While looking up information on the Guardians of the Galaxy movie I came across a claim that the movie is racist because they painted Zoe Saldana green to highlight her “otherness.” I can’t help but wonder if that means the movie is also racist for painting Karen Gillan, Michael Rooker, and Josh Brolin, among others, assorted colors? In any case I thought it might be informative to take a little look at comics history to understand why Gamora is green.
First let’s look at a comic convention: aliens are often drawn as humans with odd colored skin and one or two minor cosmetic differences like pointy ears, antennae, one eye, funky chins, etc. In this comics mirror television and the movies though they do it for different reasons. They do this on television and in the movies because, ultimately, aliens are played by human actors and until the relatively recent advent of high quality CGI, attempts to make human actors look inhuman tended to look fairly cheesy. They do this in comics because comics are produced on a regular schedule and it’s easier, and thus faster, for artists to draw human figures, which they have a lot of experience drawing, than a bunch of weird, outlandish, alien figures.
Gamora first appeared in the June 1975 issue of Strange Tales which makes her 3 years older than Zoe Saldana. In that very first appearance she was green. She was also sexy, wearing a fishnet body stocking with a neckline that plunged to below her navel. Comics fans may be nerds but they still like their women to look human.
Gamora is the last of an alien race known as the Zen Whoberi. The rest of her species had been exterminated by the Universal Church of Truth, a religious empire composed of diverse alien species and led by the Magus who, it is worth noting, is purple.
As a child Gamora was found by Thanos, who adopted her as his daughter and trained her as an assassin so that she could one day kill the Magus. Thanos, it is worth noting, is also purple with a funky chin.
In their quest to defeat the Magus, Gamora and Thanos allied with Adam Warlock, an artificial human and a Christ-figure destined to become the Magus unless he could find a way to alter his own timeline to prevent the Magus from ever coming into existence. Adam Warlock, it’s worth noting, was a golden color.
Rounding out our merry band of heroes was Adam’s friend, Pip. Pip was easily the most Caucasian member of the group. This was not a compliment to Caucasians.
So, in conclusion, Gamora is green because she’s always been green, not because they want to make Zoe Saldana look alien.