When I started recapping MCU movies a few years ago, I didn't really anticipate just how much work that was going to entail. Fifteen recaps later I'm debating whether I should quit now while I still have most of my sanity or accept that I will have to recap at least two miniseries AS WELL AS the next probably fifteen more movies. While I decide that, I've been reading and researching a LOT in an effort to better understand the Marvel universe and at least some of its characters. Along the way, I've been gaining new understanding of the things I already recapped and realized that I might need to make a few corrections or clarifications. Rather than try to address them all within recaps, I thought I would do that here in the new format I will be using for recaps from now on (long story).

Let's start with a post I did back in 2019 (which feels like ages ago) regarding the differences between the comics and the MCU, with newly added footnotes.

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Since I started writing MCU fic, I've been doing a lot of research into the original comics. I tried reading some, but there are just too many of them and nobody can agree on which ones are most important. Then I found a DK publishing "everything you need to know" book - a broad summary of all the greatest hits. As I went through it, I found myself thinking of all the ways the MCU could have been different. Here are my notes about the shit we might have gotten:

-a Black Widow that doesn't age and is as invincible as Captain America because she was injected with a variation of the same serum. (Seriously, the MCU did her so dirty).
-After taking shrapnel to the chest in an attack from villain Ezekiel Stane, Tony is saved via questionable implant/Iron Man suit. Sorry, did I say Tony? I meant Pepper.
-Actually Wanda and Vision are totally canon. They had kids and everything. No, I have no idea how that is possible.(1)
-Tony uses nanotech to store his armor UNDER HIS SKIN, which also gives him increased strength and the ability to grow new organs. Wait...did he actually do this in the MCU? (2)
-Janet (the Wasp) fucks Hawkeye and decides to live in giant mode for a while. No wait...nobody wants that one.
-Ant-Man takes a trip through Human Torch's bloodstream and briefly gains the ability to shoot flames, making him...wait for it...Fire Ant Man.
-Thor rides in a chariot drawn by two giant, mutant, steroidal goats. (3)
-Ragnarok as an evil clone Tony created from dead Thor's hair. Because he missed him. Or readers did, anyway.(4)
-Mjolnir deciding Thor is no longer worthy and choosing his former girlfriend Jane instead.(5)
-There is absolutely nothing wrong with Captain Marvel's story. It's perfect.(6)
-Shuri as Black Panther for the same reason Jane became Thor.(7)
-Black Panther being married to Storm (but breaking up when the X-Men destroy Wakanda).
-Scarlet Witch defeating Dormammu (after Doctor Strange finished screwing with him until he agreed to leave Earth alone and Loki briefly teams with him to get the Avengers and the Defenders to fight each other).(8)
-Clea Strange is Dormammu's niece. Wait...what?(8)
-Spider-Man losing his costume and needing to borrow Johnny Storm's, complete with a paper bag over his head that says "kick me".
-Jessica Drew.
-Doctor Strange trying to revive his brother after he is killed and turning him into a vampire.
-Wong being turned into a vampire. Seriously, what is it with Doctor Strange and vampires? Maybe I should do that crossover with Only Lovers Left Alive after all. Though this would probably have to include Blade and Dracula which was apparently a thing. (9)
-I would say Spider-Ham, but Into the Spider-Verse already did that and I didn't want it then either.
-Devil Dinosaur.
-Drax punching through Thanos' ribcage and ripping his heart right out (which Thanos notes is "interesting", presumably just before falling on his face).
-Loki turning New York into ice cream. Yes, you read that right.(10)
-Lady Loki.
-Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange reversing good and evil to defeat Red Skull and Loki weilding Mjolnir because now that he's a hero he's "worthy".
-Iron Man time traveling to the land of King Arthur.(11)
-On both lists of ways Thor and Loki can win against each other is "tell dad". Specifically, Thor is supposed to tell him Loki is being a "naughty boy". No word on whether this results in spanking.
-Thunderbolt Ross as Red Hulk and female versions of both red and green Hulk.
-Lockjaw gaining superintelligence from the mind stone and forming the Avengers pets into his own version of the Avengers. This includes a dragon, a saber-toothed tiger and a male dog named Ms. Lion. (12)
-The Guardians of the Galaxy are actually from the future and doesn't that make so much more sense?
-Technically, Doctor Strange is one of the Defenders. As is Aquama...I mean Namor. And the Hulk. And Valkyrie. And, in an alternate universe, Loki.
-Maria Hill as the strongest director of SHIELD since Nick Fury.
-Historic members of SHIELD include Leonardo DaVinci, Isaac Newton and Galileo.
-Fenris is totally supposed to be Loki's son. And Hela is his daughter.(13)
-After Ragnarok, Thor recreates new Asgard...in Oklahoma.(13)
-If Hela loses her cloak, the left side of her body becomes decayed.
-The Savage Land - a tropical jungle in the middle of Antarctica with dinosaurs and other ancient creatures and humans.
-Wolverine and the Invisible Woman time-travel to kill Hank Pym before he creates Ultron. They return to the present to find everything even worse with evil cyborg Tony Stark in charge of everything and go back to fix it, convincing Pym to put in a kill switch instead. All the time-traveling creates a rip in time-space that collapses the multi-verse. In other words: yes, time travel does work like in the movies in Marvelverse.

(1) I'm still not totally clear on this despite having read both comics cited as inspiration for "WandaVision" (one where Vision moves to the suburbs and makes himself a synthezoid family and one where Wanda has a breakdown and creates a warped reality where she gives birth to twins Professor X insists are not real). Supposedly there is another comic somewhere that goes into more detail about the time she used magic to create Wiccan and Speed out of shards of the devil, but I haven't located it yet.(14)

(2) It turns out this happened after Civil War (more on this later) when he was appointed leader of SHIELD and every superhero ever and gives him access to satellites, computer networks and every energy source. Which sounds like an awesome idea that wouldn't totally backfire the minute a villain hacks into it.

(3) Yeah. This is in the series where Mjolnir decides "The Odinson" isn't worthy and makes Jane Foster the new Thor, so... But as crazy as Taika Waiti has shown willingness to go, I'm not sure there is any way to do the flying giant space goat thing. Or, probably any of the other stuff in this thread including making Loki the Sorcerer Supreme and Doctor Strange a veterinarian with a talking dog.

(4) I'm not...really sure this is Ragnarok, actually. He is never named and is just referred to as a clone of Thor (who kills Goliath and really drives a bunch of supers to Cap's team). He is created (by Reed Richards) out of a hair Tony collected though.

(5) There are multiple versions of many of the characters because, as Emilio has phrased it, Marvel has always "bestowed" titles to characters instead of intertwining character and hero identity the way DC does. Batman is always Bruce Wayne, but Captain America can be Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, Bucky Barnes or Peggy Carter at various times in various parts of the multiverse. And let's not even go into how many Spider-Mans and Spider-Womans there are. Iron Man is a possible exception, but that seems to be mostly because all the other characters who wear an Iron Man suit go by different names (Iron Patriot, Ironheart, Rescue, War Machine). There are so many Thors that there is an affiliation called "Thor Corps" that apparently includes a black guy who looks like he fell out of the 1970s and a mutant named Beta Ray Bill (who is apparently the one who wields Stormbreaker). The more I try to read about Beta Ray Bill, the less anything makes sense, so I haven't really looked much further than necessary to understand (or...not) the one comic I read that mentioned Thor Corp.

(6) As it turns out, Carol Danvers' story and Captain Marvel's story were not necessarily the same thing for much of the history of the comics. Captain Marvel the movie was a very faithful telling of Carol Danvers' story. Except the comics version of Carol Danvers spent decades going by the name Ms. Marvel and then Binary and then, like, three other identities before becoming Captain Marvel. This is why when I saw the article about WandaVision that said Monica Rambeaux was Captain Marvel before Carol, I became confused. It turns out this whole copyright we-need-to-keep-DC-from-stealing-the-name thing created a big ass mess. Similar to how the bankruptcy of Marvel in the 90s forcing a selling off of Spider-Man and The X-Men led to a whole bunch of confusion and weirdness and the brief fear that Spider-Man may not be able to continue in the MCU. The fact that the MCU can skip all of that in-between stuff with Captain Marvel and just go right to Carol taking the title is really a case of just cleaning up a lot of that because they can now.

(7) There was speculation after Chadwick Boseman died that this would be the perfect way to move forward with the Black Panther story. Although there were quite a few fanboys who were so incapable of seeing the obvious here that they were going with far more elaborate fixes involving resurrecting Killmonger and reprogramming him a la Bucky to be a good guy now because pffffffttttt Black Panther can't be a GIRL. I really hope this is the route the MCU goes with it and I will savor the salty tears of the sexists who get mad about it.

(8) The version of the Doctor Strange VS Dormammu showdown that I read was hilarious and so much more fun than the one we got. Basically, it all came down to a ridiculously detailed contract The Ancient One drew up after a month-long fight with Dormammu that resulted in him having to take the form of a squirrel in order to return to Earth and being unable to attack Doctor Strange as long as he was within ten feet of a mailbox. Anyway, Dormammu has more of a body in the comics and apparently Stephen's wife (unseen in the MCU as of yet) is the same species.

When I mentioned the controversy over the casting of Tilda Swinton to play the Ancient One to Emilio, I remember him referring to the actual controversy as being about Doctor Strange himself being white. It's possible he was confused, but it made me look a little more carefully at any comic that included him for clues to his ethnicity. He is American, as is Wong (whose first name is Jason by the way). They were friends before Stephen's accident. Wong is very definitely Asian American, but while some of the more recent comics give Stephen Asian features, the majority make him look more European. One makes him into a dead ringer for Vincent Price. It's difficult to say anything for certain, of course, since we're talking about drawings done by different people over the course of several decades, but there is one thing about the classic Doctor Strange that is absolutely consistent: his eyes are blue. As is his hair.

(9) Once Agatha Harkness was brought into the MCU, the idea that Dracula is actually an ancient sorcerer in the Marvel universe began to make sense. Though the comic that featured him, Wolfman, The Mummy, Frankenstein('s creature) and a diabetic centaur with a symbiote still reads like parody (as I suppose you would expect from a comic about Deadpool). But as I was looking up  Monica Rambeaux's story (as mentioned in #4), I found this sentence: "she assisted Doctor Strange and the Scarlet Witch in battling Dracula." I'm not predicting this is where Doctor Strange 2 is headed, but... Honestly, when I realized that Doctor Strange's other companion throughout SEVERAL stories was a green skinned Minotaur alien I realized that vampires was actually the least crazy thing the MCU could adapt from his stories.

(10) I think Tom Hiddleston cited this as one of his favorite Loki moments from the comics. He also was asked in an interview what his favorite story was from mythology and said something about apples and Loki trying to distract a female horse (two completely different stories and the second one is backwards), so clearly his memory is no better than mine. But he appears to have been right about this one.

(11) Yeah, they were trying something there and I'm not sure it was successful.

(12) The pet avengers also includes DEVIL DINOSAUR, which, yes, is an actual dinosaur.

(13) So here's where I seem to have really gotten mixed up. I cited this in both my Ragnarok recap and my fic "Destiny". The last time I looked up what Ragnarok looked like in the 616 universe, though, I noticed the fine print under the description of Loki and his daughter Hela bringing about the apocalypse just like in the original myths. It said THIS IS NOT THE SAME LOKI. Apparently the comics that are basically Norse mythology in comic book form are completely separate from the modern versions. THIS Loki may have been named after a great uncle or something. I don't know. I'm still not totally clear on this.

A somewhat more minor point: in my cringing reaction to the scene where Thor leaves Loki to indefinite torture by obedience disk, I noted that it was in keeping with the sort of punishment meted out to him in mythology but said Thor was not the psycho who came up with the idea of tying him to a rock with poison dripping on him. Well...according to the comic "The Trials of Loki", he was. And again, how this comic retelling of Norse myths relates to the rest of the stories in the Marvel Universe about Thor and Loki, I don't have the slightest clue.

As for the Oklahoma bit, I was wrong about that too. New Asgard is not IN Oklahoma. It is hovering above it. Possibly cloaked in the same manner as Wakanda.

(14) Yes, I am doing a footnote of a footnote. Because life got in the way and this was put on hold long enough that I was able to obtain the correct collection of comics. I think. I have determined that all advice on which comics you should read to understand which shows can be basically ignored because the collected "Vision and the Scarlet Witch" has FAR MORE connection to the "WandaVision" series than either of the other ones. It also has things like Magneto discovering he is Quicksilver and Wanda's father, Quicksilver living on the moon with his Inhuman wife Crystal and their daughter rather uncreatively named Luna, and zombies because...whatever. Oh, and a midwife cow, or as she describes it "a new woman evolved from a cow by the lord High Evolutionary". These comics are sometimes really weird.

Oh, and Vision's make-up is really confusing in that he was basically Frankensteined out of three men at various times, probably by different writers. And his brother is apparently the Grim Reaper. I don't know anything more about that because it was just casually dropped in the middle of a conversation in the book with no reference cited (the librarian in me really loves that the writers usually provide citations for things they reference within the comics).

As for the part about the kids being created out of shards of the devil...I'm still not sure where that came from because this collection ended with a relatively normal (aside from one of the twins being undetectable by all medical equipment) birth story. Maybe I'm still missing the part where it is discovered that none of that happened and she was never really pregnant.


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A couple more observations...

Nick Fury is most often connected to Captain America because he was a soldier in WWII. And he was white. Apparently they redid all the characters in the 90s or early 00s and decided that Samuel L. Jackson would be the perfect likeness for the new Fury. Jackson agreed so long as he got first dibs if they ever did a movie and here we are. I haven't read very many Captain America comics and the one that seemed to form the basis for the first movie didn't feature Fury in the present. But it did have Steve insisting he wanted to go back to the 1940s so he could save Bucky, who he swore he would go into hiding with under new identities so as not to damage the present. Yes, he wanted to go back to his own time to be WITH BUCKY. Because the whole Steve/Peggy thing seems to have been added in the MCU, in the same way Pepper's marriage to Happy was changed to a romance with Tony.

And speaking of Steve and Tony, there's one comic that has a mostly boring plot but is still interesting for its method of storytelling in that it shows both Steve and Tony's inner monologues as they have to team up to fight whoever the big bad of the week is. At one point, Tony waxes poetic about Steve's "handsome face" and "azure eyes" in a way that's probably not meant to signal a questioning of his sexuality, but...I mean...

Much of the early Marvel comics are hilariously goofy and clearly meant for children. But at some point that changed and all of the best comics I read were part of the more recent Civil War series. Because of all the divvying up of the Marvel franchise, the MCU wasn't really able to do full justice to those stories (though it sounds like "Falcon and Winter Soldier" is taking us a step closer now). I think Cracked did an article about this. Basically, changing the incident that prompted the Superhuman Registration Act to Wanda destroying a building during a mission effectively weakened the argument for reasons I cited in the course of that recap. Absolutely nothing about the Lagos incident looked any different from any other superhero battle in previous movies in the series. In fact, Wanda seemed to do LESS damage than was done in some of those and she did it while trying to minimize the damage a bad guy would have done. In the comics, a bunch of kids without any real understanding of damage control confronted a superhuman bomb, which detonated and took out a school full of children. In that context, people pressuring the government to DO SOMETHING about regulating these people as weapons makes sense, even if it also makes sense to resist such regulation because many of the mutant or "enhanced" people didn't choose to have their powers any more than a black man can choose his skin color.

Because of the limitations of the MCU, the civil war story lacked the depth and nuance it has in the comics. I didn't get that when I recapped it, which is why it was so easy for me to take Cap's side and act bewildered that anyone would be all for a registration of people who are "different". In the comics, Tony isn't really "pro" registration. In fact, he almost successfully got any attempt to pass the Superhuman Registration Act swept under a rug before the bombing incident made that impossible. He just sees it as inevitable and thinks it's better if one of their own is working with the government to keep it from turning into something much worse. I believe someone mentions the fact that the knee jerk response would actually be to ban mutants entirely. The fault in his thinking is brought up by Cable (yes, the Josh Brolin character from Deadpool 2) at one point when somebody scoffs that Tony wouldn't do any of the horrible things that usually happen when people are labeled and separated from the rest of society. He points out that the plan will last longer than Tony, so while he may be able to minimize the damage NOW, he cannot control how registration will work forever and someone at some point down the line is bound to be more corrupt.

Anyway, I specifically want to address two things from that recap. The first is the "who is on which side" thing. At the time the movie was released, there was a question of which side Doctor Strange would be on because his origin movie came out around the same time. According to the comics, he and The Thing of the Fantastic Four basically had the same response: they fled to avoid taking a side. The Thing fled to France and joined the Paris superhero squad that looks suspiciously like Justice League knockoffs. Doctor Strange fled to the arctic and went on a hunger strike while he "meditated" for whatever end to the war would result in the least casualties. Which is exactly how you would expect a doctor turned mystic to respond, really.

Second, the pro-registration side did eventually emerge victorious, partly because CAPTAIN AMERICA DIED. One of the comics where Tony defends his position to Steve ends with the reveal that he is talking to a corpse. The last line, said through tears, is "it wasn't worth it."

In conclusion...I saw someone say once that the majority of what Marvel puts out is basically fanfiction. "Canon" is a really vague suggestion that mostly revolves around the ways characters behave. "Ultron" didn't look much like the comic it was based on at all. "Endgame" is pretty much an original story that grew from the Infinity Saga basically veering off after "Infinity Gauntlet" and is more concerned with bringing the stories of certain characters to a satisfying (or not) close. So really, these movies are unlike any other adaptations where a certain amount of adherence to the source material is expected. But I will still be arguing that a lot of the changes in "Endgame", particularly with regards to time travel, make no sense.

See you in the next recap.