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.