With Mars prominent in the skies and the news recently, it occured to me to wonder: Mars gets fairly frequent mention in the DC universe thanks to it’s being the home of J’onn J’onzz. But I can’t remember it ever being mentioned in the Marvel universe. No aliens from there, no visits to there, nothing existing or happening there. Does anyone remember it ever being featured in a Marvel story?
In the '70s, Marvel published stories about Killraven and his fellow rebels fighting against a successful Martian invasion - Amazing Adventures vol 1; #18-39. Here’s a review by Randy Lander of the more recent Alan Davis Mark Farmer version.
Killraven’s Martians got grandfathered into Marvel continuity courtesy of crossovers in Marvel Team-UpandAvengers Forever. Mars was conspicuously absent from “Guardians of the Galaxy,” though (At least it was in the 70s; I never read the Jim Valentino issues later).
Well, you need to understand that Marvel has had so many millions of stories set in the future and since the late 60’s has been playing them off against each other (viz., Kang/Immortus/Rama-Tut), that the continuity no longer suggests that any one of Marvel’s future histories will be the one that actually comes to pass. They’re all alternate timelines, any one of which might be the future to which today’s Marvel Universe will come to eventually – or the “actual” future might be something altogether. For instance, the Guardians of the Galaxy future is demonstrably not the future of the modern Marvel Universe; when Guardian Vance Astro come to the “present” and confronted his earlier self (teenager Vance Astrovik) he set the boy off in a different direction than he had faced himself. Astro had not developed his powers as a teen as did young Astrovik, he never became a member of the New Warriors or the Avengers as did the boy, and he never served time in prison for killing his father as has his younger self.
In a text-piece summary of the history of the Guardians of the Galaxy which appeared in the first issue of the Guardians’ first eponymous series (89? 90? somewhere around there), it is suggested that the Guardians’ future is the same one as Killraven’s (just further ahead than his) but that records are sketchy and this might not be correct. I haven’t read the majority of the Guardians’ appearances (either Bronze Age of 90’s era) so I don’t know if the issue was more concretely explored elsewhere.
–Cliffy