Rocket Raccoon’s Marvel Comics origin is even weirder than Guardians 3’s

It was 1976. Gerald Ford, Elton John and Wings were at the top of the charts. And in the halls ramshackle Marvel Comics a talking Raccoon was created.

It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely ascent to stardom over the past decade than that of Rocket Raccoon, the short-tempered, bipedal forest-dweller who has become a staple of Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. But as the character’s Bradley Cooper-voiced movie avatar prepares to make what might be his final appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, we should reflect on whether the character’s cultural appeal isn’t mysterious at all.

After all, Rocket’s allure comes from the same set of contrasts that Stan Lee used to pioneer the new wave of troubled, humanized heroes from which the Marvel Universe was built. Rocket’s complex and troubled story is a departure from Bugs Bunnys or Detective Chimps.

As Marvel Comics scribe Al Ewing told Polygon via email, “Rocket was cast out of his Eden by unforgiving gods and left to fend for himself — of course readers and audiences want to take him to their hearts.” Rocket Raccoon, in other words, is the saddest funny animal who ever lived.

Rocket’s earliest origin story was presented in 1976’s Marvel Preview #7, part of the company’s short-lived line of offbeat black-and-white magazines. Bill Mantlo, and Keith Giffen’s spacefaring Sword-and-Sorcery Series was featured in that issue. The Sword and the StarRocky is a talking raccoon who, with his Beatles-inspired name, guides Prince Wayfinder to Witch-World. And if the preceding sentence sounds like a late-hippie fever dream more than anything resembling the Guardians of the Galaxy, that’s to be expected.

Image: Bill Mantlo and Keith Giffen/Marvel Comics

There is little in this first story to connect young Rocky with his later, cosmic iteration: the raccoon we see here speaks with a jaunty British accent, blows Gandalf-esque smoke rings with a tobacco pipe, and exhibits far more of a pip-pip insouciance than the angry temperament we’ve come to associate with the character. It would have been impossible to connect this character with Rocket, the later version of him, except that Mantlo insisted that they were the same.

Sal Buscema/Marvel Comics

Mantlo saw potential in this odd little creature, and six years later he brought it back in the pages (this time within Marvel continuity). Incredible Hulk #271. This story has the protagonist trapped on an alien world called Halfworld. The planet is populated with intelligent, walking and talking animals. Among them is the familiar face of the raccoon who’s name is now expanded to Rocket, and who is said to be Halfworld’s chief law enforcement officer.

Despite the somewhat less Liverpudlian implications of Rocket’s new name, the story is in fact little more than a mounting series of Beatles gags: Rocket’s right hand man is a walrus named Wal Russ, and quest on which they lead the Hulk is a mission to retrieve a holy book called Gideon’s Bible from the evil priest Judson Jakes. With Hulk’s help, the animal squad defeats Jakes, saves Gideon’s Bible, and rescues Rocket’s captured true love (an otter named Lady Lylla), before sending the gamma monster on his merry way. Rocket’s furry legs were more impressive than expected, even though he had a less-than-optimistic start.

Bill Mantlo was surprised by a comic-industry event that proved to be surprisingly foresighted. Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, and their self-published first issue was released in May 1984. Teenage Mutant Ninja TurtlesThe comic is a sly and unabashed parody of the Marvel comics created by Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, and featuring a group of intelligent, humanoid reptiles.

Over the course of a year, what began as a small underground comic quickly became the most popular cult title since the days Howard the Duck. In 1985, Marvel took Rocket from the shelves for his own four-issue series, written once more by Mantlo and pencilled by Mike Mignola, a young, but promising, artist. And if Rocket’s personality this time around is still in the mode of his previous HulkThe story’s grim and gritty revisionism about his past more than makes up for the appearance.

Image: Mike Mignola/Marvel Comics

In the first pages of this book, we learn that everything we thought about Halfword Rocket and their animal friends was a lie. Halfworld’s inhabitants are not talking creatures, but rather a collection of mental patients who require the care and attention of animals. And far from naturally anthropomorphic aliens, the animals of Halfworld are, in fact, no more than everyday critters — adopted as comfort animals for the human inmates, they were made the victim of genetic experiments by the authorities of Halfworld, evolving them unnaturally into the planet’s caretakers in lieu of more respectable humanoids.

It’s an Alan Moore-esque instance of comic deconstruction, inserted in the midst of what had been a lighthearted animal milieu, and Mantlo doesn’t shy away from its bizarre implications (“B-but…that means that I’ve spent my whole life searching for SanityIn a universe created to accommodate the !” exclaims an appalled Rocket on learning the truth). At the story’s end, Rocket and his pals obtain their freedom from the madness of Halfworld, requisition a rocket ship, and set off into space for further adventures.

Image: Wizard Magazine

It was never followed. The market for funny, revisionist animals that stomp their butts was probably saturated. Perhaps Mantlo’s story was just too damned weird, even for an audience looking for the next Donatello and Raphael. Whatever the reason, it was clear that nothing could help with good Rocket’s revival: for the next three decades, Rocket disappeared almost entirely from Marvel’s books, save for a handful of jokey appearances in She-Hulk, QuasarThen, Exiles It only reinforced his status as the biggest embarrassment in Marvel continuity along with Spider-Ham. In 2007, WizardAs of then, the magazine still treated the possibility that a Rocket would appear in the next issue. Annihilation: ConquestThe crossover is a silly joke.

Rocket was waiting for this moment. In 2007, Starlord miniseries, written by Rocket’s co-creator Giffen, and penciled by Timothy Green II, the eponymous Peter Quill is tasked with the leadership of a veritable Suicide Squad of imprisoned cosmic ne’er-do-wells: among them disgraced Avenger Mantis, world-conquering sentient tree Groot, and Rocket himself. This, of course, was the nucleus of the newly-reimagined Guardians of the Galaxy, and it’s in this series that we finally see Giffen’s version of Rocket emerge as the angry, raspy voice we know.

Yet at the same time, Giffen allowed Rocket’s newfound role as a team player to add a new and previously unseen dimension to his character: a surprising and tenacious loyalty toward his friends, which even Rocket, if pressed, would be loath to admit. Indeed, beginning with Giffen’s revival and continuing into the ongoing Guardians of the Galaxy series that spun out of it (written, for the length of its initial volume, by the duo of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning), that deeply-encrusted heart of gold increasingly became Rocket’s defining characteristic. (Abnett and Lanning also added some Weapon X-esque uncertainty by returning Rocket to Halfworld, and revealing that some or all of what he had learned about the planet’s asylum origins may It is a good idea to use have been a lie — so the actual origin of the animals of Halfworld remains, at present, unknown.)

By the time writer Al Ewing took the lead on Rocket’s story, first in 2017’s RocketHe was drinking alone at cosmic gin joint after his ex-girlfriend Lylla had betrayed him and tricked him to play a con. Then in the writer’s too-brief but much loved Guardians of the Galaxy run in 2020, Rocket was falling into depression after Peter Quill’s apparent death.

In just five decades Rocket went from being a pastiche Bugs Bunny via the British Invasion to a character with depth and complexity equal to the furless mammals surrounding him. It is perhaps odd, yet important, that this transformation would have seemed not only normal, but inevitable by then.

Al Ewing and Adam Garland/Marvel Comics

Rocket’s ability to humanize funny animals, by showing the vulnerability and sadness inherent in their wide-eyed furry forms, is similar to Stan Lee, who famously made superpowered humans human by adding flaws. Readers want to believe, in their hearts, that characters like Rocket are vulnerable and need to be loved. This is true no matter how much he swears or what rages of fury he gets into.

Ewing himself sums up Rocket’s appeal eloquently. “He’s a sad funny animal, and that’s baked in on a meta level,” Ewing told Polygon via email. “If you read his original adventures and the Mantlo/Mignola mini, it’s a real romp, funny, smart and with heart. As I recall, we don’t see him again until he turns up in a prison cell in the Abnett/Lanning books, which have a much tougher, very 2000AD-influenced sensibility. Rocket is more of a character from that time – it’s less playful and swashbuckling and a bit more violent and arrogant. It also feels more lonely.

“It’s a horrible thing to put a fictional character through, and it turns him into a tragic figure on an existential level,” Ewing elaborated. “We all just want to be talking raccoons, but we’re stuck in this grimy space war. Rocket is us.”

And that, when it comes down to it, has always been the heart of Rocket’s appeal to us. He’s a funny animal, but the joke always seems to be on him.