6 More Marvel Superheroes Who Could Be Part of the "Generations" Event

Recently, Marvel Comics announced that they will bring back many of their traditional characters [...]

By Russ Burlingame - April 11, 2017 07:27 pm EDT

Recently, Marvel Comics announced that they will bring back many of their traditional characters in an event titled Generations, which will apparently see them fighting side-by-side with the heroes who have replaced them in recent years.

marvel generations dead characters resurrected jean grey captain marvel wolverine hulk

There will be ten stories all crossing over in a larger "Generations" story, pairing up heroes with alternate takes on their own idea and with big-name writers, most of whom have a lot of history with the hero in question.

And it's all very good, but lest we forget, most of the characters -- notably Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Hulk, and Captain Marvel -- have had other "pretenders to the throne" or replacement heroes before.

...Where are those guys?

Here's the complete list of character pairings for the official event, and the writers who will be telling their stories:

Iron Man (Tony Stark and Riri Williams) – written by Brian Michael Bendis
Spider-Man (Peter Parker and Miles Morales) – Brian Michael Bendis
Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan) – G. Willow Wilson
Thor (Odinson and Jane Foster) – Jason Aaron
Hawkeye (Clint Barton and Kate Bishop) – Kelly Thompson
Hulk (Bruce Banner and Amadeus Cho) – Greg Pak
Jean Grey (young and older) – Dennis Hopeless
Wolverine (Logan and X23) – Tom Taylor
Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell and Carol Danvers) – Margie Stohl
Captain America (Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson) – Nick Spencer

Who's missing on that list? Well, howzabout a quick jaunt down memory lane?

CAPTAIN MARVEL

You thought there were just two Captain Marvels? Well, guess again!

Genis-Vell-3-580x356 — (Photo: Marvel Comics)

Even leaving aside the version from DC Comics' Shazam!, there are a handful of Captain Marvels that have had the title over the years.

The one we'd most like to see return to the pages of Generations? Genis-Vell.

Also occasionally called Legacy or Photon, Genis-Vell was the Captain Marvel of the critically-acclaimed Captain Marvel series from Peter David, published in 1995.

Genis-Vell is the genetically-engineered son of Mar-Vell and his lover Elysius, created from the late Mar-Vell's cell samples and artificially aged to maturity. Genis, like his father, wears the Nega-Bands, possesses Cosmic Awareness and was bonded with Marvel's own Snapper Carr, Rick Jones.

Eventually Genis would go insane and have to be stopped, which is one of the things that meant he couldn't be Captain Marvel anymore.

JEAN GREY

Okay, so this one is kind of a cheat, as she never fully was "Jean Grey."

Except that's exactly what she was brought in to be.

No matter how utterly crazy her mythology gets, Marvel is stuck with Madelyne Pryor because she's the mother of Cable, a child she would have in an alternate future with Cyclops who traveled back in time to become a major player in the then-current Marvel Universe. With Cable coming to the big screen in Deadpool 2 and a dizzying array of A-list talent rumored to be under consideration to play him, it seems now more than ever that Marvel can't get rid of ol' Madelyne even if they tried.

And since she is, among other things, a clone of Jean Grey, why wouldn't she want in on the action when Generations comes around and the older Jean teams up with a younger version of herself?

For extra added fun and confusion, use the version fo Madelyne from Mutant X, the Marvel Comics series that took place in an alternate universe and featured Havok, Pryor, and wildly different takes on various other X-Men characters?

More...

SPIDER-MAN

Granted, now that he's got his own title going on, the Scarlet Spider is a busier guy than he's been in the last few years when everyone just figured he was dead.

Ben-Reilly-Scarlet-Spider-Header copy — (Photo: Marvel Comics)

Reilly is a clone of Spider-Man -- or is he? -- no, really he is -- OR NOT!...you get it. Yeah, he's the guy who was Spider-Man (and/or Scarlet Spider) during the infamous "Clone Saga," which took over the Spider-Man titles for most of the '90s.

Recently, veteran comics writer Todd Dezago, who was one of the key players in that era, told ComicBook.com that the original plan for that story was to take six weeks and to replace Peter Parker with Ben Reilly "who's not married and not bogged down by all this history...and then of course, two and a half years later, there we go."

For two and a half years, True Believers, Reilly was -- if not Spider-Man, than at least one of the Spider-Men and a key player in the month-to-month Spider-Man comics.

Certainly that's got to be worth at least a cameo, right?

(For this entry, we also would have accepted the Superior Spider-Man, or even Venom!)

More:

THOR

A supporting character in the Thor title for years, Eric Masterson was eventually merged with Thor in order to save the life of the man after he had been nearly killed in an attack by a supervillain.

For a time, the two shared a body but had distinct consciousnesses -- and then after an attack by Enchantress, Eric was the one and only Thor for a while.

Later, when Thor found his way back into control of his body, Masterson was given the Uru mace Thunderstrike, after which he named himself and continued to act as a superhero.

Again: here's a guy who was, at least for a while, Thor -- and who continued that heroic legacy in a new identity after it was clear that he wasn't really Thor, much like Ben Reilly.

Along the way, he and James Rhodes (another Iron Man, who we're simply leaving off the list because he's off the table right now following the events of Civil War II) were briefly the Secret Defenders, working with Silver Surfer.

There was also, at one point, a veritable "Thor Corps," the most famous of which was Beta Ray Bill, who was gifted a hammer known as Stormbringer after he defeated Thor in combat at Odin's command. In the comics, he played a big role in World War Hulk, the story into which Thor Odinson is being inserted in the movies.

CAPTAIN AMERICA

The obvious choice here would be Bucky Barnes, who served as Captain America following the apparent death of Steve Rogers during the fallout from Civil War. Barnes, Captain America's oldest friend and first sidekick, had been recently reintroduced as the Winter Soldier, and was seemingly the obvious choice to fill the role.

(Leaving aside the fact that for years, Sam Wilson had acted as Cap's strong right hand and had even worn the costume before. But ah, well, at least it wasn't the Azrael-Batman thing again.)

Anyway, U.S. Agent might be a more appropriate choice here, if only becuase there was likely a time that you could create a Venn Diagram of about 6 months in the '90s during which half of this list was active at the same time in the role of the main heroes.

U.S. Agent, who took over from Steve Rogers when he briefly quit being Captain America, wasn't Cap's first replacement and wouldn't be his last -- but when you look at the suit he wore after he stopped being Captain America...

...Well, it's pretty clear John Walker never fully got the whole Captain thing out of his system.

THE HULK

Only becuase we can't think of a good enough reason to differentiate "Mister Fixit" from the Bruce Banner Hulk, we're going to call upon General "Thunderbolt" Ross for this one.

Ross, a longtime supporting character and human antagonist to The Hulk, is the father of Bruce Banner's love interest Betty Ross.

He's not the only Red Hulk we've ever seen, but General Ross took on the identity during the World War Hulk event, during which the Bruce Banner Hulk was rampaging around the world in a fury over having been shot off into space by the Illuminati.

The end result of bringing Ross into the role was to take a temporary concept -- The Red Hulk had been created by MODOK as part of a team of Hulk villains -- and give it a semi-permanent sheen, as well as taking an objectively "bad guy" character and making him something of an antihero. Ross might be a pain in Hulk's ass, but he's never (or at least almost never) objectively a "bad" guy.

He, of course, isn't the only "other Hulk," as there's She-Hulk (currently starring in a Hulk title), Hulk's son Skaar, and more.

Heck, there's a whole animated series: Hulk and the Agents of SMASH.