Rocket RaccoonRocket

ROCKET RACCOON

Known for his snarky, trigger-happy personality, Rocket Raccoon first appeared 10,000 years in the future as a mysteriously helpful, if not annoying, woodland creature on planet Hailailae. Since then—or maybe before then—he has become the most well-known trash panda this side of the Keystone Quadrant

Don’t be fooled by his standoffish and morally ambiguous bravado, this tactical genius will put his hide on the line for his friends and the galaxy they defend.

The Ranger

A native of the Keystone Quadrant, Rocket Raccoon began his life as a protector of an unidentified humanoid race known as the Loonies. They came to the planet hundreds of years prior when psychiatrists, searching for a place to house and study their criminally insane away from the contempt of everyday society, founded an asylum on planet Halfworld. Wanting their new environment to be as friendly as possible, the founders brought furry creatures to comfort their patients while they built robots to help care for them. For years, the psychiatrists studied patients on Halfworld before returning home and leaving their patients under the sole care of the remaining robots. As time passed the robots became sentient and longed to leave Halfworld. They genetically engineered the Earth-like animals, creating humanized caretakers to function in their stead, and withdrew to build a ship capable of breaking through the force field surrounding the planet—another security measure left behind by the founders.

As commander of the Keystone Kops, Ranger Rocket paroled Halfworld driven to protect the Loonies and animal inhabitants alongside his partner Wal Russ and ladylove Lylla. He knew no other way of life until a big green guy fell from the sky and gave Rocket his first glimpse at life off-world. Not long after this encounter a war broke out between groups of Halfworld’s animal civilians. During his attempts to quell the fighting, Rocket learned the truth behind the creation of the anthropomorphized animals of Halfworld. The escalating fighting prompted the robots of old to return to the asylum and, with the help of his friends and an illustrious toy maker, Rocket cured the Loonies putting an end to the war once and for all. This allowed for Rocket and other residents to leave Halfworld in search of new destinies while the newly sane human inhabitants created a world of their own.

Or so he believed…

Locked and Loaded

Rocket maintains all of the animalistic abilities of his nocturnal Terran counterparts—a heightened sense of smell, hearing and agility, as well as amplified vision in low-light environments. What he lacks in size and brute strength he makes up for with cunning and strategy. A tactical genius, Rocket comes in handy in a pinch and has particular aptitude for the handling of an assortment of weaponry—the bigger the better. He usually carries rocket skates enabling him to fly short distances, his trusty yet sassy Timely Inc. Mail Device, and never leaves home without a laser pistol…just in case.

Fur Traders

During Rockets time as a more or less heroic figure he acquired a pretty lengthy list of foes, as one does spending the better part of a careering foiling the attempts at galactic takeover. A few villains topping the charts include Ultron, the Phalanx, and Thanos, followed by the personally victimized Ex-Terminators, a group of Rocket’s ex-girlfriends out for revenge against the two-timing rodent. Rounding out the set is Kraven the Hunter, and on rare occasions—when he’s determined to make a hat out of Rocket—Deadpool.

Trees and Team-Ups

On the more cheerful side, Rocket has an equally long list of friends. Claiming the top spot is, of course, Rocket’s best buddy Groot—the pair make for quite the clichéd couple. The various remaining Guardians of the Galaxy members fall in a not-so-close second. The Avengers make the roster after their team up to take down Thanos. The Starjammers make an occasional comeback from Rockets space pirating days and the classics include his most longstanding comrades, Lylla, Wal Russ and Blackjack O’Hare.

Combative Chronicles

After leaving Halfworld, Rocket found himself imprisoned several times, including a brief petrification, but managed to escape each time before finally landing securely in a Kree prison for trespassing in a restricted zone. While doing his time in the clink, Kree officials drafted Rocket into a ragtag team of prisoners forced to embark on a suicide mission to destroy the Phalanx and stop Ultron’s invasion of the Kree home world. Alongside Bug, Deathcry, Mantis, Captain Universe, Groot, and leader Peter Quill (AKA Star-Lord) the team set off on a suicide mission that’s success proved fatal to two of the group.

Over the course of the assignment, Groot and Rocket developed a deep friendship rooted in combat. When Groot sacrificed himself to destroy the Phalanx Babel Spire, Rocket rescued a twig to regrow his barky buddy before reinforcements arrived to help take down Ultron and the Phalanx once and for…the time being.

With the threat neutralized, Star-Lord used Mantis’ telepathic ability to convince Adam Warlock, Drax the Destroyer, Gamora, Quasar and Rocket to join his team and continue fighting for the well-being of the galaxy. The group set up headquarters in Knowhere, a Celestial’s floating severed head, where Rocket struck up a rivalry with a four-legged Russian astronaut who’s bite definitely proved worse than his bark.

Once set up, the team began to tackle different trials and tribulations of the galaxy. The team learned of something causing tears in space-time and headed out to seal them, which brought them into conflict with the Universal Church of Truth. Rocket, being all too familiar with loonies, helped the team seal one rift and rescue a time-displaced hero. Having rejected all of Rocket’s brilliant prior group name suggestions, including the pure-gold “Ass-Kickers of the Fantastic”, the group adopted the name of Major Victory’s future team and so became the Guardians of the Galaxy.

The squad managed not to kill each other, considerately leaving that task for others to attempt. After a rigged teleporter exploded, the Guardians found Skrull bodies amongst the dead and the team went on an all-out hunt of Knowhere during which Drax overheard Star-Lord and Mantis talking, discovering she had telepathically convinced them all to join the team. The group found the young Skrulls with Cosmo, who explained they were there for sanctuary and had nothing to do with the explosion. No longer in immediate danger, Drax informed the team of his deceitful discovery and the group disbanded.

Rocket, still believing the cause to be a noble one, assembled a ragtag team of guardians to continue the fight. Shortly after, a distress call sent from Star-Lord and his new allies informed the team that a Kree-Shi’ar war threatened the cosmos. The teams came together only to split up and Rocket, Warlock, Drax, Groot and Major Victory headed to the Shi’ar fleet. Blocked by the Vulcan’s teleport shield the team rebounded into space where Rockets old pirating pals, the Starjammers, picked them up and the two groups, alongside a particularly timeless telepath, joined forces to rescue former Shi’ar Majestrix, Lilandra.

Rocket and his team returned to Knowhere to join back up with the other half of their party to no avail. The Kree detonated a Terrigen-Bomb causing a cosmos-wide collapse. Warlock, able to temporarily fuse two realities together, unknowingly created the Cancerverse and merged himself with Magus. To save all of space-time, the Guardians joined forces with Thanos to destroy the new Warlock/Magnus hybrid and restore death to the Cancerverse. Hoping to kill two birds with one stone Star-Lord attempted to trap Thanos in the collapsing realm and wound up trapped alongside him.

With the loss of Star-Lord weighing heavily on them, the Guardians of the Galaxy once again disbanded and Rocket took an average job in a mailroom. Unable to live the normal 9-to-5 lifestyle, he received a package containing a homicidal robot clown that just wouldn’t die. Finally gaining the upper hand, he had the clown sucked out into space, saving his coworkers, but getting himself canned in the process. He determined the clown was made of sentient wood and set off in search of the only other hunk of wood with a brain he knew. Rocket reached Planet X and found Groot serving a life sentence for impersonating royalty. He promptly broke out his budding buddy and the two fought off another attack from killer clowns before heading to Rocket’s home planet, Halfworld. where Rocket got his original memories back.

Turns out Rocket had been running the asylum as security chief with his number two, Blackjack O’Hare, taking in patients from across the cosmos when a high-level psychic from Earth named Barry Bauman came to them. Unable to contain his abilities, Bauman took control of countless patients and staff in his attempts to escape Halfworld before Rocket finally put an end to his reign, containing him within the planet’s core and locking it with a bio key requiring he and a few other staff be present to open the cage. To ensure this never came to pass, Rocket selflessly wiped his memories and left Halfworld.

Just as Rocket’s memory returned, the asylums security went on the fritz and Bauman escaped, locking Rocket and his friends in their own virtual reality therapy environments. Groot managed to break Rocket free and the two found Blackjack O’Hare before attempting a last-ditch plan consisting of Rocket dressing up like a dog and distracting Bauman long enough for Blackjack to reboot the system and neutralize the psychic. Blackjack offered Rocket a permanent place at the asylum but with his old flame Lylla now married to Blackjack he declined.

Finding himself reinvigorated by this latest adventure with his pal Groot, the pair decided to return to their life of galaxy guarding, for better or worse. A quick detour found them briefly captured and thrown into a reality TV show. But, the wily rodent and his photosynthetic muscle broke free and struck a deal for half of the shows profits in return for sparing their show host’s life.

Unbeknownst to Rocket, Star-Lord did not perish in the “collapse” of the Cancerverse and managed to escape some time later. He summoned the Guardians once more and the team joined forces with the Avengers to take down the returned Thanos. After this show stopping team-up, the group returned to Earth once more to aid Captain Marvel during Civil War II when the Guardians ship was destroyed. They, once again, went their separate ways, leaving Rocket alone and trapped on Earth. There, he had a run in with the police, got help from a teenage spider, evaded a crazed hunter and broke out of a S.H.I.E.L.D detention center.

After finding his way off Earth, Rocket hit the road solo, spending time drowning his sorrows in the seediest bars all of space had to offer until an old flame sought him out, desperate for help. Rocket rose to the occasion, planned a robbery and found himself double-crossed, landing in the bowels of space prison from which he had to forcibly evacuate himself. He then joined forces with a regenerating degenerate, hired a rival gang of thieves to help him steal some deeds, and was shot dead by his ex girlfriend. That didn’t stick and he managed to finish his last job, but found himself with a particularly heavy heart thereafter. Star-Lord found him three whiskeys to the wind and tried to bring him back to the relationship roller coaster that is the Guardians of the Galaxy, but in the true Rocket manner he told him to get lost and left once more, alone.