Rocket Raccoon was never supposed to be a superhero
The year was 1976. Gerald Ford was in the White House, Wings and Elton John were topping the charts, and in the ramshackle halls of Marvel Comics, a talking raccoon was born.
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. Just as Spider-Man was a leap forward in superhero storytelling from the cardboard dialogue of Silver Age Superman, Rocket is a troubled, complex departure from the Bugs Bunnys and Detective Chimps that preceded him.
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. In that issue, Bill Mantlo and artist Keith Giffen used an installment of their spacefaring sword-and-sorcery series The Sword and the Star to introduce a talking raccoon with the Beatles-punning name of Rocky, who guides the heroic Prince
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