As Mentioned in Episode 166 – Proteus Has Two Mommies

Marvel Boy! MARVEL BOY! One of my very favorite characters! Here’s the real short-form Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of Marvel Boy. It will still not be short.

So back in the day a team was introduced called the Guardians of the Galaxy. Not the ones you know from the movies! These Guardians were all from the future, and all of them were the last survivors of their individual human colonies after the solar system had been conquered by the Badoon (except Yondu, who was the last survivor of an alien from Alpha Centauri because sure). One of these characters was a guy named “Vance Astro.” Vance was actually an astronaut from the 20th century who had been placed into suspended animation and sent on a millennium-long star journey, but now that he was awake he could not remove his special space suit or he’d die. And also he was telekinetic.

Go with it, okay?

So the Guardians came back to the present day and showed up in some Avengers and Defenders stories, and in one of those stories Vance Astro encounters a beloved time travel cliche by encountering… his younger self! Said younger self was a teenager and had not yet changed his name to “Astro” from “Astrovik.” As a result of the temporal paradox, young Vance Astrovik’s mutant powers of telekinesis erupted early!

So now young Vance Astrovik is a telekinetic, and does just what any of us would do in this situation – he puts on a costume, calls himself Marvel Boy, and becomes a professional wrestler.

Yup.

See, in the 80s the Marvel Universe had this thing called the UCWF, or “Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation.” Because the kids like pro wrestling! The Thing was in it. No, seriously, Ben Grimm was a professional wrestler. He met Marvel Boy! They had adventures together! Then everyone forgot Marvel Boy until the New Warriors happened.

Later on Marvel Boy would actually accidentally kill his abusive father with his mutant powers (in a surprisingly well-done and sympathetic story that I am not doing justice to, you should read it), get convicted of manslaughter (Foggy Nelson is his attorney and beats the murder rap but I guess the jury was allowed to consider lesser charges) and go to prison, where he at one point aids and abets a prisoner riot in The Vault (the supervillain prison) because the prisoners’ demands were actually quite reasonable, and when he gets out not long after, he takes the name Justice. He is my favorite New Warrior. Also eventually he joins the Avengers and becomes staff of the Avengers Academy.

Guardian of the Galaxy Vance Astro, by the way, goes back to the future with the rest of the Guardians, and eventually he finds Captain America’s shield and finds a way to get rid of his protective bodysuit and takes the name Major Victory.

Comics!

Anyways, New Warriors Marvel Boy is cool. He has no connection whatsoever to any other Marvel Boys or Marvel Girls. But he’s awesome, and you should love him.

One other thing that might make Vance interesting to our hosts is that he’s that rarity – a mutant character that has never been drawn into the ambit of the X-books.

He has very strong connections to other parts of the Marvel universe, but not the X-Men, except romantically at one remove via Firestar in a “Six Degrees of Charles Xavier” sort of way. It’s not that anti-mutant prejudice is suppressed as part of the character and his history – it’s just that this isn’t taken to make him somehow automatically an X-character.