10 Best Avengers Cosplay Characters Ever

4. And Here's To The Supporting Cast

Marvel being Marvel, they're busy trying to find ways to shoehorn in decades of continuity, heroes, lovers, villains and storylines into the histories of their far younger cinematic counterparts. In many ways, that's exactly the problem that they found themselves with in the Ultimate Marvel line of comics, where they intended to release comics with stories occupying the same shared universe, but a far simpler version not bogged down by decades of narrative... but also wanted character that still felt the heft of those decades of narrative. The Falcon, aka Sam Wilson, was the first ever African-American superhero (The Black Panther, due to arrive in Marvel movies shortly, was the first black superhero, but he's African, not American). Created in 1969, The Falcon was actually Captain America's partner throughout the 1970s, sharing top billing with him on the comics' masthead. He's taken over as Captain America before on a temporary basis, and was named the new Captain America by Marvel last year. In the movies, Steve Rogers has only just met him, but Marvel intends to try and imply that kind of long-running, deep friendship in only a couple of movies, to get the required result without doing the work of establishing the two as friends. We'll see if they can keep it up.

The Winter Soldier, meanwhile has the opposite issue: created in 2005 in the comics, he was the long-deceased Bucky come back from the grave, just as his storyline works in the films. The Soldier is far cooler than The Falcon, and another contender for replacement Captain America in the comics... although we're not sure why Cap would need replacing in the movies, given that he's not exactly covered himself with glory since coming out of the ice. We've got two incursions on an 'international incident' level that resulted in massive damage and loss of life, and the destruction of SHIELD, which qualifies as a similar kind of catastrophe on a political level. Catastrophe is something that Nick Fury would know all about, of course. He's even sacrificed his original look: in his first comics incarnation, Nick Fury was a white WWII veteran who'd taken a milder version of Captain America's super soldier serum and who barely aged as a consequence. Then the guys behind the Ultimate Marvel line of comics decided they wanted their Nick Fury to look like Samuel L. Jackson, and went ahead with the change... fast forward a few years, and Marvel, setting up their Phase 1 of movies, begin to realise that they can actually get Samuel L. Jackson, if they want. Then mainstream Marvel fiddled around with the narrative to follow suit, and the old school Nick Fury was written out. And that's history for you.