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The Giant Purple History of Guardians 2’s Best New Character
Perhaps the most unlikely thing about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, a movie already packed with oddball shout-outs to comic book ephemera, is the character for which it will be remembered: Ego, the “living planet.” No one should be surprised that Kurt Russell, himself a living planet of sorts, managed to swagger into the Marvel Cinematic Universe; by this point, the number of Hollywood A-minus-listers who haven’t shown up might just be smaller than those who have. However, comic-book Ego is another story. A giant purple orb with a beard? Not exactly Central Casting.
While much more than a footnote—in 2000, Ego was at the center of a crossover storyline that included both the Avengers and the X-Men—Marvel’s favorite sentient planetary mass is far from a fan-favorite. He’s made fewer than 100 comic-book appearances total. (Seriously: in all the tens of thousands of issues Marvel Comics has published, he’s appeared in less than 1 percent of them.) Yet, 51 years after his creation, now is the perfect time to bring him to the big screen.
To understand why, you have to understand where Ego comes from. The character first appeared in 1966’s The Mighty Thor #132, in a final-page reveal that swiftly established how wonderfully over-the-top he was. After being described as a fantastic “bio-verse,” Ego showed up looking like … well, like nothing else. Whereas the rest of the issue featured line art by Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta, Ego was a photo collage of found material, giving him a surreal, otherworldly quality as he bellows, “I have been waiting for you! I am Ego!”
The next issue toned things down considerably. Not only did Ego take on a more traditional line-drawn appearance, but he also established his distinctive appeal—as well as his distinctive limitations as a character. For all his boasts of having “the largest, most powerful intelligence in all of infinity” and “possessing powers without end,” Ego turned out to be little more than his name. sure, he can create all the human-sized bodies to throw against superheroes he wants, but as soon as his confidence is shattered, he runs away in melodramatic shame. “Never again shall I seek to invade other galaxies!” he exclaimed as he retreated. “I shall ever be a world apart—till eternity crumbles!”
Of course, in superhero comics, “eternity” is all relative. Ego would return a number of times, with each reappearance demonstrating all over again that once you get beyond his oversized opinion of himself, there’s not really much to Ego. Fun Ego stories have popped up here and there—2007’s Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #7, for example, had Ego fall in love with Earth, slinging cheesy pick-up lines to Gaia—but, for the most part, Marvel left him alone.
From Curios to Cameos
So how did Ego end up in Guardians Vol. 2? Not because of canon: Ego and the Guardians have never overlapped in comic-book continuity. He’s not even Star-Lord’s dad as the movie claims; that honor belongs to (snortworthy name alert!) King J’son of planet Spartax, who crash-landed on Earth and had an affair with a human woman before returning to the stars. However, director James Gunn clearly is fond of unlikely Marvel characters, judging from Howard the Duck and The Collector’s appearances in the first Guardians. Gunn is, clearly, a fan of the source material and has favorite characters of his own that he’s using the opportunity to play with. With that in mind, the most obvious reason for Ego’s role is that he’s a double-wink from Gunn, who proves his own Marvel cred while making a nice, while also maneuvering it into a joke at his lead character’s expense. (Of course Peter Quill’s planet-sized ego came from a literal planet-sized Ego!)
But there’s another possibility as well—one that might simply be coincidence, or might actually be a touching, understated tribute to one of Marvel’s founding fathers.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacob Kurtzberg, who went on to find success in the comic book industry as Jack Kirby. Kirby is a comics legend, and while his decades-long career is impressive from beginning to end, his most famous achievement will always be co-creating the Marvel Universe with Stan Lee. With Lee, Kirby came up with Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, X-Men, Avengers and Thor; years earlier, with Joe Simon, he’d already created Captain America. In many ways, Kirby’s work is the foundation of everything that Marvel would go on to do.
And yet, the movie version of the Guardians of the Galaxy property has very little Kirby in it. Groot is the only core Guardians member Kirby worked on, and even he only shares a tenuous connection to the original version Kirby created in 1960’s Tales to Astonish #13. (Although the story was again written by Stan Lee, Groot actually predates the official start of the Marvel Universe as such; Fantastic Four #1 wouldn’t be released until the following year.) Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax and Rocket, were all created after Kirby had left Marvel at the end of the 1960s. In fact, of the three Marvel movies coming out in 2017, only one is based on a Kirby creation—Thor: Ragnarok. (The protagonist of Spider-Man: Homecoming happens to be Marvel’s most iconic non-Kirby character.)
Adding Ego into the mix, then, feels like a small way to try and touch on Kirby’s contribution to Marvel in his centenary. Whether or not Gunn was thinking about this when he wrote Ego into the cast is unknown—and arguably unlikely—but while comics purists may feel that Ego has no place in Guardians, almost no one would disagree that Kirby’s creativity has earned a place in Marvel’s big screen version of Outer Space in whatever way possible. And if that way just so happens to look like Kurt Russell, then all the better.
[WIRED]
