The outsider: not everyone can relate to the experience of being either ostracized or emotionally foreign to one’s surroundings, but it is a scenario that most can sympathize with. Film has historically tapped into the people, paranoia, and politics associated with those deemed societally unpalatable, whether it be through the lens of the common criminal, the individual misfit, or most metaphorically, the unsightly monster. 

Despite being a centuries-old trope, authors and screenwriters have continued to iterate on the outcast archetype through various mediums and premises; but not many storytellers appear to be as intimate with this concept as James Gunn. 

Gunn’s signature offbeat humour, crude character banter, and darkly heightened sensibilities have come to inform the flavour of narrative and aesthetic through which a generation of viewers perceives the outcast and feels sympathy for them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his recent comics-based output. With the recent conclusion of Creature Commandos’ first season and the inaugural chapter of Gunn’s new vision for the DC Universe on-screen, I think it’s time we all understand how it feels to be misunderstood.

Monsters, misfits, and meaning

Creature Commandos represents both a new beginning for Gunn and DC under his creative direction. The series also evokes the most metaphorical exploration of the “other” Gunn has attempted. By putting monsters and metahumans at the story’s centre, it simultaneously taps into themes that are synonymous with his prior comics-based works but subverted to acknowledge an unfortunate reality for its protagonists in they don’t get the chance to go home and be ‘normal,’ like any of the humans cast in the show alongside them. 

Gunn carries over a non-linear narrative structure from his time directing The Suicide Squad (2021), dedicating each of Creature Commandos’ seven episodes to a different team member, highlighting their unique upbringings and relating them to present predicaments. Viewers soon realize that — except for the flaming crime lord Doctor Phosphorus — each protagonist is a victim of circumstance, incarcerated purely on their appearance being correlated to a potential threat. 

The Bride — a zombified woman and the scorned lover of mad scientist Victor Frankenstein — spent her life groomed by her creator and running from the monster obsessed with her. G.I. Robot carried out his sole directive, killing any and all Nazis he came across. Weasel — a returning character from The Suicide Squad — is revealed in “Chasing Squirrels” to have been falsely apprehended under the accusation of murdering children in a school fire. With no possibility of self-defence due to his lack of sentience, he cannot defend that he was, in fact, trying to rescue those children. 

Most tragically, the amphibian Nina Mazursky — spotlighted in the series finale “A Very Funny Monster” — is shown to be completely absolved of wrongdoing but nonetheless detained for her perceived monstrosity after being caught living in the fictional Star City’s sewage system.

Gunn further subverts his approach to unlikely misfits by splitting apart his ensemble, thereby feeding into the dysfunctional dynamic between individuals already at odds with social expectations. From “Chasing Squirrels,” the series separates field leader Rick Flag Jr. from the team, who return to the nation of Pokolistan on orders to eliminate its princess — Illana Rostovic — believing she is poised to wage global war. 

In either of Gunn’s previous DC Comics capers, the story’s midpoint would highlight how the main cast grow to confide in each other, whether it be Ratcatcher 2 bonding with the ironically musophobic Bloodsport, or Peacemaker and his A.R.G.U.S. teammates jamming to Hanoi Rocks. 

The impromptu return to eliminate the princess of a nation they were tasked with protecting leaves sparse room for the Creature Commandos to align as a group — especially since their backstories are never divulged to each other — as with the Suicide Squad. For this reason, their tragedies are unable to form any interpersonal sympathies. 

Moreover, the sole friendship formed between the Bride and Mazursky is befallen by the latter’s unceremonious murder at the hands of Princess Rostovic in the finale. Gunn reinforces Mazursky’s tragedy as an unwitting government pawn and turns the Bride into a vengeful assassin. It is a decidedly cold and unheroic victory that punctures the loneliness she struggles with as both a creation of a man with stagnated maturity and a monster unable to integrate within society.

The new DC Universe’s story begins properly with the Gunn-helmed Superman on July 11. One wonders why someone entrenched in the crevices of comic book history would approach a character so weaved into the fabric of American pop culture. 

However, Gunn is demonstrably partial to the condescended foundling, who strives to chart a path where the world refuses to carve them one. Narrativizing an off-world immigrant raised on a humble farm and trying to embody humanity’s best reveals that cape or not, Clark Kent is no different in being different. In that way, we are all outsiders — a James Gunn character.