Trivia / Guardians of the Galaxy (2023)

• Approval of God: Before beginning their run, Lanzing and Kelly sought Al Ewing's blessing for dismantling his Guardians status quo. They wanted to assure him that no disrespect was intended with their revamp of the team.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Kev Walker admits getting to draw the Guardians has been a longtime goal and dream gig for years. The closest he previously came was the Nova mini-series from the original Annihilation event during the mid-2000s.
• Production Posse: Kelly, Lanzing, and Walker had all previously worked together on Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • Possibly. It was always inevitable that Marvel would relaunch the Guardians' book after the end of the Al Ewing era. But it's also not hard to see it's being relaunched in the Spring of 2023 for multimedia synergy with the team's third MCU film. This is also may be why Mantis and Nebula (the latter especially given her comics version's hostility towards the team) are also prominent members of the new lineup.
  • Kelly and Lanzing have also admitted this was part of the rationale for using the Manifold Territories from the end of Dan Slott's Reckoning War as the setting. This was done to play into the Space Western themes (the Territories as the Old West frontier) and to take a break from the book's then-current Cosmic Marvel status quo (i.e. Skrulls, Kree, etc.).