I swear I didn’t plan this, but on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day we’re kicking off our week of Marvel Phase 2 Character Guides with Falcon, mainstream comics’ first African-American superhero. For some reason I always thought that title belonged to Luke Cage, but I was wrong. I’ve had a passing understanding of Falcon as a member of the Avengers in various shows I watched as a kid, but I knew I wanted to brush up his history before he debuts on the big screen in Captain America 2: The Winter Solider.

As with the rest of the character guides this week, this should give you a brief overview of the character, show you how he’ll fit into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and then point you in a few different directions so you can learn more, like I’ll be doing.
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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:
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