Star-Lord's and Gamora's Relationship

The current and most well-known version of the Guardians of the Galaxy team formed in the 2006 event, Annihilation. Eight years later, they received their own movie, 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy. In that time, they appeared in 75 issues across multiple titles. In the five years since then, they have appeared in over 200 issues. That is almost entirely due to the success they've had on film. So it's no surprise the comics have steadily changed to make them more like their movie counterparts, from character designs like Star-Lord and Nebula, to new concepts like the Milano and the Ravagers, to relationships like Nebula and Gamora. It's another Gamora relationship we'll talk about today, this time between her and Star-Lord.

In the comics, Gamora does have a romantic relationship with a fellow Guardian, but it's Nova, aka Richard Rider. This is first seen in Annihilation #1 (August 2006) and lasts until his death in the Cancerverse (Guardians of the Galaxy #20, June 2014).

In the films, however, Gamora has a relationship with Star-Lord. In the first film it's mostly flirting, but they're officially together during the second film.

But this all changed in the latest volume of Guardians of the Galaxy. Although it's been building since Infinity Wars, they officially get together in Guardians of the Galaxy #7 (July 2019).

Is this a temporary thing or will they go the distance? Only time will tell.

Nebula's Relationship with Gamora

One of the things the movie Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and its sequel did really well was take a lot of disparate cosmic Marvel characters and form them into a cohesive whole. Credit where credit's due, the process was started by the 2006 event Annihilation, which the movies take a lot of inspiration from, but the movies really ran with it. One example of this is the relationship between Gamora and Nebula.

Gamora, aka The Deadliest Woman in the Whole Galaxy, first appeared in Strange Tales #180 (April 1975) as a bounty hunter looking for Adam Warlock. Only a few months later in Warlock #10 (October 1975), we learn that she was rescued by Thanos as a little girl and raised as his daughter to kill an evil version of Adam Warlock called The Magus.

Meanwhile, Nebula is introduced in Avengers #257 (May 1985) as a pirate who has taken over Thano's ship, the Sanctuary II. We learn there's more to the story in #260 (August 1985), however, when she reveals that she's Thanos's granddaughter.

In Infinity Gauntlet #1 (May 1991), Thanos calls the legitimacy of this claim into question, but accepts her as his granddaughter anyway.

For the next two decades, Gamora and Nebula only appear in a handful of issues together. In fact, they don't interact until Annihilation: Ronan #2 (May 2006), and don't show any sign of familiarity. In Annihilation: Ronan #4 (July 2006), Nebula has joined Gamora's team, the Graces, but they still don't seem to have any level of relationship beyond that.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) changes this drastically. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Gamora and Nebula are both Children of Thanos, and they have an intense rivalry as he constantly pits them against each other in combat. The reason Nebula is a cyborg in this universe is that, every time Nebula lost a fight against Gamora, Thanos would upgrade her to make her better. By this point, she's mostly machine. However, once they each turn on Thanos for their own reasons, they grow closer together and treat each other like sisters.

In Thanos Annual #1 (May 2014), Nebula is referred to as a daughter of Thanos for the first time. As it came out a few months before Guardians of the Galaxy was released, I don't know if it was planned to be roughly in time with the movie, or if it's just a coincidence. Either way, the Nebula discussed in this issue is from an alternate reality, so it doesn't really count one way or the other.

Guardians Team-Up #2 (March 2015) complicates things. Nebula and Gamora interact more than ever before, and it seems like they have personal history. Nebula in particular says she has many things she could blame Gamora for. That being said, the person who has hired Nebula to capture Gamora doesn't like Gamora because she's the daughter of Thanos, which implies Nebula is NOT a daughter of Thanos.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Best Story Ever #1 (April 2015) doesn't clear up anything. On one page, it re-affirms that Nebula is a granddaughter of Thanos, yet later Gamora refers to Nebula as her "sister" (quotes hers). Either way, there's clearly an animosity between them.

I thought Gamora #1 (December 2016) settled the issue. In it, Gamora and Nebula consider each other sisters and act as if they were raised together. But I don't actually know if it's continuity. The writer says it's set in the MCU, but nothing in the comic itself claims that (not to mention that Gamora and Thanos use their comics designs, not their movie ones). To make it worse, the genocide of Gamora's people, as depicted, doesn't match the movies OR the comics. So we'll just disregard the whole thing.

Unfortunately, that means this entry won't end with the smoking gun I thought it would. But I feel that the two Guardians stories from 2015, and the recent Asgardians of the Galaxy #3 (November 2018) that shows Nebula has a clear rivalry with Gamora, add up to make essentially the same point.

Flashback Friday: Arc Reactor

Each Friday, I take one of the entries from my old Super Posts and expand it into its own featured article.

This week: the Arc Reactor!

The arc reactor first appeared in the film Iron Man (May 2008) as a portable power source that powered the magnet that kept a piece of shrapnel from entering Tony Stark's heart, as well as powering the Iron Man suit. It was a miniaturized version of a machine that Howard Stark built to create clean energy, a project that didn't go anywhere until Tony was able to miniaturize it. Side note: much evidence across the Marvel Cinematic Universe shows that the Arc Reactor is Howard Stark's attempt to create a man-made version of the Tesseract.

It later appeared in Invincible Iron Man #3 (July 2008), though instead called a Repulsor Technology Node. Pepper Potts was caught in an explosion that caused shrapnel to lodge into her body. Tony has a node implanted into her chest to keep the shrapnel from entering her heart. He also says he used one when the same thing happened to him in the Middle East, which essentially completely rewrites his origin to match the movie. Although the "Extremis" storyline from 2007 moved his origin to the Middle East, this is the first time it's been noted that he implanted something into his chest to help with his heart condition, rather than crating a whole chestplate to wear.

In Invincible Iron Man #21 (December 2009), Tony has to reboot the Extremis within his body to prevent Norman Osborn from gaining access to it. Doing so causes his body to shut down, so he has to get an RT Node implanted to restart it. Incidentally, this same issue seems to indicate he had both the RT Node and chestplate when he escaped Afghanistan.

The Arc Reactor/RT Node has continued to appear since then, although I'm not sure it's ever been vital to a storyline again. I'm also pretty sure neither Tony nor Pepper still have theirs; they're simply a way to power the suits these days.

Group Spotlight: Ten Rings

This is an important one! But CBR already wrote about it, so I’ll defer to them.

The gist is that the Ten Rings are a terrorist organization led by the Mandarin that debuted in Iron Man (May 2008), and Ironheart #1 (November 2018) has finally brought it into the comics ten years later. You can read about it in more detail at the following link:

https://www.cbr.com/mcu-ten-rings-iron-man-ironheart/

As you can see, the symbol isn’t completely the same, but it’s close enough.

Spider-Gwen's New Alias: Ghost Spider

With Halloween just around the corner, I figured it was a perfect opportunity to talk about "Ghost Spider". So what is Ghost Spider, anyway?

To answer that question, we have to go back a few years to a little event called Spider-Verse. You may have heard of it. The premise was that a group of bad guys was traveling to all the different alternate universes to kill all the different Spider-Men and -Women, so a bunch of different Spiders teamed up to help defeat them. It was billed as featuring "Every. Spider-Man. Ever.", and although that isn't true, it came very close. It also introduced several new Spider-Men in the pages of a mini-series called Edge of Spider-Verse, and one of those new characters was Spider-Woman, aka Gwen Stacy. She debuted in issue 2 (September 2014).

This version of Spider-Woman had a great costume, and the issue had a punk rock sensibility, both of which greatly appealed to fans, so it didn't take long for her to get her own series, Spider-Gwen (February 2015), set on Earth-65. (Side note: although the series is called Spider-Gwen and that's what fans call her too, her superhero name has always officially been Spider-Woman.)

Spider-Gwen has quickly become one of Marvel's most popular characters, so she's started appearing in merchandise and adaptations as well. In December 2017, she was announced to be in a movie called Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors. Only in this movie, she goes by Ghost Spider.

In July 2018, Marvel announced she'd be getting a new series called Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider, which released last week.

I dig the name. Not only does it play up her unique outfit, but it cleverly has the same initials as Gwen Stacy. And that's not the first time they've done it. It took me a while to notice, but she lives on Earth-65 because 65 looks a lot like GS.

Just A Small Little Thing: Cottonmouth's Name

Canon immigration due to synergy can be a strange thing. Introducing a new character or concept to make the comics more like the new adaptation or to promote said adaptation makes sense, but it doesn't always look like that. They're not all Aqualad or Aya. Sometimes they're a small detail that most people won't even register. Cottonmouth is a great example of that.

Cottonmouth is a Luke Cage villain that first appeared in Luke Cage, Power Man #19 (April 1974) after being mentioned in the previous issue. He's a drug kingpin who tries to hire Luke as muscle, which Luke accepts as a way to get evidence that Willis Stryker framed him for the crime that sent him to jail. Cottonmouth was obviously involved as well. Despite sounding like a villain name or a street name, and despite having connections to Stryker, aka Diamondback, it is implied that "Cottonmouth" is simply Cornell Cottonmouth's last name.

Cottonmouth is a pretty minor character even though he has ties to a superhero's origin, only appearing a total of 7 times (until recently), and two of those were in an alternate universe. So some may find it strange that he was featured so prominently in the Luke Cage tv series (September 2016). But featured prominently he was, and if anything good can be said about that series, it's that it did a great job at humanizing its villains. So Cornell Cottonmouth became Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes, a shady club owner and gun runner. In the MCU, "Cottonmouth" was a nickname he picked up as a kid when he got some teeth knocked out. He hates it and people use it mainly to make him mad.

Of course, one of the great things about adaptations is they can raise the prominence of characters. Most people only know Luke Cage through the Netflix shows, so suddenly Cage's biggest villains are Cottonmouth, Diamondback, Black Mariah, Shades, and Bushmaster, even though they've only had a handful of appearances each. And that means when Luke Cage gets a new series - Power Man and Iron Fist - because of the show, those characters definitely get their share of the spotlight. Thus, we get Power Man and Iron Fist #10 (November 2016), where we not only get Cottonmouth and Mariah working together (along with Piranha Jones, who isn't a villain in the show, and Tombstone and Mr. Fish, who aren't in the show at all), but we see Cottonmouth's full name:

It's a small detail, but honestly, it makes more sense this way.

Marvel Tsum Tsum

This is a weird one, so get ready.

In 2013, Disney created a new line of plushies in Japan called Tsum Tsum. The name comes from the Japanese word tsumu, which means "to stack", because Tsum Tsums are designed to be stackable. (Note: pictured are plastic ones that were introduced later; the originals were plushies, as seen in the next image.)

Over the next couple years, they expanded the line to include Pixar, LucasFilm, and Marvel. The Marvel ones specifically debuted in September 2015, and that first wave basically included everyone you'd expect: most of the movie Avengers (minus Scarlet Witch, Falcon, and Hawkeye), the Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, Chitauri, Loki, Ultron, and Ronan, plus a few surprising choices like a Hydra agent, an AIM agent, and Venom.

A year later, Marvel - for some reason - released a four-issue miniseries called Marvel Tsum Tsum. Issue #1 came out in August 2016. The premise of the series is that a crate of these Tsum Tsums are en route to The Collector (from another dimension, I believe, but I could be wrong about that), but they end up on Earth. And not only are the Tsum Tsums alive, they consider themselves to be the real heroes and Earth-616's heroes to be strange imposters!

It's a bizarre plot, to be sure, but it seems like a lot of fun and an interesting way to use the brand.

Vehicle Spotlight: The Milano

I've been waiting to feature this one for almost a year, but I could never find visual proof...until now.

Many people don't know this, but the film Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) took a lot of liberties with the property. Although the main cast matches the post-Annihilation version of the team, a good chunk - possibly a majority - of the rest of the movie is original to it, even including some of the main characters' personalities and backstories. One such example is the Milano, Star-Lord's personal Ravager ship.

In the comics, the Guardians used a much different ship. However, beginning in All-New Guardians of the Galaxy, the team was suddenly using the Milano - name and all, despite the fact that the name is pretty dependent on Quill's man-out-of-time-who-grew-up-in-the-80s persona that doesn't really jib with the backstory of the comics version. The ship first appeared in All-New Guardians of the Galaxy #1 (May 2017).

Its origin is given a couple days later in Free Comic Book Day: All-New Guardians of the Galaxy 2017 (May 2017), where we learn the Guardians' ship was impounded by the Nova Corps, and they went to steal it back but decided to take the Milano instead.

Magneto’s Telepathy-Blocking Helmet

CBR, formerly Comic Book Resources, has a feature called “Follow the Path” that’s essentially the same as this blog. Sometimes they post things I was not aware of, and unfortunately they go into so much detail that anything I wrote about the subject would basically be plagiarism. In cases like that, I just post the link and be done with it. But since it’s not a “real” post, I’m doing it on Saturday instead of the usual Wednesday. 

In the following link, you can learn all about how the idea that Magneto’s helmet is to block Xavier’s telepathy was a product of the 2000 X-Men film. I don’t know if I completely buy it; I don’t recall being surprised by that fact when I first heard it, which makes me think I’d heard it before. Unfortunately, I can’t find any evidence online.

https://www.cbr.com/magneto-helmet-telepathy-protection/2/

Wakanda Salute

Canon immigrants happen for all kinds of reasons. The two most common are that the creators are homaging an adaptation they loved (usually as kids) or that the creators are trying to create synergy with a new adaptation for various reasons. Occasionally, like with the hit movie Black Panther, it's both.

Black Panther, to put it simply, was a phenomenon. It made more money in the US than Marvel's The Avengers, it has a chance of beating The Avengers in the "adjusted for inflation" category, and it just. won't. leave. the theatre. It was released on February 16, 2018, and as of this writing, it's still there! Keep in mind that Avengers: Infinity War was released A MONTH ago. It was released on dvd THREE WEEKS ago. This just doesn't happen. The only reason it would still be in theatres at this point is if it's still making money, and to still be doing that at this stage is a testament to how successful it is.

The movie was a cultural success as well. And one of the things that started popping up from the movie the most was the "Wakanda Forever" salute. Here's an example from the movie:

And here are some examples from real life:

It's no surprise, then, that it didn't take long to make it into the comics, as seen here in Black Panther #171 (March 2018):

Note that it's expressed with a "Hail Wakanda!" instead of "Wakanda Forever!", but the sentiment is still there.

Hulk vs Thor

Changes are inevitable in adaptations. And sometimes, even when a specific story is adapted, the changes made to the story can sometimes be adapted back into a different story. 

Planet Hulk is a perfect example.

"Planet Hulk" was a 2006 storyline in which the Illuminati (an organization of Marvel bigwigs that have their noses in everything) exiled the Hulk to space, where he landed on the planet Sakaar and was forced into gladiatorial combat. Most notably, he had to fight the Silver Surfer.

When Planet Hulk was turned into an animated movie (2010), Silver Surfer was replaced with Beta Ray Bill, who is essentially an alien Thor. (In case you're unfamiliar with Beta Ray Bill, the short version is that he took over as Thor briefly, then Odin gave him his own hammer called Stormbreaker).

"Planet Hulk" was also a large part of Thor: Ragnarok (2017). In this case, Hulk fought actual Thor.

This scene in particular made a huge splash with fans, particularly because of a line Thor says where he's excited Hulk shows up ("Yes! I know him! He's a friend from work."), which was suggested by a fan during a set visit.

So when Incredible Hulk #711 (December 2017) decided to revisit Sakaar's gladiatorial games - no doubt to coincide with the movie, which came out in November - they had the new Hulk (Amadeus Cho) fight Odinson (an unworthy Thor). Except they twisted it a bit by reversing the roles - they even give Hulk the "friends" line!

What's most interesting is that Greg Pak wrote both the original Planet Hulk storyline and this one!

Name Spotlight: James Wesley

Wesley is not a canon immigrant.

If you don't know who Wesley is, he's Kingpin's right hand man, whose main job is to clean up Kingpin's messes. He first appeared in Daredevil #227 (December 1985), and to be honest, didn't make too many appearances after that. But he was only ever called Wesley.

He later showed up in Daredevil (2003), and they gave him a full name: Wesley Owen Welch. This information is key to the mystery at the heart of the movie...which, incidentally, was almost entirely cut out of the theatrical version.

He appeared again in Daredevil season one (2015), and once again was given a full name. Only this time, he was called James Wesley.

It is with this name that he reappeared in comics recently, in Kingpin #4 (May 2017).

Spider-Man's Marriage

This is one of those tricky ones where an idea was created for an adaptation, then they decided to introduce the idea in the comics as well, before the idea appeared in the adaptation. What makes this trickier is that they tried to have the two storylines coincide.

Since 1977, Stan Lee has written a daily newspaper strip called The Amazing Spider-Man. At some point he decided Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson should get married in it, and he approached Marvel Comics about them doing the storyline in the comics as well, ideally having them take place the same week.

They didn't happen in the same week, but they did happen close together. In the comic strip, the marriage took place on June 21, 1987:

In the comics, they got married in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (August 1987):

Of course, they're no longer married, which is unfortunate. But it still counts!