Comic Review #82: The New Guardians #1 (1988)

 

Well it's June which is the month every conservative fears... It's Pride Month! Yes more and more human beings are giving less and less of a shit if you want to kiss a dude or become a dude or love both dudes and ladies or whatever. Yeah there's still a very sad amount of human beings who give a shit what two adults do in their own time and in their own lives because they are stupid worthless shitheads who no one ever truly loved. Okay maybe other garbage people loved them but do you want to be loved by a garbage person? I sure don't! So I've decided to look at the LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ+ (I support you getting to be you but I'm still going to be terrible, terrible jokes.) characters that have existed during DC and Marvel history! It'll be a fun time. I decided to start with a really bad DC comic that will give portnoyd a lot of material for comments he can make in 2042 when his children are all in college and he can just waste his precious time blathering about internet garbage.

Anyway this comic comes off the heals of a world shaking DC comics event called Millennium. I won't get to into it now but uh... It's a pretty fucking bad comic. A HUGE mess of a series that I still can't believe came from Steve Englehart and Joe Staton. Steve Englehart wrote some of the best Avengers, Captain America and Batman comics ever published. If I ever review them and portnoyd is like DURRR THIS THING I NEVER READ FOR MY SELF IS BADDDDD BECAUSE YOU SAID SO i will literally go to Las Vegas and smack the absolute shit out of his ass. like I will slap him until his ass can't hold shit. They are that good. Portnoyd better watch himself out, but by the mid/late 80s when he returned to comic books from a small hiatus writing fancy books that have no pictures or Batman. 

He came back and did Green Lantern which was really hit or miss. Some stories and characters (like Kilowog the greatest Green Lantern!) were fun and some were just "What were you thinking man?" He also did West Coast Avengers (which was actually probably the best stuff he did during this era) and Fantastic Four (which was his worst, It's not my least favorite era for the team but it's uh certainly up there.) I know portnoyd will UNTHOUGHTFULLY go LOL THOSE THINGERS ARE DUMBY AND I EAT POOPIE like the stupid stupid man he is. I don't know if it was editorial interference or if Steve's heart wasn't into it any more but I just know that his mid-late 80s work is no where as good as the work he did in the 1970s.

The New Guardians were created by the Guardians of Oa to uh breed and spread around their new DNA. The Guardians of Oa are those little blue assholes that appear in Green Lantern comics to give the Green Lantern of earth a hard time because THEY ARE SHIT HEADS. Anyway they wanted to go bone the Star Sapphires so uh they did! They are also very stupid because uh one of the characters they picked was a gay man. Gay men do uh usually not have sex with women. It's kinda in the name. Ya dig? The other character they picked to join the team was a man who had literally been turned into a plant. and the other is a computer who doesn't even have some kind of plant dick. . There's also Harbinger but who gives a shit about her. Oh and a Chinese lady who talks about dragons and also a Jamaican lady.

 

You can see in that nice image that our pal Extrano is gay and also a stereotype. Despite that he's clearly the most fun new character of them all ( the Floronic Man (the plant guy) was created decades before this) and also apparently the Computer Guy can turn back into his original form so I guess he still has his penis. Still that's one choice for all the ladies to bone him and he's already married to someone. So the Guardians of Oa really fucked up because they were too busy thinking about getting to fuck the shit out of the Star Sapphires. The fucking blue pricks.  Anyway Extrano seems to be gay Dr. Strange. Which I think is pretty rad.

So the story continues and we change scenes to a group of racists who have created a crazy looking vampire man who apparently only likes to drink the blood of non white people. So they send him off to cause havok with another racist jerk to watch him. There's a wild scene where the racist Vampire called Hemo-Goblin eats a cat. It's hilarious. The Jamaican Lady fights with him. She gets the Dragon Chinese Lady to help her fight when she gets hurt. The Hemo-Goblin runs away and they go back to the hideout. Everyone somehow finds where the Hemo-Goblin is hiding and then they all have a fight. Extrano gets cut by the Hemo-Goblin. They fight. The Hemo-Goblin dies. Green Lantern's old buddy Tom comes by and gives them the bad news. The Hemo-Goblin had AIDS.

This got apparently lots of bad press from fans who pretty much told DC how thats not really how AIDS works and that maybe the clearly gay character you created (this was the 1980s so they couldn't really say he was gay because that would totally turn anyone who read it into a cock craving maniac because that's how homosexuality works.) shouldn't get AIDS. Or at least not get it in his probably 3rd appearance in a comic. The Jamaican Lady also gets AIDS or probably should by being cut too. I don't care enough to figure out.

I did read one other issue of The New Guardians and it was fun as hell but it was only fun as hell for the character Snowflame a character who got his super powers from cocaine. He literally could have fought any body and the issue would have been amazing, probably even better. The New Guardians just wasn't a good group of characters. Except for the Flornoic Man and Green Lantern's pal Tom, none of them really got used after this series ended in like 1989. None of them, except Extrano would be used by me in the weird off chance DC found this blog and was like THIS IS THE MAN WE NEED and gave me a job by me and I love weird goofy obscure characters. These guys had no charm or anything and we don't need to see them ever again. 

FINAL VERDICT: I don't think it's bad that a comic tackles or discusses an social or political issue, even if it's serious. Discussing serious issues within stories can help fix them in the real world by bringing it to peoples attention. It's BAD because they didn't do a good job of it. AIDS was and IS still a serious thing that deserves more respect than this. Portnoyd is going to have a fucking field day with this comic and despite it all DC pretty much gave him that field day which might just be the worst thing about it all.