Real Name: Taneleer Tivan
Occupation: Curator
Identity: The Collector uses no dual identity. His existence is not known to the general public of Earth.
Legal Status: Unknown
Former Aliases: None
Place of Self-Awareness: Cygnus X-1
Marital Status: Widowed
Known Relatives: Matani (wife, deceased), Carina (daughter, deceased)
Group Affiliation: Elders of the Universe
Base of Operations: The known universe
First Appearance: AVENGERS #28

History: Like all the Elders of the Universe, the origin of the Collector is lost in antiquity. What is known is that he is one of the oldest living beings in the universe, having been among the first of the universe's races to become sentient in the wake of the Big Bang. Virtually immortal, the Collector spent the first millennia of his existence with his wife and daughter on the tranquil world he chose as his home base. When their daughter had grown to maturity and left them, the Collector's wife died of mysterious causes. The Collector was unprepared for her demise: he had thought her as immortal as he. In meditation, he realized that an important factor in an Elder's immortality is the will to live, and his wife had simply lost here.

Determined not to succumb to his wife's malady, the Collector meditated upon what he might do to give his life meaning. In a vision, he foresaw that beings of great power would arise one day determined to destroy all life in the universe. To prevent this from happening, he decided to devote his life to collecting living beings and artifacts from throughout the known universe, and placing them in safekeeping. If what he foresaw came to pass, he could repopulate the universe and bequeath to them the knowledge and culture of the past.

Building himself a large starship, the Collector set forth, stopping at every inhabited world he found to acquire a sample of their finest achievements as well as living representatives of the world's lifeforms. In a matter of years, his ship was completely filled, and the Collector was forced to suspend his mission in order to build expanded facilities for his permanent collection. With the aid of robo-mechanics acquired from the planet Cron, the Collector converted several uninhabited planets into giant museums, and transferred his collection there. Every time his ship's hold was filled, he would return to the museum-worlds to deposit his recent acquisitions. At present, the Collector has filled ten museum-worlds with artifacts from a hundred thousand planets.

Over the eons, the Collector's monomania became more and more obsessive; making him lose sight of the original reason for which he began his collection. In recent years, the first being of great power he had foreseen as a threat to all life, Thanos of Titan, had been born and defeated without the Collector's intervention. When the second such great threat to life, Korvac of Earth, appeared, the Collector decided to send his daughter Carina to spy on him. Korvac slew the Collector before he could reveal to Earth's heroes what he knew of Korvac. A short time later, the Collector's kinsman, the Grandmaster, played a contest of champions with the spirit of Death itself, winning the power to resurrect the Collector apparently at the cost of his own immortal life.

Resurrected, the Collector resumed his ancient task. In his most recent known vision, he foresaw the attempt of Surtur to destroy Asgard.

Height: 6 ft. 2 in.
Weight: 450 lbs.
Eyes: White
Hair: White

Strength Level: Unknown. Although all Elders possess the capacity for virtually unlimited strength, some have chosen not to develop it.

Known Superhuman Powers: As an Eider of the Universe, the Collector possesses an immortal body, immune to the cellular deterioration of aging and impervious to conventional harm (disease, penetration wounds, etc.). Only the dispersion of a major portion of his bodily molecules could prevent his regenerative power from functioning and cause death. Unlike some of the Elders (such as the Champion or the Contemplator) who have used their long lifetimes to develop vast powers of the body or mind, the Collector has not devoted any of his energies to self-perfection. Hence he has no special superhuman physical or mental abilities. The Collector is more interested in acquiring physical objects of power rather than developing powers of his own.

Though he is prone to precognitive flashes of the future, the Collector must meditate for long periods of time in order to make sense of the particulars of the vision: who the participants are, where the foreseen event will take place, what is its time frame, and so on. Sometimes his visions of the future turn out to have been of events not realized in his own Reality but in an alternate one, as in the case of his vision of Thanos destroying the universe.

Weapons: The Collector possesses the finest technology of a hundred thousand worlds, giving him a virtually limitless arsenal of weaponry. He is only limited by what he can locate in a given situation. One of his most frequently used devices is his Temporal Assimilator, a handheld device which enables him to time travel for short temporal distances and durations. He also has a large-scale time probe enabling him to fish for artifacts in other time periods of a given world's history than its present. He has a suit of battle armor which is made of a substance called etherion, and which enables him to fly.

Transportation: The Collector's cargo ship has warp drive capacity. He generally keeps it in hyperspace as he orbits a planet from which he is procuring specimens, in order to escape detection. Projecting from the ship into real space is a small, invisible booth-shaped access-portal.