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Today the Guardians of the Galaxy are one of the most well-known groups in the Marvel Universe. In 1990 it was a different story. Before their MCU debut, and before their 2008 comic revamp, the Guardians of the Galaxy were dead and forgotten. The team had stopped making regular appearances and weren’t seen for a majority of the 1980s.

When writer and artist Jim Valentino was looking for characters to reinvent, he instantly gravitated towards the Guardians. “I remember I was thumbing through the Marvel handbook because it had all of the various characters at that time. And I was looking for characters that nobody had touched in a long time. And I came across the Guardians of the Galaxy,” Jim Valentino says during an appearance on the Robservations with Rob Liefeld podcast.

“I remember calling [Rob Liefeld] up and saying, what do you think of these guys? And [Rob said], they look cool, but they don’t have a story. And that kind of sat with me for a while. And I remember getting up in the middle of the night. This must have been like two days before we left for [WonderCon]. And it hit me - do a quest. Quests are always iconic. Do a quest for Captain America’s shield because it had been previously established that Vance Astro was a big fan of Captain America. His room was decked out with Captain America statues and stuff like that, that Al Milgrom had done.”

“I pitched the idea of the quest for Captain America’s shield. [Tom DeFalco] had been thinking about reinventing the Guardians of the Galaxy, and he said his idea was that there would be another 500 years or so in the future, or a thousand years in the future, or something like that. He said he liked my idea better.”

This led to Marvel launching a new Guardians of the Galaxy series in 1990, which lasted for five years and 62 issues. Thanks to Valentino, the team was back on the map. Did this lead to the popular MCU films? It’s hard to say, but it certainly made the Guardians an active part of the Marvel Universe again.

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