25 of Marvel’s best spacefaring characters

The Celestials (Image via Marvel)

14. The Celestials

If you’re looking for large amounts of weirdness on a cosmic scale, then surely the story of the Celestials will satisfy you. See, not only are they both immensely powerful and astonishingly large, but the Celestials are also some of the oldest beings in the Marvel universe.

Their origins are a little murky, though it’s clear enough that they existed somewhere near the very beginnings of the universe. Though they may seem godlike to us, the Celestials are also subject to stupid things like war. In fact, their war with a species known as the Aspirants was so bad that it decimated the Celestials, thanks in part to a 25,000-foot tall robot weapon known as the “Godkiller”.

The surviving Celestials have kept pretty busy, however. They’ve created the Eternals (Thanos’ people), the Deviants, and have screwed around with our genetic codes so much that they’re the ones responsible for mutants.

Strange and powerful as they seem, the Celestials are still subject to petty things such as life and death. New Celestials may be born, though they need to consume an entire galaxy’s worth of material to do so. They can also die, though it’s apparently pretty tough to defeat one. Knowhere, the port of call for the Guardians of the Galaxy and others, is located in the floating severed head of a Celestial.