Even though I’ve been hooked on comics lately, I still only consider myself a casual comic book fan. When I was fifteen or so, I read a lot of graphic novels and religiously bought new issues of Wizard Magazine, but I didn’t make it to comic book shops often enough (or have the money) to keep up with ongoing stories. When you take into account the decades and decades of history most of the major superheroes have now, not to mention all the reboots and parallel timelines it can be overwhelming to get into a new character.
Being way more of a movie buff than a comic one, I am a huge fan of what Marvel has done with their Cinematic Universe. Iron Man was a big surprise, and although The Incredible Hulk was just alright and Iron Man 2 was a disappointment, the shared universe really picked up steam when Thor, Captain America, and The Avengers all came out within a year of each other.
With Phase 2 of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe kicking off in a few months with Iron Man 3, I’ve been wanting to prepare and learn about all the new characters that will be on screen. With Phase 1, I knew the backstories of all the characters but this time around things are getting a little more obscure.
Phase 2 Character Guides
So, I decided to do some research on the main new characters in Phase 2 and share it with you all, as well as open it up for discussion. I’m sure there are plenty of comic book nerds out there who can point us in the right direction as far as what we should read before seeing the new movies. These won’t be histories or biographies. Think of them more like bibliographies. A collection of stuff I’ve found that should help better understand the characters.
So, throughout the next few months we will be looking at different characters from the next batch of Marvel movies, which are:
- Iron Man 3 (May 2013)
- Thor 2: The Dark World (November 2013)
- Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier (April 2014)
- Guardians of the Galaxy (August 2014)
- The Avengers 2 (May 2015)
- Ant-Man (November 2015)
For the sake of this series of posts, I’m going to leave out Avengers 2 and Ant-Man. I’m super excited about Ant-Man but since it looks like he won’t be in the next Avengers film, so I kind of consider him Phase 2.5.
Starting today and continuing for the next few months, we’ll be looking characters such as Iron Patriot, Falcon, Winter Soldier, Crossbones, the whole Guardians of the Galaxy roster (including Rocket Raccoon), Thanos, and maybe a few surprises. The posts will be illustrated with action figure photography when possible, because obviously I’m a huge dork. Also, make sure to follow THS on Instagram to get sneak peeks at which characters will be featured on different days.
