NetEase’s new Marvel hero shooter is finally out, and packed with comics details. If you’re not as familiar with the books as the movies, here’s a few burning questions you might want answering.
The world of comics and video games alike has been all aflutter with the launch of Marvel Rivals, the new team-based hero shooter that mashes together Marvel’s comics history with the mechanics of the industry’s latest hot-ticket Overwatch rival. But if you’re already eager to jump in and decide your main, except your Marvel knowhow leans a little more MCU than it does the comics Rivals is more keenly drawing on for its vision of the multiverse, we’re here to help with some answers to the biggest questions we’ve been fielding from our non-comics friends this past weekend.
Unless you’re a Punisher main. You guys go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.Who Is Galacta?
First created in 2009 for a short-lived comic series, Galacta isn’t a gender-bent spin on Galactus, but his daughter. Not sired through traditional means, in her reality Galacta was birthed from a parasitic entity within Galactus’ own field of the Power Cosmic. Hiding on earth as a girl named Gali, Galacta used her similar abilities to her father—to combat her own similar growing hunger to fuel the Power Cosmic within her—to protect the world from alien threats in secret, consuming hostile biomass rather than turning on the planet itself.
The character hasn’t actually had many appearances since, but she’s started reaching more people through her recent gaming appearances. Aside from Rivals, where Galacta acts as the match commentator and the central figure bringing the myriad heroes together as a fighting force, she’s also recently appeared in Marvel’s other recent buzzy game, the card game Marvel Snap.Is Marvel Rivals‘ Story Based on the Comics?
There isn’t a direct parallel to any particular comics storyline and Rivals‘ premise, but it’s definitely one that’s going to be familiar to both comics readers and anyone who’s up to date on where the MCU is going to start heading over the next few years. In Rivals, heroes and villains from across the multiverse have been drawn to a singular futuristic amalgam reality after its Doctor Doom and a past alternate managed to cross paths and inevitably attempt to undo each other. This created an event dubbed the “Timestream Entanglement,” which both threatened to collapse time itself as well as create a series of incursions where various multiverses collided, either depositing fragments of themselves (like the living island Krakoa, more on that later) or merging parts of them entirely, like Yggsard, a fusion of the realm of Asgard and the world tree Yggdrasil.
You can think then, in comics terms, of Marvel Rivals taking place in something akin to Secret Wars‘ battleworld, in particular the version of it from the 2015 comic event of that name, rather than the 1985 original. There’s a mixture of the multiversal collapse (which will become a narrative within the MCU, culminating in its next Avengers duology) and this idea of a fusion world while all these realities are in existential limbo as Rivals‘ characters race to stop the Dooms, but it’s otherwise an original setting for the game.Is Jeff the Shark Really From the Comics?
Yes! One of Rivals‘ early breakout characters has been the adorable “Land Shark” Jeff, a support healer who is just a teeny tiny shark with teeny tiny legs running around and chomping up entire teams. He’s a more recent Marvel character, but he does indeed have roots in the comics rather than necessarily being created whole cloth for Rivals. Jeff was introduced in the pages of Kelly Thompson and Daniele di Nicuolo’s West Coast Avengers series in 2018, after the team dealt with a horde of Land Sharks created by Modok assaulting Santa Monica.
