Columbus Day is next Monday, celebrating Christopher Columbus and the European explorers who came over to the New World and wiped out and enslaved the native population with disease and advanced (for the time) weaponry. Since Christopher Columbus is a pretty controversial figure in history, ComicBook.com has decided to celebrate the holiday by talking about some of our favorite fictional explorers, who have appeared media ranging from comic books to television to video games.
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Ash Ketchum
The protagonist of the long running Pokemon anime, Ash Ketchum has explored the various regions of the Pokemon world for the better part of two decades alongside his beloved Pikachu. Ash’s goal is to be the very best, the best there ever was, which means traveling thousands of miles on foot across largely uninhabited territory, accompanied by a few friends and his Pokemon. While Ash’s travel log is pretty remarkable, what’s even more impressive is that he’s seemingly never aged a day in the Pokemon anime, meaning that he’s still 11 years old after all these years. Despite all his adventures and encounters with legendary Pokemon, Ash still has a long way to go. He’s only won one of the six Pokemon Leagues he’s competed in, despite his impressive collection of Gym badges and Pokemon.
Nathan Drake
Nathan Drake is the charming and sarcastic treasure hunting star of the Uncharted adventure series. A mix of Indiana Jones and Johnny Knoxville, Drake travels the world looking for long lost treasure, dodging bullets and ancient curses along the way. While Drake entered the treasure hunting business solely for profit, he also has a good heart and won’t hesitate to put his friends or the good of humanity above his own avaricious desires. Sony will release a new Uncharted game in early 2016, with hints that this might be Drake’s final adventure.
The Crew of the USS Enterprise
The original space explorers of television, the crew of the USS Enterprise boldly went where no man had gone before, discovering new civilizations and new worlds on the edge of the space frontier. During Star Trek’s original three year run on NBC, the James T. Kirk led crew fought Klingons, discovered worlds blighted by strange afflictions and traveled back into time at least once. Kirk usually was on the front line of the Enterprise’s missions, taking his shirt off at random and fighting assorted bad guys with all the skill of a four year old learning how to judo. While NBC cancelled Star Trek after three seasons, it gained a cult status, spawning multiple movies and television shows in the process. Recently, Paramount rebooted the Star Trek franchise with younger versions of the original Star Trek characters and the upcoming Star Trek: Beyond promises to follow the crew into another extended exploration mission into space.
The Challengers of the Unknown
While the Fantastic Four get all the fame and glory for being the “First Family” of explorers in comics, that honor really goes to the Challengers of the Unknown, a group of adventurers first appearing during DC’s Silver Age. A Jack Kirby creation, the Challengers were four wildly different adventurers (one was a famed war hero, another a diver) who all miraculously survived a plane crash. The team battled monsters and other weird threats and operated out of a mountain base in the Rocky Mountains. The Challengers faded into obscurity as superheroes began to step on their turf and eventually disappeared into Hypertime saving the world, but not before leaving a new Challengers team behind to continue their quest. Although DC’s tried rebooting the group several times (most recently as a team of adventurers appearing on a reality TV show), but the Challengers have never recaptured that original Silver Age spark.
Captain Nathan Bridger
In the tradition of great underwater explorers like Captain Nemo and Sean Connery’s character in The Hunt for Red October came Captain Nathan Bridger, the main character of SeaQuest DSV, a television series that ran for three years on NBC.ย After Earth ran out of easily accessible natural resources, it turned to underwater exploration and mining to keep afloat.ย The SeaQuest was a state of the art submarine designed to both keep the peace between assorted nations and underwater colonies and also conduct research on the largely unexplored ocean depths.ย Bridger’s crew included a talking dolphin and a teenaged computer genius sporting a Florida Marlins jersey.ย While SeaQuest initially stuck to themes of underwater exploration and marine biology, the show later veered off into science fiction, with Bridger and the rest of SeaQuest‘s crew fighting aliens and resealing an ocean-threatening crack in the Earth’s crust.ย ย
