It’s been a pretty slow news week on the SW front so I’ve decided to go ahead and throw this up on the jumbotron for you all to take a look at.  Star Wars is a big part of my fandom but it will always be second to my first love of geekdom, comic books.

Marvel Comics has never really been my thing.  I will freely admit that I am and have always been the quintessential DC fanboy, so most of my knowledge of Marvel probably isn’t any more than the average comic book fan.

There is one caveat to that, though, and it’s one that I’ve only discovered in the past couple of years.  At the same time that Marvel was rolling out what many people consider a landmark in comic events, Civil War, they were also running a different sprawling event, Annihilation.

Annihilation was a story line that was concerned with the cosmic level setting and characters that generally don’t get much more than cameos in the regular comics.  Characters like the Silver Surfer or Captain Marvel generally show up occasionally and do something but they don’t tend to stick around all that much.

This event was the spotlight for these characters.  One cosmic level entity, Annihilus, is trying to take over the galaxy and he’s being opposed by the heroes of the cosmic setting, many of them that most readers either don’t know or they don’t remember.  The primary characters of the story are former Heralds of Galactus and a really pretty old character that nobody had done anything with in quite a while, Nova.

To any of you out there that don’t typically like comic books but do love a pretty good sci-fi story, I would recommend Annihilation to any of you.  I will say, however, that there are somet things that reader needs to know in order to understand the situation.

That’s what this post is for, it’s probably going to be pretty long.  The actual primer starts after the jump.

Right out of the box, one of the first things you need to know is that there are about three real political power players in the universe.  I’m saying political because of the existence of majorly powerful entities like Galactus, I’ll get to them.  And I say major players because there are a lot of lesser political groups, like the Korbinites.  I will not be covering them, because they aren’t really important in this story line.

The big three empires in this setting are outlined here, the Kree, the Skrull and the Shi’ar Empires.

The Kree Empire: If any of the three empires I’ve listed can be said to be the ‘good’ guys, it’s the Kree.  But that’s really relative.  The Kree are a very human-like race of aliens that come in two varieties, the ‘pure-bred’ blue Kree and the ‘pink’ Kree, which resemble white, human males.

The reason for the split is that at some point, a god-like being decided to punish them by freezing their natural evolution for trying to become more powerful, on level with the Phoenix force, a low level god.  Pink Kree are a result of attempts to overcome this limitation by interbreeding with other races.  Apparently the pink Kree are generally more powerful, but the pure-bred are of higher standing.  Despite this separation, the pink Kree are not really featured in the event.

The Empire is led by the Supreme Intelligence, an entity which is essentially a giant floating head in a tank.  Like Zordon from the Power Rangers. The Supreme Intelligence is a biological computer that is made up of the brains of the greatest Kree researchers and scientists.

Kree justice is dealt out by an organization of Accusers led by the Supreme Accuser, who for our entire knowledge of the publication of Marvel’s cosmic series has been Ronan the Accuser, a character that wields the ‘Universal Weapon’ which allows him to control material at an atomic level.  Ronan plays an important role in Annihilation.

Kree individuals are general between five and a half and eight feet tall with various kinds of abilities depending on their lineage and some potential mutations.  If you are familiar with the Inhumans, they are members a Kree colony whose inhabitants mutate themselves as part of a coming of age ritual that bestows a variety of powers.

Other important Kree in the Marvel Universe have been Captain Marvel (Mar-vell), Mar-Vell’s Son Genus Vell, Ms. Marvel Carol Danvers (Who is actually a human/Kree hybrid) and Noh-Varr (Also known as Marvel-Boy or yet a fourth Captain Marvel in the Marvel setting).

The Skrull Empire: Skrulls are likely to be the highest on the evil scale.  Skrulls are a race of shape shifters whose natural shape is that of a green humanoid with pointed ears and heavily wrinkled chins.  This race was actually genetically engineered untold years ago by the Celestials, beings of enormous power, on scale with Galactus but functionally different than him.

The Skrull Empire is based around the rule of the Emperor or Empress.  Initially, the race was primarily interested in free trade and sharing technology with any race they deemed worthy.  When they reached the home world of the Kree, Hala, they opted to allow the two sentient races of the planet to decide between themselves who would represent the planet to the Skrull.  The Kree eliminated the other race, the Cotati, and stole the technology of the Skrulls after they were appalled by the act of genocide.

This ignited the Kree Skrull War that has been among the most defining parts of each race.  During the course of the war, the Skrull became less mercantile and more militaristic.  They also developed a series of incredibly powerful weapons, including the Cosmic Cubes, which grant their wielders incredible power over reality.

Both the Kree and Skrull initially appeared in the pages of The Fantastic Four and each race had their own violent interactions with the team.  Kree would send their robotic guardians, the Sentries, against them while the Skrulls would engineer a biologically enhanced warrior, K’lrt the Super-Skrull who had all of the powers of all of the members of the FF.

The Shi’ar:  This race is pretty fundamentally different than the previous two, for instance, it didn’t debut in the Fantastic Four, instead first appearing in the pages of X-Men.  In contrast to the other two, the Shi’ar are made up of a number of races based around a single race.  The Shi’ar themselves are a humanoid race that was evolved from birds, so their bones are hollow and they have vestigial feathers.  Despite their light build, the average Shi’ar citizen can lift right around a solid ton.

Other races also make up the empire and especially the Imperial Guard, the elite agents and soldiers of the Empire.  The one of these that will stick out in a readers mind will probably be Gladiator, a big purple guy with a mowhawk and a cape with a giant collar.  He’s essentially a Superman analog but only as long as he maintains a high level of self-confidence.  I’m not even kidding, Gladiator can whip nearly anyone as long as he watched enough after-school specials.

The Shi’ar are really the least fleshed out, they’re led by an emperor and are the ostensible source of the Phoenix Force.  I hate to seem like I’m selling them short, but they’re not really important to this storyline and I simply don’t know that much about them.

Galactic Entities

As I mentioned before, aside from the political entities, there are individual entities that are very powerful and are avoided, feared and largely viewed as natural parts of the universe.

Galactus: The most well known of these entities is almost assuredly Galactus, a big guy in purple armor that eats worlds.  He only gains nourishment from the planets that have life on them and it doesn’t really seem to matter whether or not he consumes sentient life.  It’s been revealed that he is an entity that is part of the natural order.

At one point, Galactus had been known as an individual known as Galen who survived the death of the previous universe in ‘The Big Crunch’ and in the birth of the new reality he gained access to the ‘Power Cosmic,’ an energy that is never really explained until Annihilation.

In order to feed himself, Galactus is capable of giving a section of his power to another being, creating a herald.  The heralds are all charged with the duty of finding new planets for Galactus to eat, but beyond that single responsibility, he has little interest in their actions.

The process of creating a herald changes the physical body of the being that he empowers, changing a fairly normal humanoid into something else, such as the Silver Surfer whose entire body becomes like a chrome skin-tight bodysuit.

Other heralds have included Air-Walker, Firelord, Nova (not the space cop), Terrax the Tamer, Morg, Stardust and Red Shift.

Thanos: The being from Titan known as Thanos has been, at various times, a fairly inconsequential villain who was more of a schemer than a big gun.  He got over that and began following a series of plans that empowered him to immense levels, such as absorbing the power from a cosmic cube and assembling the Infinity Gauntlet, which made him the single most powerful entity in the universe.  That level of power was higher even than the embodiment of Eternity and Death within the setting.

The Mad Titan, as he is often known, has had an obsession and love for the embodiment of Death.  It’s been this single obsession that has driven Thanos to gain so much power, although Death herself often spurns him.

The Nova Corps:  Alright, so it’s not really a single entity, but it’s an organization in the universe that isn’t really a government.  Now, if you don’t know who the Nova Corps is, I don’t blame you.  Think the Green Lantern Corps with lesser abilities.  The individual centurions that make up the organization were empowered with enhanced strength, durability, flight, faster than light travel and energy blasts.  Centurions are also linked by a central intelligence called the Worldmind.

The Corps is based on the planet Xandar, also the location of the physical storage of the Worldmind.  One of the primary purposes of the Corps beyond being a police force is to act as the protectors of the the culture and history of the planet Xandar.

Even if the Corps itself hasn’t been terribly relevant lately, some characters associated with it have been pretty important.  Among those have been two different heralds of Galactus, Air-Walker and Firelord, who served together in the corps.

So, that’s my primer for the Cosmic Marvel setting.  If you have any questions about it, leave them in the comments and I promise to answer them the best that I can.  I won’t make any promises, but I will do the best I can.