Remember The New Guy / Marvel Universe

Marvel Universe

Remember the New Guy? in this franchise.

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Comic Books

Comic Books

The following have their own pages:

• Spider-Man

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• The Avengers:
  • Baron von Blitzschlag is a minor example, created as a former Nazi supervillain now working as a research scientist for the Initiative. He was supposed to have fought several World War II era superheroes, but he was never a particularly notable villain. Blitzshlag was originally meant to be Arnim Zola, but since Ed Brubaker was using the character in Captain America, writer Dan Slott created a new character to fill the same role.
  • The original Baron Zemo was stated to have been one of Captain America's deadliest foes back during World War II (he was even responsible for the death of Bucky Barnes), but his first published appearance was a Silver Age issue of The Avengers. Just a few months later, he appeared in an issue of Sgt. Fury (a flashback series set during WW2) to cement his place as a 40s era villain.
  • Cressida, a.k.a. Avenger X, was a young Life Drinker who briefly joined the team during the "Cap's Kooky Quartet" era, specifically during the weeks between The Avengers #16 and #17. She ended up betraying the team before supposedly being Buried Alive by the Frightful Four, and only managed to escape her tomb many years later following Civil War II. In-universe, her existence was so obscure Sam Wilson and the other modern Avengers had never even heard of her, which allowed Cressida to briefly trick them by using a Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
• Ant-Man: In Avengers Vol 3 #62, Scott Lang's ex-wife Peggy Rae appears when she obtains a court ruling limiting Scott's time with Cassie to supervised visits for one month. She has a strained relationship with Scott both because of his past as a criminal and his career as a superhero, feeling it's too dangerous for their daughter. This despite the fact that in Scott's first appearances his wife, and Cassie's mother, never appeared or was mentioned, with it being implied that Scott was raising Cassie alone. And with him having custody of Cassie with no problems.
• This is by now many years old, but the introduction of Cable happened this way too; right when he was introduced everyone was treating him as if he had always been around. Which, considering his backstory, is either Fridge Brilliance or Hilarious in Hindsight.
• Captain America:
  • Isaiah Bradley, the black Captain America. He was introduced in 2003's Truth: Red, White & Black, but was retconned into having been active in Marvel's Golden Age during World War II. He's supposedly a pillar of Marvel's black superhero community, and characters like Luke Cage are shown to be in awe of him.
  • Golden Girl and the Human Top. Both of them were created in the 70's to add a little diversity (Golden Girl being Japanese-American and Human Top being black) to Marvel's Golden Age, and were retroactively stated to have fought alongside Captain America and Bucky as members of The Invaders.
  • Ed Brubaker's Captain America run introduced Codename Bravo, one more of Cap's supposed allies from World War II. He also introduced Queen Hydra, a female HYDRA agent from the same era.
  • Cap’s parents where introduced decades after Steve himself debuted in Golden Age with his mother Sarah not being shown until a 1980 special which showed his backstory in full and his asshole drunk dad Joseph wouldn’t even appear in flesh until another flashback in 2012 — yet it’s still treated like they always existed. To be fair though the idea of Steve Rogers having personal problems and a Dark and Troubled Past are new conventions since he was supposed to a pure patriotic symbol to inspire/entertain The Real Heroes when he was created. Also In-Universe Cap doesn’t like talking about his parents out of shame for his father’s misdeeds and being unable to protect his mother, justifying why they wouldn’t be brought up in conversation much.
• The short-lived series The Crew revolved around James "War Machine" Rhodes trying to take down the drug lords responsible for the death of his younger sister. Not only was the sister never mentioned prior to this, she was pretty much never mentioned again after the series ended either! The sister was eventually mentioned again years later in the Iron Patriot limited series...so that it could be established that she had a daughter, Lila Rhodes, who is apparently very close with James despite having never been seen or mentioned before. The series also added a previously-unmentioned son of the above-mentioned Isaiah Bradley - Josiah al hajj Saddiq - who'd apparently been around since the sixties and had become a superhero.
• Daredevil's childhood mentor Stick wasn't introduced until Daredevil #176, which was published a whopping 17 years or so after the title's debut.
• An issue from 1989 revealed that Doctor Strange had a little brother named Vic Strange. The excuse for why we'd never heard of him was that Vic had been hit by a car after an argument with Stephen, with his body placed in cryogenic stasis until medical science could advance far enough to save his life. That explains why Vic had never been seen before, but not why Strange had never mentioned him prior to this.
• Hawkeye:
  • Trick Shot, the man who taught Clint how to use a bow and arrow, was introduced this way via a Retcon. He was created to fix the Plot Holes that sprung up from having Hawkeye learn archery from the Swordsman, who had never demonstrated any proficiency with a bow.
  • As was Barney, Clint's older brother (and later Evil Counterpart). Hawkeye had never mentioned having an older brother in any of his previous spotlight tales, but in The Avengers #64, Barney shows up out of nowhere, and the Avengers all already know him as a powerful underworld figure (though they don't learn he's related to Clint until the end of the issue).
• A fairly significant part of Chip Zdarsky's Invaders run involves Randall Peterson, a man who fought alongside Cap, Bucky, the Human Torch and Namor during World War 2. The story makes it clear that Randall is very good friends with the former Invaders, and it's even revealed that Namor lived with him and his family after the war. In fact, Randall and Namor are so close that the former even named his own daughter after the Atlantean prince. Naturally, he'd never appeared in a single comic before this.
• Iron Man:
  • When the armoured avengers series was rebooted following Avengers Disassembled with Warren Ellis at the helm, suddenly Tony had an old mentor in Sal Kennedy and an old love interest (one important enough in Tony's life that he actually remembered her when she called) in Maya Hansen.
  • Tony’s long lost brother Arno Stark was created in 2013 long after Iron Man and the rest of his family had debuted and is retconned to be Howard and Maria’s first biological son who slipped into a Convenient Coma leading to Howard and Maria adopting Tony. Fans tend to be more than happy to just ignore Arno and the adoption storyline’s existence much like the MCU does, despite a few writers best efforts such as Dan Slott who brings Arno back as a Evil Counterpart in the 2019 series.
• Jessica Jones was created in 2001's Alias by Brian Michael Bendis, but through the comic she has been retconned into various parts of Marvel history, most notably hanging out with Peter Parker the day he was fatefully bitten by an irradiated spider. She later gained powers of her own and was mind-controlled into picking a fight with The Avengers, leading directly to a severe beating and coma. She recovered with the help of Jean Grey. All of the preceding "happened" before she even debuted in comics. What's more, her origin involved witnessing Daredevil's origin; she's been inserted into the fiction that far back. One Spider-Man comic goes to the point of using a panel from the '60s Amazing Spider-Man comic and pointing that she was one of the background characters featured in the panel.
• Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #19 introduces Quicksilver in this way, as a former member of the Avengers who quit due to personal differences.
• Toni Ho from New Avengers (2015) is the daughter of Ho Yinsen, a prominent character from Iron Man's origin. The fact that she'd never been mentioned or seen before (despite Yinsen's son having appeared in the past) was explained as her parents having divorced when she was a kid, meaning she grew up in America while her dad stayed in Asia.
• The Sentry might be the most (in)famous example in Marvel, albeit he was an intentional case of this. A Superman Substitute created in 2001, like Jessica Jones he was retconned into numerous parts of Marvel’s history as far back as the 60s and had connections with Mister Fantastic, Iron Man, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Professor X and was even active as a hero prior to the emergence of the Fantastic Four. Thanks to his Superpowered Evil Side the Void all Marvel heroes and the population on Earth forgot his existence justifying why nobody would recognise him. Marvel would even create an elaborate hoax with a supposed drawing/concept art of Sentry from the 60s signed by Stan Lee and Artie Rosen being unearthed, taking this trope to an even further level.
• Angela Del Toro and Ava Ayala, the two most recent White Tigers, were introduced this way. When Angela was introduced, it was said she grew up viewing Luke Cage and Danny Rand as honorary uncles, but they never mentioned her before and her introduction also necessitated retconning her mother Awilda's death (she had been killed with her parents by Gideon Mace). They would later use that same retcon with Ava's introduction, showing that her older sister Awilda raised her, and that she only escaped the massacre of her family because she was at school when it happened.
• In general, this is the case for many Canon Immigrant characters. For instance, when Melinda May made the jump from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to the comics, she was introduced as a legendary S.H.I.E.L.D. operative that had apparently been around for years, despite never having been seen or mentioned in any prior comics. This specific case is slightly justified though, since S.H.I.E.L.D. is a massive organization that employs tens of thousands of agents across the globe. It makes sense that we've only ever met a small fraction of them in the actual books.
• Black Panther:
  • Princess Shuri, T'Challa's little sister, was introduced as a young woman in a 2005 issue of the series, with everyone acting like she's always been there. The same writer also gave T'Challa an unnamed younger brother who was killed by Klaw, though unlike Shuri, he's almost never remembered or mentioned.
  • The Dora Milaje didn't exist until Christopher Priest's run, but are nonetheless treated as an indispensable part of the mythos at this point. Same goes for Hunter, T'Challa's adopted older brother.
  • Ramonda, the Queen Mother of Wakanda, didn't exist until 1989. However, unlike many other examples of this trope, there's a good reason why she wasn't seen or talked about beforehand. She had been kidnapped and imprisoned shortly after T'Chaka's death, causing everyone to assume she'd left the country to be with a new man.
• The Black Order were introduced in Infinity as Thanos' elite generals, with the implication that they'd been around for quite some time. At one point, Supergiant even mentions that Thanos recruited her from an orphanage back when she was a child. The team had never appeared or been mentioned in any of the decades worth of previous stories featuring Thanos, and in fact, Thanos had traditionally been depicted as relying on others as little as possible when he could help it.
• X-Men does this over and over and over again. Siblings like Sunfire's sister Sunpyre and Xavier's twin Cassandra Nova were always there. The "original" new team of all-new-all-different X-Men consisted of Vulcan, Petra, Sway and Darwin, who mostly died (two of them got better). Sage has always been Xavier's personal spy since she was the first mutant he met, but never did anything (nothing mutantly, anyway, she was an established if extreeeemely minor character for decades) during the regular stories. Elias Bogan has always been a long-lived influential figure of the Hellfire Club.
  • Cassandra Nova at least justified it - she was deliberately hiding her presence, and since she has Psychic Powers stronger than Charles' it's not inconceivable that she could.
  • The situation with Sunpyre was actually lampshaded. Immediately after meeting her, Jean Grey confusedly stated that she'd known Sunfire for years and he'd never mentioned having a little sister.
  • Sage was present in the comics for years, and her mutant and spy status is arguably a case of either this trope or Retcon: in fact, it was teased at off-and-on during several of Claremont's plot threads. The origin story of the New Mutants, for example, has her randomly help the New Mutants against Pierce and the Hellfire Club (her employers). Xavier does declare not to trust her, but we're never told if it's just to cover up her status as The Mole, or if he's afraid of a Becoming the Mask scenario. Anyway, that was 20 years before Sage's reveal as Xavier's spy.
• The Blue Marvel was introduced as a black Silver Age superhero who was forced to retire due to the institutional racism of the 60s. He ended up coming out of his exile during the 21st century to help The Avengers battle his old nemesis.
• Parodied (?) with Deadpool as there have been a number of comics and mini-series that place him in various eras of the Marvel Universe that predate his creation— teaming up with Iron Fist and Luke Cage during their "Heroes for Hire" era, taking over for Iron Man during the "Demon in a Bottle" era, even showing up in the original Secret Wars and bonding with the Venom symbiote. However, it's quite hard to tell which of these stories (if any) have actually happened and which ones are simply What Ifs created in the spirit of fun (particularly when you remember that it's already been established that 1) Deadpool's mental instability has been known to mess with his memory and 2) he's aware that he's a comic book character, thus subject to Multiple-Choice Past).
• Similarly, Sally Floyd was created for the mini series Generation M, after the events of House of M, with the reader being informed that she had multiple interviews with famous mutants and dated Angel. She was apparently a friend and confidante of X-Men such as Jubilee, Beak and Dani Moonstar, but was simply never seen or mentioned until now.
• Union Jack was another Marvel character from the Silver Age that was retconned into the Golden Age. In fact, an actual Golden Age Marvel hero (the Destroyer) was retconned into being the first Union Jack but in a disguise.
• Runaways has done this a number of times:
  • The original series introduced The Pride, a criminal organization-slash-cult that has ruled Los Angeles since the 1980's, and yet which had never been mentioned anywhere else in the Marvel Universe.
  • Whedon's brief run on the series introduced the Upward Path and the Sinners, two rival gangs of superhumans who fought for control of New York City in the 1900's and had ties to the Pride. Needless to say, there's never been any mention of them anywhere else.
  • Secret Invasion introduced Chrell and X'iv, Xavin's former mentor and classmate, respectively.
  • The final arc of the third series introduced Hunter Stein, Chase's never-before-mentioned uncle.
  • Daken: Dark Wolverine retconned Marcus Roston, Daken's evil ex-boyfriend, as being a supposed former member of The Pride who got kicked out for creeping on Chase.
  • Runaways (Rainbow Rowell) takes the cake on retconned friends and relatives. To start with, there is Dr. Hayes, Molly's long-lost grandmother, whose lack of prior mention is lampshaded as her being estranged from Molly's parents. Later there are The Seed, the children of the Gibborim who were never even hinted to exist prior to the series. There's also The One, the spirit inhabiting Nico's Staff of One who comes out of nowhere. And finally, there is Doc Justice, a superhero who has supposedly been around for nearly as long as The Pride, but who has never been mentioned anywhere.
• Marvel UK’s Plasmer introduces Captain Kerosene, a new British hero from World War Two with flame powers. Explained away as his powers are unstable, so he mostly served secretly as a double for the better-known Human Torch, allowing the allies to misdirect the Axis powers. There’s also Jack Smithers, a century old British spy who supposedly knows Captain America from the forties.
• The Union features Britannia, the UK's favourite superhero. She'd been "protecting Britain longer than she cares to remember" thirty years ago, she has her own cartoon series, and the current Union Jack is on familar enough terms to call her "Tanya". She had, of course, never appeared anywhere before.

Films

Films

• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron introduces Dr. Helen Cho, a renowned Korean scientist who serves as a medical and scientific ally to the team. She's close friends with both Bruce and Tony, but like Alexander Pierce below, she is neither seen nor mentioned in any of the previous movies.
  • Alexander Pierce is introduced in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a high-ranking member of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Nick Fury's close personal friend. Prior to his debut, he'd never been mentioned in The Avengers or any of the other MCU films. Word of God from the creators was that this is one of the major reasons Jasper Sitwell was chosen to be a HYDRA mole. Most of the double agents in the movie were new characters that hadn't appeared in any other films, and the filmmakers felt it'd be a cop-out to introduce such a massive conspiracy and not have it involve any established characters.
    • Pierce's situation seems especially odd that in that it appears he's Fury's superior (or at least the politically-appointed head of SHIELD while Fury is the operational leader), whereas The Avengers implies that Fury reported directly to the Council. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. further confuses the issue because a flashback established Pierce had been in a high-ranking position years earlier. Avengers: Endgame retconned him into having a role in the events of The Avengers, showing that he was involved in the retrieval of Loki's cosmic scepter (which contained the Mind Stone) following the Battle of New York.
  • The titular heroine of Captain Marvel (2019) is stated to have been around since 1995. However, she never appeared nor was mentioned in any of the MCU films until her solo movie. Nick Fury was the only one who was aware of her existence, yet he never bothered to use the pager she gave him to contact her until he was snapped out of existence along with half the universe, making her introduction to the Avengers very late and outright pointless.
    • Likewise in the same movie, the Skrulls were established as having been hiding in refuge from the Kree way before the events of the films. Not only were they never mentioned either, but their war with the Kree is a retcon from the Kree-Xandar war in Guardians of the Galaxy. The Stinger of Spider-Man: Far From Home revealed that Talos, the leader of the Skrulls, and his wife were impersonating Nick Fury and Maria Hill respectively, apparently implying that the Skrulls were hiding on Earth during the entire franchise.
  • The Stinger of Spider-Man: Far From Home introduces S.W.O.R.D., a seemingly new government organization that acts as a counterpart to S.H.I.E.L.D. from the earlier movies. WandaVision subsequently establishes that S.W.O.R.D. has been around for quite a while and has funding and resources on par with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s, despite never having been seen or mentioned in any of the prior movies or even the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show.
  • Thor: Ragnarok:
    • Due to having become a fugitive after the events of the previous movie, Heimdall has been replaced as the guardian of the Bifrost by a new character named Skurge. Despite never having appeared in the previous films, Skurge has apparently been around for a while, and claims to have fought alongside Thor in the past. It's handwaved by having Thor not recall the battle in question, which makes sense given all the crazy adventures he's gone on by this point.
    • Justified case with Hela. She's Odin's eldest child and Thor and Loki's older sister, but all evidence of her existence was covered up by Odin after she went rogue and had to be imprisoned. Throughout the movie, she's shown to be bitter about the fact that nobody remembers her.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past:
    • When debating how to break out Magneto, Wolverine casually announces he "knows a guy." The guy turns out to be Quicksilver, who has not appeared or been mentioned in any of the six previous X-Men movies. This line of dialogue is The Artifact of the original script, in which the teen who helped Wolverine was a young version of Cain Marko, AKA The Juggernaut, who he did actually encounter in X-Men: The Last Stand.
    • The future portion of the film fully incorporates the idea from First Class which established that Charles and Mystique grew up together. It can seem a bit jarring to see Patrick Stewart's Xavier sadly recounting how he once loved Mystique and considered her his sister, when there is absolutely no indication at any point in the original trilogy that the two were ever close or even knew one another.
  • Even earlier than that, X-Men: The Last Stand introduced Dr. Hank "Beast" McCoy, a mutant politician who everyone at the Xavier Institute (other than the latecomer Logan) knows intimately, even though he was never shown or mentioned in the first two movies. X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past rectified the issue somewhat, clarifying that Hank was a student from the Institute's early days who stayed behind when Xavier shut the school down during the Vietnam War.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse is set in the 1980s and has a teenage Nightcrawler join the X-Men even though X2: X-Men United which was set 20 Minutes into the Future had them meet him for the first time as an adult. Though Word of God has said the time travel in Days of Future Past has made the third and fourth movies non-canon, which could mean the same for X2.

Live-Action TV

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. introduces us to Agent Eric Koenig (played by Patton Oswalt) who shortly after his introduction is murdered by Ward. But! He has a twin brother, Billy, also a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, who is introduced in the last few minutes of the season a few episode later. By the time the second season comes around we see there's a third Koenig brother as well, Sam. We never get an explanation for how either Koenig ended up working with Coulson's team.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • Benjamin Donovan, the crooked lawyer overseeing Wilson Fisk's affairs while Fisk is in prison during season 2, was not mentioned at all during the first season.
  • Lampshaded in season 2. When helping Matt with his tie prior to Grotto's funeral, Karen mentions having a brother, who has never been so much as discussed up until this point. Matt is surprised as Karen has never mentioned having any siblings before, to which Karen simply replies, "You never asked."
• The Defenders (2017): Only two of the Hand's five leaders were introduced in prior series: Madame Gao through Daredevil (2015) and Iron Fist (2017), and Bakuto in Iron Fist. The other three - Alexandra, Sowande, and Murakami - are this trope. While Bakuto and Madame Gao made cryptic references to Alexandra's existence during Iron Fist, Murakami is an egregious case as Stick mentions that Murakami pulled the strings behind Nobu's operation in Daredevil, yet Nobu at no point gave any indication he was a subordinate to a Finger. Especially since Nobu was the one assisting Madame Gao in doing business with Wilson Fisk.
• Iron Fist (2017): The Bulletin reporter that interviews Ward Meachum is Jennifer Many, who appears to be a veteran reporter, but was never seen nor mentioned in any of the Bulletin scenes in Daredevil (2015).
• Luke Cage (2016): Season 2 introduces us to Mariah Dillard's estranged daughter Matilda Maybelline "Tilda" Johnson, who was never seen or mentioned in season 1. It's explained in this case that Tilda was given up for adoption by Mama Mabel when she was young, and Mariah didn't like being around her as she was conceived as a result of Mariah being regularly raped by her uncle Pete.

Western Animation

Western Animation

• Avengers Assemble:
  • The Vision appears in Season 3 with no explanation or origin, and the Avengers are already all familiar with him. The creators apparently assumed the viewers already knew him from the then-recent Avengers: Age of Ultron movie, even though the show takes place in a completely separate continuity.
  • Captain Marvel debuts in the very next episode, and like Vision, the Avengers all know who she is (though The Falcon has never met her in person). She even has a long-spanning rivalry with Captain America and ribs Hawkeye over an incident where she saved his life.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: In the episode "To Steal an Ant-Man," Hank Pym and the Heroes for Hire eventually track down the thief who swiped the Ant-Man suit, and it turns out to be Scott Lang, a janitor who works at Hank's lab. Hank immediately recognizes Scott and seems to have known him for a while, even though he had never appeared before this point. Oddly enough, this was actually averted in the original comics, where Scott debuted as an employee of Tony Stark in an issue of The Avengers before he actually became the new Ant-Man in a later issue of Marvel Premiere.
• Iron Man: The Animated Series:
  • Titanium Man debuts in the episode "And The Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead," and mere seconds after the villain appears onscreen for the first time, Iron Man says "Titanium Man? I thought we finished him off at Magnitogorsk!"
  • Season 2 introduced a Canon Foreigner villain named Dark Aegis. He was established as a dreaded foe who was thought to have died during a past battle with Iron Man, despite never having shown up prior to his one and only appearance.
  • The Series Finale introduces a Chinese scientist named Dr. Su-Yin, who has conveniently developed a special suit of armor that runs on bio-energy, and is thus impervious to the Mandarin's anti-technology mist. She and Tony are clearly very close and it's stated that they had been working together on the bio-energy microprocessors for several years, despite neither Su-Yin nor the project ever having been mentioned before this.
• The Marvel Super Heroes had a case of this in the Captain America segment that adapted the debut of Baron Zemo and the Masters of Evil. Because there was no rhyme or reason to which comic stories were adapted to episodes of the cartoon, Iron Man recognizes the members Black Knight and Melter as foes he previously fought even though the former's debut wasn't adapted into an Iron Man segment until much later in the show's run and the latter made no other appearances.

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