Prior to 2014, not many people had ever heard of or were familiar with the Guardians of the Galaxy–and that even includes comic book readers.
I’ll gladly point out I was familiar with the Guardians of the Galaxy (and Nova), as they are the reason I started this entire website (along with Quasar).
The site logo I created is from the colors of Nova (blue) and Quasar (yellow).
“Cosmic Book News” is a play on Marvel Cosmic comic book news.
I remember the day I came up with the name as a bunch of us were a part of the QuantumZone.org forums, and we just got done with our “Bring Back Wendell Vaughn as Quasar” campaign, which saw us send the Marvel offices a Quasar cake, petitions, letters, t-shirts and fan art. Marvel took a big liking to us Quasar fans; I managed to get in contact with new Marvel Cosmic editor Bill Rosemann, and the rest they say is history.
While sites like Marvel’s CBR wouldn’t bother with any of the Marvel Cosmic stuff, I created Cosmic Book News to help promote the titles: the 2007 Nova series and the 2008 Guardians of the Galaxy series. We regularly featured exclusive previews, solicits and interviews, and our reviews were used in Marvel press releases and quoted on the covers of comic books and graphic novels.
I created a forum focusing strictly on the cosmic genre of both Marvel and DC comics, which eventually led to a full blown website, which I coded myself from scratch. As the site grew, I migrated it to a content management system, which is what the site uses today (all themed by me as well, and I even run the back-end hosting). The site has grown pretty huge, has received millions and millions of visitors and has a big social media following.
Quasar fans came together with the Richard Rider Nova fans as we had a lot in common. Both characters saw a resurgence during Giffen’s Annihilation series, albeit Quasar died (but we got him back, as mentioned above). The fans shared a common thread in that Richard Rider and Wendell Vaughn were human cosmic Earth heroes who never got the limelight from Marvel, and the fans knew they deserved better.
Under Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, a new era of Marvel Cosmic would flourish. In addition to Guardians of the Galaxy and Nova, DnA would pen Annihilation: Conquest, War of Kings, Darkhawk, Realm of Kings, Thanos Imperative and Annihilators. Abnett and Lanning’s work on Marvel Cosmic happened to be noticed by a science-fiction writer working for Marvel Studios as part of their writer’s program whose job it was to come up with new ideas for movie scripts. Nicole Perlman would take a liking to DnA’s Guardians of the Galaxy, so she wrote a script based on the series, which eventually saw Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige give the green light to a new movie. James Gunn would come on board and rewrite the script leading to the Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 films (and Gunn running the Marvel Cosmic MCU).
They helped spread the word and they were there along for the ride and never went away, and without them the books would’ve never even existed; there would be no film without those loyal readers.
If us fans didn’t support Abnett and Lanning’s Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy the way we did, Marvel Comics would have cancelled the titles, Nicole Perlman would have never taken a liking and wrote a script, and we never would have had a Guardians of the Galaxy movie (or new Disney franchise).
Good times.
I’ll also add without Bill Rosemann and Abnett and Lanning’s fan-friendly approach to the books, there wouldn’t have been a Guardians of the Galaxy movie as well. Thanks, guys!
