Ego the Living Planet

Ego the Living Planet is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character first appeared in Thor #132 (September 1966) and was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. The character has made limited appearances in animation and video games, while Kurt Russell portrayed the character in the live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), in which Ego claims to be a Celestial and father of Peter Quill and Mantis. Russell also voiced alternate timeline versions of Ego in the Disney+ animated series What If...? (2021). Ego the Living Planet was initially introduced in The Mighty Thor #132 (September 1966), and was created by Jack Kirby. Kirby created Ego as a way of exploring his fascination with the expanse of the universe. Ego, the alien Kree, and The Colonizers immediately followed the creation of Galactus, thus establishing Marvel Comics' own "space age mythology". As Kirby recalled in 1969, shortly after the character's debut, Ego's genesis came when: I began to experiment ...and that's how Ego came about. ... A planet that was alive; a planet that was intelligent. That was nothing new either because there had been other stories [about] live planets but that's not acceptable. ... [Y]ou would say, 'Yeah, that's wild,' but how do you relate to it? Why is it alive? So I felt somewhere out in the universe, the universe ... becomes denser and turns liquid—and that in this liquid, there was a giant multiple virus, and if [it] remained isolated for millions and millions of years, it would ... begin to evolve by itself and it would begin to think. By the time we reached it, it might be quite superior to us—and that was Ego. The reader's first glimpse of Ego on the last page of Thor #132 is a full-page splash panel photo collage with Ego's human features superimposed on a bulbous, chaotic planetoid. Kirby had been using photo collages for several years; this image has been called "his most effective and freakish to date.