Why i hated Bendis run on Guardians of the Galaxy

[CaptainMar-Vell92 of the Kree]

Trust me, Bendis' run on the guardians in one of the worst comic runs i've ever read.


I will say that I have not read the post-Secret Wars issues at all, but I've read all of the Marvel NOW! series, as well as all the Annihilation and original Guardians of the Galaxy related books, and I can tell you that my biggest problem with the series is two-fold, though both items are closely related. That is, I think Bendis' Guardians of the Galaxy suffers from a total lack of conflict. This lack of conflict means the book feels inconsequential.

In the series, the Guardians are allegedly guarding Earth from threats (despite Earth having a truckload of heroes already), and it seems like instead, aside from utterly failing to notice Thanos coming during Infinity and helping out SWORD during that crossover, they spend most of their time simply recruiting new members who Bendis inevitably does nothing with (Iron Man, Angela, and Captain Marvel being notable examples, with Agent Venom showing up just long enough for them all to get kidnapped in the most interesting part of the whole run, but one that doesn't resolve the second part of my complaint). Sure, the original run added tons of characters left and right, but they were always added in order to resolve a particularly story beat, like Jack Flag with Star-Lord in the Negative Zone, or Moon Dragon and... all that stuff that happens with her. In Bendis' GotG, Captain Marvel joins for literally no reason except he wanted her on his team, for example.


Finally, the new Guardians have no agency on their own. Almost all of Bendis' Guardians stories have the team sitting on a ship and something terrible happens and they have to go fix it. There is no agency on the part of any of the characters, and none of the cast WANT anything. Every character needs to have some reason to be there, and none of them do anymore. As such, the stories feel flat and, again, pointless. The teenage X-Men are more heroic and have more agency in the crossover issues than the Guardians do, which is sad, because they're, well, kids.

There's no character growth, no plot in 4 years just random unexplained changes to any of the changes in character personalities.

1) Drax is suddenly turned from brooding space Kratos to dumbass with knives.

2) Rocket Tuns from tactically ingenious blue collar weisenheimer into a blood thirsty blood-knight howling for murder at every turn. (Blam murdered you!)

3) Gamora becomes the woman in distress who needs to be saved every once in awhile instead of being one of the greatest martial artists and assassins in the known universe.

4) Star-lord turns into a falstaffian man-child pirate from Sarcastic and remorseful space cop.

5) Thanos is turned from a morally ambiguous magnificent bastard schemer and philosopher into a foolish saturday morning cartoon villain who gets wrecked by street level characters and mid tier characters.

6) Groot is probably the only who hasn't been changed much, and that's only because Bendis had no idea what to really do with him. Well except that he gets destroyed like ALL THE TIME!


Finally, after nearly four years, Bendis and Marvel had no choice but to address what went on in the cancerverse with the Original Sin tie-in. Yet, in many ways, the damage of letting the topic slide had already been done. As it hit in the summer of 2014, the explanation turned out the pinnacle of suckitude of this run, especially when Bendis had claimed he had a “great” and long planned story in mind from the moment he began to work on the characters. (tell me lies tell me sweet little lies)

Truthfully, many aspects of this three issue arc did not even line up with the Avengers Assembled arc Bendis had already done. Further, the story did not even line up within itself either. Leaving aside the preposterous lazy notion that Nova (Richard Rider)’s arm could just be sliced off when he had energy shielding capable of protecting him from near limitless damage at super luminal speeds, Richard Rider was shown to die in a place where Bendis already said (and showed) you couldn’t die. Personally, I didn’t need a masterèiece of writing, but something that made a lick of sense would have been nice.

Even more mind-baffling, the three issue comic was severely decompressed, featured numerous spelling and grammar mistakes (Including spelling Richard Rider’s name wrong, like Ryder instead of Rider, and some cases two different ways in the same issue) i felt life the comic wasn’t even edited. Certainly the poor, disjointed quality of the arc contrasted with Bendis early claims that he had done “significant research” (AH!) on the character prior to taking ahold of GOTG.

The worse part of this arc was that the years of friendship and partnership between Peter Quill and Richard Rider was just ended so abruptly and devoid of emotion. Richard Rider was dug up just to throw dirt on his three year old dead body. As the story went on, there was nothing lasting or mysterious about the reveals and answers….the arc was just bad, ill-researched and nonsensical.


Yet, Bendis subsequent writing made matters worse. Not averse to showing thought bubbles in his comics, Bendis gave no lasting reason or noticeable imprint of Richard Rider’s death/ legacy in Peter Quill’s actions or thoughts. In fact, Quill hardly would even mention Rider, or think of him ever again.

To date, I don’t recall Quill ever interacted with the new Nova, Sam Alexander. Again, that makes little sense to me.

Long gone was any sort of notion he was still troubled by the 350k people he had sacrificed to stop a rogue herald of Galactus, the death and dismemberment of his close companion or perhaps even the months and hopeless months of gritty intergalactic war against Annihilus and Ultron.

Nope, this Quill was cool with all that noise. Without the friendship of Rider or his old realistic motivations, the character became a silly gag character who more often made fun of the old model than embraced what had been mysterious and complex about the old Quill. Additionally, with his “daddy issues” as a newfound chief motivation, Quill seemed rather banal and off, especially considering where the character had been. Even worse, Bendis never constructed a logical bridge to show readers how any of the changes got from a point A to point B.

I'm not saying the GOTG has to be a gritty and violent military science fiction like Warhammer 40,000 or having Jim Starlin's brand of trippy existenzialism to be good, but they need an author who cares about continuity and knows how to write space operas. Thankfully i think the GOTG are in decent hands with Donny Cates.