From a romanticised auteurist perspective, in which a director’s biography is soaked into their films, it’s easy to align Gunn’s own trajectory from rebel against the system to oddball darling within it with the diegetic arc of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Troma’s films wear their outsider status as a badge of honour, and those written by Gunn are no exception, with his first feature, Tromeo and Juliet (1996), replete with incest, murder and on-screen nipple piercing, exuding the Troma ethos of trampling taste boundaries. Gunn started his filmmaking career as a writer for Troma, a gleefully schlocky independent film studio that is proudly situated outside of the Hollywood mainstream, branding itself as ‘a haven for independent directors and young talent during an era of corporate takeovers’. While these qualities are all obviously synthesised in Guardians, it still remains to be explored how a filmmaker whose output ranges from grisly horror to nasty critiques of the superhero genre reconciles these more outrageous elements in a family-friendly superhero blockbuster. An article by Rob Leane on Den of Geek makes some useful inroads, outlining Gunn’s key traits as his ‘oddball charm’ ‘winningly subversive (and sometimes twisted) humour’ and the ‘continuing influence of friendship on Gunn’s work’. Despite this, little analysis of what constitutes Gunn’s widely accepted individual filmmaking style has been offered. A distinctly auteurist discourse is therefore circulating the press and promotional feedback loops. Indeed, Gunn himself, in an open letter thanking his cast, crew and fans, states ‘what touches me the most is that the film I told the folks at Marvel I wanted to make two years ago is the film that you’re seeing in theaters today - it's that so many of you seem to be directly EXPERIENCING the film I INTENDED’. A prevailing notion in discussions of Guardians of the Galaxy is that Marvel were astute in hiring, and entrusting with apparent carte blanche, James Gunn to co-write and direct.