Take Pittsburgh’s Guardian, the Penguin. “The gritty young savior of Steel City,” reads the copy attached to his picture. “Can project ice missiles from his hands and travels on a frozen ice sheet.” Obviously, those are the same powers as Iceman from the X-Men. But to top it off, the Penguin wears a visor across his eyes, just like fellow X-Men Cyclops. Put together, the Penguin seems like Frozone from The Incredibles, but as a white guy in yellow and black.
Or maybe you’d prefer Montreal’s hero the Canadian, a guy in a blue and red power suit who shoots blasters from his hands, just like Iron Man. How about the Arizona Coyote, aka Wolverine in a trench coat, or the Panther, who imagines what it would be like if Black Panther came not from the futuristic utopia Wakanda, but from Florida? At least the Edmonton Oiler, with blocky costume and goo gun, had the decency to rip off a good character, Paste-Pot Pete.
Occasionally, an unwieldily mascot forced Lee to take some creative leaps. Sure, the Columbus Blue Jacket looks like a B-tier Go-Bot, but not often do you see a revived Civil War soldier with cannons in his robot legs. Lee didn’t just steal Falcon’s pet bird for the Detroit Red Wing, but embraced the team’s Motor City roots by sticking awkward wheels and pedals on what otherwise looks like Mach-1 of the Thunderbolts. And the St. Louis Blue may be kind of a rip-off of forgotten Ultraverse hero Night Man (jazz musician by night, superhero by later at night), but he looks kind of cool.
Ultimately, the dull designs and generic power sets bring to mind not legends in the making, but the drawings of some random kid who just watched Hockey Night in Canada. Which they are, canonically-speaking.
Unguarded Hockey
According to the shared universe lore revealed in the graphic novel The Guardian Project Special Edition, the Guardians actually came from the mind of Mike Mason, a nondescript teenager who sketched out a series of superheroes in his notebook. Somehow, the pictures came to life, giving 30 North American cities their own superheroes… at least until the Thrasher leaves Atlanta to become the Jet and the Coyote decides Salt Lake City is nice and renames himself the Mammoth.
The Guardian Project Special Edition boasts some supplemental artwork by the legendary Neal Adams and scripts by Chuck Dixon, then still closer to his incredible work on Batman and Birds of Prey and not the right-wing nonsense he does these days. It contains six-page origin stories for each of the heroes, all illustrated well and handsomely put together, but deadly boring.
