Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: guardians of the galaxy, marvel, rick remender

Rick Remender Had Plans for an Original Guardians of the Galaxy Revival

Superstar comic book writer Rick Remender wanted to revive the Guardians of the Galaxy fifteen years ago but with the original team, not the new one that spun out of Annihilation, the cosmic super-mega-crossover event released around that same timeframe.

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, many comic shops are closed and Diamond is shut down. Marvel and DC have chosen not to release new comics digitally and as a result, no one has new to read. Comic media, unfortunately, has nothing to write about save for anything creatives might want to share on social media.

One comic book writer has come up with a clever idea to keep people talking and writing about comic books during this unprecedented shutdown. Rick Remender has been digging through his old files while stuck at home, and he's been revealing a bunch of old pitches that never came to fruition.

So far, we've learned about his plans for taking over the X-books that never came to be after he told Marvel to drown in hobo piss in 2014 over the corporately-mandated Inhumans vs. X-Men. We've looked at his rejected pitch for a Spider-Man story bursting with bug-themed baddies and saw a veritable crap ton of artwork from his various creator-owned Image Comics series and the same from his Marvel days. We even got to read part of a Namor pitch that was basically Frank Miller's Daredevil: Born Again meets The Little Mermaid, and a wild Hearts of Darkness sequel pitch that would have seen the invention of Cosmic Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange in a polyamorous relationship with Clea and Brother Voodoo, and vampire Wolverine and werewolf Captain America doing their own version of Twilight, a Ka-Zar pitch that saw the Savage Land relocated to Central Park, and a Silver Surfer pitch that blamed everything on the devil.

The latest pitch from Remender is one that would bring back the Guardians of the Galaxy. The original ones from the future. Remender says these pitches came from the 2006-2009 era, so it's not entirely clear whether this pitch was made after 2006's Annihilation event, which set the stage for the second volume of Guardians of the Galaxy to launch in 2008. That team would go on to become the one that would star in the Marvel Studios films, and they're the ones most recognized today. But Remender's pitch involves the original Guardians created by Stan Lee and Arnold Drake way back in 1969.

An unexpected event has transpired within the current Marvel Universe, one that has never occurred in any timeline before. The result is a very different future in which the malevolent Brotherhood of Badoon rise to power and enslave the known universe long before the Guardians of the Galaxy ever exist. Darker in tone than any of the original incarnations, this version follows the four core members of The Guardians of the Galaxy as they embark on a desperate and perilous journey through a galaxy dominated by evil. Their hope is to locate the one remaining artifact that can save their worlds – Dr. Strange's Eye of Agamatto.

In the current Marvel Universe timeline, the technology needed to wage war on the most powerful empires in the universe will not be developed by the Brotherhood of Badoon until the year 3000. However, something has gone wrong – something that has never happened in any divergent timeline or alternative reality. The immensely powerful technology of Thanos has been secured by the Badoon in our time. They now have the power to stage their offensive on the galaxy centuries sooner; nothing held by Kree, Skrull, Shi'ar or Human will stop them.

We open our story in the year 3053 with Charlie 26, a militiaman from Jupiter locked away in a dang Badoon prison on a dark asteroid. Charlie 27 was the leader of a revolution on Jupiter that was fueled by his knowledge that there are relics spread throughout the MY that could defeat the Badoon. Nearly a thousand years ago when the Badoon attacked Earth, the heroes of the planet created a "Noah's Arc" of all the most powerful relics and weapons on the planet and spread them across the stars in hopes of keeping them from the Badoon's grasp…

If Remender's team had caught on, the Marvel Universe might look a lot different today. But things went a different way, and though this future story could theoretically still work, Remender has no interest in trying again.

Cheers to you though, Rick Remender. Your declined pitches of yesterday are the only "new comics" we're likely to get for a while, so we hope you keep 'em coming.

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