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Few things are more likely to make me feel apprehensive as the combination of the words “indie retro horror.” There’s a lot of well-intentioned material with that self-applied categorical description floating around the […]

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Warning, this post contains spoilers for the film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Proceed with caution. 

For longtime fans of Marvel Comics, one of the biggest treats in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was seeing the original Guardians of the Galaxy debut on the big screen. Led by Sylvester Stallone in the role of Stakar Ogord, also known as Starhawk, the OG Guardians were re-positioned as Ravagers, much like their former teammate Yondu (the always amazing Michael Rooker).

Created in 1969 by writer Arnold Drake and artist Gene Colan,  Guardians of the Galaxy bounced around the year 3000, traveling back and forth in time and battling all sorts of villainous aliens. It was basically a generic superhero comic with a semi-rotating cast until the 1990s and a man named Jim Valentino–the very same who helped found Image Comics.

With a fresh new #1 issue, Guardians of the Galaxy relaunched with Valentino serving as writer and artist. Under his creative direction, the adventures of Starhawk, Aleta, Charlie-27, Yondu, Martinex, and Nikki got weird. Really weird and really awesome.

Guardians of the Galaxy By Jim Valentino from Marvel Comics

Does the inclusion of these characters mean that Marvel plans on showcasing some of their bizarre adventures? It’s certainly possible. With the current slate of Guardians of the Galaxy films, Marvel Studios has proven they ain’t afraid of getting weird, and that’s a good thing. If they plan on exploring the adventures of the original Guardians, things are going to get even weirder.

We encourage you to visit your favorite comic book store and pick up some of the classic Guardians of the Galaxy collections, but in the meantime, we thought we’d share some of our favorite moments from the awesomely crazy ’90s run of the series.

Taserface and the Stark

The real star of the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is Taserface, the mutineer Ravager who wages battle upon Yondu. You could be thinking, in the comics, Taserface was a Stark: a race of aliens who worshiped Tony Stark. These folks loved Iron Man so much they named their entire race after him. Unlike his cinematic counterpart, the Taserface of the comics is named as such because he literally shoots a taser beam out of his facial armor–it’s not metaphorical, in other words.

Guardians of the Galaxy by Jim Valentino from Marvel Comics

Earth, home of the Punishers

The Guardians find themselves on Earth on a number of different occasions, but the strangest involves a trip to Manhattan and a battle with the Punishers. New York has all but been taken over by this brutal gang of Frank Castle devotees. The Guardians engage in an epic street war with these goons and it basically ends with the Guardians retreating. The Punishers are too vast and too insane.

Guardians of the Galaxy from Marvel Comics

The Mutants of the Future

In the world of the original Guardians of the Galaxy, mutantkind fled Earth and started a new life on a different planet. The series actually lays out a pretty cool backstory for this, but the strangest footnote is that the descendants of Wolverine essentially take over as supreme rulers of all mutants.

Guardians of the Galaxy from Marvel Comics

When the Guardians cross paths with the mutants, they are lead by Rancor. She’s a tyrant who looks exactly like Wolverine – that haircut ain’t a good look, lady – and murders her own father. She then takes over the whole planet and turns all the humans she can find into slaves for mutants. It’s crazy stuff.

Major Victory

The one character that seems to be missing from the lineup of original Guardians in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is Vance Astro. The former astronaut is a time traveler, of sorts. He was in a hypersleep on a ship that veered off course, leaving him in suspended animation for over a thousand years. The Guardians discover him, and he joins up with them, eventually becoming the group’s leader and moral center. He ends up with Captain America’s shield, like the original Captain America, and wields it with telekinetic powers that he gained, uh, somehow. All in all, he’s actually a pretty cool character with a great design, that is, until he is reborn as Major Victory.

Guardians of the Galaxy from Marvel Comics

Yes, Major Victory, the most 90’s superhero ever. Even in the far reaches of outer space, in the distant future, mullets and headbands became fashionable. Just look at this guy! The sleeves trenchcoat, the collar, the thigh-high boots! In a comic series filled with crazy stuff, this just might be the craziest. Major Victory, we salute you and your weird fashion choice.

There are plenty of other bizarre moments in the 62-issue run of the 1990s Guardians of the Galaxy. Sure, most of them won’t make it into any Marvel movies, but some might. Hey, 20 years ago, who would have thought we’d have a big screen version of Rocket Raccoon? Maybe Major Victory is ready for his close-up? I mean, Taserface got his screen time, right? Give Vance Astro his due, Marvel!

Did you read the old-school Guardians of the Galaxy? If you did, sound off in the comments below and let us know your favorite moment from the series!

Images: Marvel Comics

Which Guardian is the Guardians’ favorite?

by Shannon Gibney and Lori Askeland

Hulu’s reboot of The Handmaid’s Tale opens with a car chase: the protagonist (Elisabeth Moss), who will later be called “Offred,” is racing with her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and daughter Hannah (Jordana Blake) in their faded, old model Volvo through a frozen landscape, sirens of their invisible pursuers wailing.

The decision to introduce us to Offred as a member of an interracial family revealed an obvious break from the overwhelmingly white world of the novel and 1990 movie. Many reviewers construed that fact — and the powerful presence of Samira Wiley in the role of Offred’s badass lesbian friend, Moira — as undeniable evidence that the series would be more intersectional in its approach to feminist themes than the novel had been.  (“There’s intersectionality, too, with Moira, a lesbian, played by a black actress, Ms. Wiley,” was the breezy quip of the New York Times’ Katrina Onstad.) But sadly, bodies of color alone do not a liberatory racial narrative make. Indeed, a deeper look at the series shows the uncomplicated, and therefore, problematic effects of this “colorblind” casting.

Back in the world of the series’ opening sequence, the car crashes off to the side of the icy road as the pursuers gain on them, and Luke, “not-yet-Offred’s” black husband, tells his wife and child to run into the woods across the street. The camera focuses on mother and child, frantically, desperately running through the bleak landscape… until we hear the stark sound of a gunshot in the distance. The anguished look on “not-yet-Offred’s” face tells us everything we need to know: That her beloved has been killed by the insurgents, that he has in fact sacrificed himself in order for his family to live (cue sardonic groan of all viewers of color at this point, maybe three minutes into the first episode). Indeed, the frequency with which characters of color are killed off early in movies and films so that the deserving white people they love so much can live, has become something of a running joke. The trope has become so familiar to black and viewers of color that one friend called it a “blackrifice” on her social media feed.

Of course, Luke reappears in the numerous flashbacks peppered throughout the series, giving characters texture and depth via their lives pre-Gilead, and I know that legions of viewers of color are thrilled that actor O-T Fagbenle will still get work this year, even though his character is ostensibly dead. But the point remains that, narratively speaking, his role in the series as its lone sacrificial and very-much-dead black man, is suspect.

As a friend pointed out on an online discussion, the Handmaid’s Tale series is a missed opportunity to examine how evangelical movements, which are almost always patriarchal, often rely on racism to achieve their goals. I was thinking, in that first episode: Oohh: how are they going to make 2017 Luke’s experience of the patriarchy as a black man different from the experience of the novel’s white 1985 Luke? My assumption was: obviously, he will not be treated the same. When he goes out onto the street, would Moira really be likely to be “safer” with a tall, muscular black man, or would they together seem like a threat? Is his ability and right to “protect” Offred — paternalistic as it might be — going to be respected in the world as white Luke’s paternalistic rights were (except for the fact that he was divorced?). But, alas, as director Bruce Miller has noted with misplaced pride, “Once you have decided it’s going to be a diverse world, it doesn’t change the story.” When black characters are just substituted in, the post-racial optics are what allow the television show to erase any interrogation of white supremacy as a logical part of any post-apocalyptic scenario in a US context — which is what Atwood was shooting for.

Then there is the issue of Offred’s “sassy” and “take no shit/take no prisoners,” best friend Moira, who is now a black lesbian, rather than a white lesbian, in this iteration of Atwood’s world. While I was happy to see the series attempting to accurately represent contemporary America, racially and otherwise, I was let down when I realized they were attempting to do so via yet another tried and true stereotype Hollywood and white folks love to perpetuate about black folks: The “wild,” “Ride Or Die,” black lesbian friend who is “far more woke” than her perpetually meeker white female counterpart, the “sister who is just not here for this,” who through her nonconforming black female lesbian body, shows her “white sister” how to “resist.”

Problematic.

Which brings us to the decision to include people of color into the television series world of Gilead at all. The whiteness of the novel’s world was a deliberate erasure: not the result of a blindness on the part of the novelist that Miller’s post-racial directing is correcting, but a vital part of Atwood’s efforts to fully imagine what a theocratic revolution in the US would look like, given our history. Atwood dedicated the book to Perry Miller who taught her the history of Puritan theocracy in New England, and has repeatedly said in interviews that every incident had historical precedent.

Thus, the “Children of Ham” discussion* in chapter 14 of  the novel  can be understood as a revival  of the American Colonization Society dream: the idea, warmly supported by white abolitionist luminaries from Thomas Jefferson to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Abraham Lincoln, that the best way to “deal with” black people (when you hate slavery only a little more than you hate slaves, to paraphrase Toni Morrison), is to ship them back to any random place on the continent of Africa (Liberia eventually founded for the purpose) or perhaps to a Caribbean island. In the novel, the 1985’s Offred hears a TV News report that the “Children of Ham,” the term from biblical precedent that was regularly used to justify slavery in the US, were being shipped out to “Homelands” in the West, that a “pure” white-supremacist world could be created in Gilead, with the exception of a few “Marthas” who are “allowed” to be servants (described as brown). Atwood’s understanding of what a likely evangelical coup would look like in the US is, logically, genocidal — the Cherokee Removal also comes to mind — and focused on “racial purity.”

In an interview with TVLine, Miller suggests, in fact, that Atwood at least initially resisted the post-racial direction he was taking, saying it was:

“a huge discussion with Margaret Atwood, and in some ways it is ‘TV vs. book’ thing.” After all, on the printed page, ‘It’s easy to say ‘they sent off all the people of color,’ but seeing it all the time on a TV show is harder. ‘Also, honestly,’ he adds, ‘what’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show? Why would we be covering [the story of handmaid Offred, played by Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss], rather than telling the story of the people of color who got sent off to Nebraska?’”

Which is, of course, a fair question of Atwood’s 1985 narrative, but not one that is simply resolved by acting as if racism is readily solved by “diversity” in the cast. (And, if we’re really dreaming, could perhaps more easily be resolved by simply making a series out of Octavia Butler’s Parable novels…!)

A television show about racists can critically examine the nature and power dynamics of the race-based hierarchy portrayed on screen, thus unhinging it for the viewer. And a television show about “nice, open-minded people” or “evil, small-minded racists” can also be racist if it relies on unexamined stereotypes to tell its story. That Miller doesn’t recognize this key difference is telling.

In a recent Think Progress piece, Miller says: “When you think about a world where the fertility rate has fallen precipitously [as it has in Gilead], fertility would trump everything. And we’ve seen that: When fertility becomes an issue, racism starts to fall because people adopt kids from Ethiopia and Asian countries and from everywhere.”

With all due respect, I wonder if Miller has heard of colonialism? That is, the process by which a country or society with more power ostensibly rapes, pillages, and reaps the natural resources (one of which is children) of a less powerful society or country, in order to gain more power and resources? Talk to transracial adoptees, and you will learn very quickly that our adoption into majority white cultures in the Global North does not necessarily or even often mean they are instantly welcoming or open to the presence of non-white bodies in their midst. The real issue is how these black, brown, and indigenous bodies are used in the service of building up these majority white societies — a key subtlety Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale  never quite seems to get to.

Indeed, Miller’s uncomplicated analysis of transracial adoption and its ubiquity signalling a new kind of racial tolerance reveals troubling fissures in his understanding of power and difference. And these fissures are unfortunately echoed in the series itself.

And yet. Despite the fact that this entire article is devoted to the series’ problems with race and representation, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale still packs an indelible punch. In today’s Trumped up world, in which white male Republicans hold the majority in both state and federal government (many of them evangelicals), and the global attack on women’s rights is steadily gaining steam, the idea that a society like Gilead could gain prominence is not so far-fetched. After all, as Glosswitch explains in The New Statesman, it is already happening:

“Today there are parts of the world in which renting the womb of a poor woman is indeed ten times cheaper than in the US. The choice of wealthy white couples to implant embryos in the bodies of brown women is seen, not as colonialist exploitation, but as a neutral consumer choice. I can’t help wondering why, if the fate of the fictional Offred is so horrifying to western feminists today, the fate of real-life women in surrogacy hostels is causing so little outrage.

“I suppose the main argument of these feminists would be that real-life women choose to be surrogates, whereas Offred does not. But is the distinction so clear? If Offred refuses to work as a handmaid, she may be sent to the Colonies, where life expectancy is short. Yet even this is a choice of sorts. As she herself notes, ‘nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.’ In the real world, grinding poverty drives women of colour to gestate the babies of the wealthy. As one Indian surrogate tells interviewer Seemi Pasha, ‘Why would I be a surrogate for someone else if I don’t need the money? Why would I make myself go through this pain?’”

The timeliness of this story, given our current political reality, cannot be understated. Although critics such as Francine Prose argue that the series is simply, “…a seven-hour-long orgy of violence against women — promoted and marketed as high-minded, politically astute popular entertainment,” I believe otherwise. The show works best, and to be clear, it often does work, when it reveals the raw, visceral violence hiding at the core of most otherwise “civilized” cultures, where women are concerned. And I, for one, appreciate that the producers have not sugar-coated this truth, or made it in any way easier for viewers to digest. I also appreciate that they have opted to show how women ourselves are some of the most vicious perpetrators of violence on other women, and how this in turn keeps the whole system of patriarchy working.

That a television series, just four episodes in, should provoke such impassioned responses, and outpouring of critique and analysis, shows that it is doing some very important work. This work could be even more powerful, however, with a more complex racial lens.

Lori Askeland loves beautiful writing that engages political ideas head on, especially speculative fiction and life writing of all sorts — memoir, personal essays, journals. She’s currently a teacher of American literature and composition at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Follow on twitter: @AskelandLori

There was so much packed into Riverdale‘s first season that the pacing always felt off. In a TV series about a murder mystery with the characters from Archie Comics, it’s to be expected that the show would move at a breakneck pace as that story unfolded over only 13 episodes.

One big casualty from the super fast pacing was that a lot of characters got pushed to the sidelines if their stories weren’t integral to the main murder mystery, resulting in deleted scenes galore. But I’ve made my feelings known about how Riverdale should have gotten more episodes than just 13 for its first season. I’m not going to rehash everything I’ve already said again. But the deleted scene that The CW and Warner Bros. TV just released from the season one finale confused me. A lot. I have so many questions.

First, check out the deleted scene for yourself below:

It’s a funny little scene showing Betty (Lili Reinhart) helping her pregnant older sister Polly (Tiera Skovbye) settle back in to life at Riverdale High after the drama of Jason Blossom’s (Trevor Stines) murder investigation died down. In a moment scored to Josie (Ashleigh Murray) and the Pussycats’ “Fear Nothing,” Betty and Veronica (Camila Mendes) walk Polly through the school halls, all three wearing Riverdale Vixen uniforms.

Of course, other students are obviously shocked to see the pregnant Polly not only back in school like nothing had happened but also in a cheerleader’s uniform (I honestly didn’t know they made maternity cheerleader uniforms until now). I love how the trio don’t even bat an eyelash at the camera phones flashing in their faces. Their confidence and no-f-cks-given attitude is just the best. I’m all for the basically-widowed Polly returning to some semblance of normalcy after losing the father of her (cough, incest-bred, cough) unborn baby.

And then Reggie Mantle (Ross Butler) crashes the female empowerment party, ruining the moment with a classic Reggie leer and gross comment about “mommy issues” and how good Polly looks pregnant. Gross, yes, but this little moment wouldn’t normally be a big deal …

But The CW already announced two weeks ago that Riverdale was recasting the role of Reggie for season two.

Butler, who stars as a series regular on Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why (also renewed for a second season), had scheduling issues with the two series and chose to give his time to the buzzy Netflix drama over The CW’s series. That resulted in Riverdale effectively not using the iconic character of Reggie for most of the first season. That definitely hurt the series, as Reggie is a huge part of the Archie Comics world as Archie’s (KJ Apa) rival, and the producers decided to recast the role for season two so they could use the character more without having to work around Butler’s 13 Reasons Why production schedule.

It’s a sad loss for Riverdale as Butler made a great Reggie, but I’d rather have more Reggie played by a different actor than no Reggie at all. You just can’t tell a good, complete Archie Comics story without Reggie!

Based on this deleted scene, however, that decision to recast came after the finale was filmed. I find it nuts that the producers not only wrote a scene with the old Reggie, but they had Butler fly back to Vancouver to film it. It was edited out before the hour made it air. But then the network released the scene online anyways! I don’t have to tell you how weird it is that they brought Butler back to film this scene, only to cut the scene and recast his role and then release this scene regardless. I mean, why release the scene at all?!

Of all the twists and turns presented in the season finale (#prayforFred), this is the one I just can’t get over. Am I overreacting or do you think it’s weird too? Tweet me at @SydneyBucksbaum and let’s chat all things Riverdale … including the mysterious case of the reappearing Reggie.

Images/video: The CW, Warner Bros. TV