of Walt Kelly's Pogo, and rapidly flies off in several dozen directions at once. Mantlo seems to have treated the project as an opportunity to attempt the sort of free-form satire Steve Gerber had pulled off with Howard the Duck; it's also fascinating to see Mignola getting to draw some really weird things years before Hellboy began.