GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is coming, which is just about the strangest news this side of ever.

Announced at Comic Con and planned as the final film in Phase Two before MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS 2, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY originally had a draft by one Nicole Perlman. She was a grad of "Marvel's now defunct writing program" and had written two space-based scripts, one about the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster and one about Neil Armstrong.

Writing duties have now been passed on, for whatever reasons may be, to one Chris McCoy - while he hasn't yet had a script produced, three of his works have appeared on the Black List (a list of best unproduced scripts) in the last five years and so is considered "to have a lot of heat as a writer." The scripts he has written "have been praised for their quirky comedic bent," something that will only do good things for Marvel as one fifth of the Guardians team is a Raccoon and another fifth is a tree. Man. Thing.

"While there have been several incarnations of the team in the comics over the years, the movie’s lineup will include Drax the Destroyer, a human resurrected as a green warrior with the sole purpose of killing Thanos (the villain in the Avengers final-scene tease); Groot, a giant tree-man; Star-Lord, a gun-toting half-human/half-alien intergalactic vigilante; Rocket Raccoon, a genetically engineered animal with a knack for guns and explosives; and Gamora, the last survivor of her species who was saved by Thanos to be his assassin but now battles him."

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is scheduled to arrive two years hence from this past Wednesday, making August 1st, 2014 the make-or-break day for fanboy judgement of Marvel's Phase Two.