10 Things Marvel Wants You To Forget About Guardians Of The Galaxy

3. And His History Is Pretty Confusing

Not that Ship is the only weird part of Star-Lord's back story. It's basically all weirdness, because he's been around long enough to have had his continuity rebooted numerous times. Originally he was supposed to have a similar character development to Chris Pratt's movie incarnation, with creator Steve Englehart planning for him to "go from being an unpleasant, introverted jerk to the most cosmic being in the universe", and it was eventually going to dovetail with his burgeoning interest in astrology, meaning he wouldn't have been a badass space hero so much as a ditzy hippie having his "mind expanded". We're kinda glad that didn't happen. He also had a totally different origin to his current history in the comic books, which is also different from the movie. In both the film and recent comics his dad was an alien who knocked up his human mother, only to scarper and never come back. In the movie Peter gets abducted when his mum dies of cancer, whilst in the comics he had to escape from that aforementioned Badoon attack meant for his absent father. Before all of that, he had the much different and much weirder origin story that Engleheart dreamt up. Peter Quill is born during a rare moment of all the planets aligning, causing him to look like neither of his parents and his dad accusing his mum of infidelity. During his anger he dies of a heart attack, and Peter is raised by a single parent, eventually becoming a NASA astronaut and getting shot up into space. He gets picked by a cosmic entity to become Star-Lord, superpowered protector of the universe, and has a false memory implanted of his mother dying so he won't have any connections back on Earth. So, er, that's weird. And nobody ever really talks about it.