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Description
Major Victory
Real Name: Vance Astro

First Appearance: Marvel Super-Heroes! #18 (January 1969)

Project Starjump was a secret attempt at trans-solar system travel developed in the late seventies by SHIELD scientists utilizing data gleaned from an unknown extraterrestrial automaton discovered on the moon in the Apollo missions. Vance Astro--formerly "Astrovik" before changing it to sound less Russian to his military superiors--was one of the two air force pilots chosen to be the astronauts who would ride the capsule farther than any man had ever gone before, sent to round the nearby Alpha-Centauri system and return to Earth. Designed to test the effects of long distance space travel on the human body, they were to be kept in suspended animation for a mission that would take decades. But something went awry before they had totally left the solar system and the capsule ceased communications with Earth. Starjump was presumed lost at this point.

In actuality their craft had been beset upon by a stitch in time, a hole through limbo that unleashed the Void. In the chaos, Astro's half of the capsule was sucked into the stitch, while the half containing his partner, Wendell Vaughn, remained, all while Astro stayed in his suspended state. By the time Astro wound back on Earth his half of the craft had been traveling for over a thousand years instead of a few decades, and the planet he returned to was now a barren husk devoid of life. In the timeline he had ended up in, a mad titan had made his way to Earth a few decades after Starjump's launch and tapped into the power of infinity, killing half of all life in the cosmos. Astro's former home was rendered nearly uninhabitable by the titan in his quest to build a throne to death, and humanity was forced to the fringes, clawing back only through rigorous genetic experimentation that would allow them to live in a barren solar system.

But these remnants too were nearly wiped from the universe in a more recent catastrophe in the form of the Badoon. Trapped on a planet beset by two apocalypses in a single millennia, Astro owed his life to his containment suit that protected him from the ravages of a thousand years of suspended animation--as well as his newly awoken telekinetic mutant abilities. Found by a group of resistance fighters piloting the Captain America, a vessel named in honor of one of the last remaining heroes to fall in battle against the mad titan in the long distant past, Astro quickly made a name for himself among their ranks as a man of action and dynamic leadership. When their captain Geena Drake lost her life in an attack on a Badoon stronghold, Astro was given the shield of the man their ship had been named after, and was coined the new leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

----

As the Guardians' leader, his call sign becomes "Major Victory." His containment suit was supposed to be a temporary measure for his Starjump experience but it is basically the only thing keeping him alive after spending a thousand years in a suspended state, so the Guardians upgraded its capabilities and armor to keep him safe and make his life more comfortable.

The original Guardians of the Galaxy team is a fun concept to me. I liked how the MCU reinterpreted them as the middle-aged predecessors of the modern Guardians but that leaves Vance Astro and his whole story high and dry (no surprise he's one of the few members of the classic team who has never appeared in the MCU even in a cameo form), and he's my favorite member of the original team so I'm sticking with the comics' team of a future timeline. But there was a *lot* of backstory to get from point A to point B here, even having already mentioned Astro in passing in Quasar's entry all that time ago. So this is a separate timeline Astro ended up getting flung to, one where Thanos's snap was never undone (in addition to him completing his throne to death I mentioned I think in Mar-Vell's entry that decimates much of what is left on Earth). Another thing I changed was having Astro become the Guardians' leader after the death of Geena Drake, a more recent addition to the Guardians 3000 mythos that I don't really have plans for and I thought it would be a neat way to get her mentioned at least in passing (as she is named after Arnold Drake and Gene Colan, the original creators of the Guardians), so you can imagine her in whatever way you will. I'm also specifying Astro's powers as "telekinetic" instead of "psychokinetic" as they do in the comics, I think there is *supposed* to be a difference but I'm not even going to bother getting into that, he just moves shit with his mind, that's enough for me.

Anyway, like I said, Astro is my favorite of the original team and that is down to both his far out origin story and his really distinct look, especially the more classic blue and white containment suit look combined with Cap's shield from his more modern appearances (in the old comics he never had both at once). So that was something I wanted to make work here. But it was trickier for me to do than I had anticipated. It took me a long time to come up with a design that both called to his classic look while still looking more like an actual medical containment suit he has to wear. Another thing I wanted to push was to make the Guardians of the 31st century look like they live in a post-apocalyptic space age, and to achieve this I made his suit really damaged, weathered, and beat up, and the band and pack thing he wears helps make him look prepared for life in a rough galaxy.

Description
Major Victory
Real Name: Vance Astro

First Appearance: Marvel Super-Heroes! #18 (January 1969)

Project Starjump was a secret attempt at trans-solar system travel developed in the late seventies by SHIELD scientists utilizing data gleaned from an unknown extraterrestrial automaton discovered on the moon in the Apollo missions. Vance Astro--formerly "Astrovik" before changing it to sound less Russian to his military superiors--was one of the two air force pilots chosen to be the astronauts who would ride the capsule farther than any man had ever gone before, sent to round the nearby Alpha-Centauri system and return to Earth. Designed to test the effects of long distance space travel on the human body, they were to be kept in suspended animation for a mission that would take decades. But something went awry before they had totally left the solar system and the capsule ceased communications with Earth. Starjump was presumed lost at this point.

In actuality their craft had been beset upon by a stitch in time, a hole through limbo that unleashed the Void. In the chaos, Astro's half of the capsule was sucked into the stitch, while the half containing his partner, Wendell Vaughn, remained, all while Astro stayed in his suspended state. By the time Astro wound back on Earth his half of the craft had been traveling for over a thousand years instead of a few decades, and the planet he returned to was now a barren husk devoid of life. In the timeline he had ended up in, a mad titan had made his way to Earth a few decades after Starjump's launch and tapped into the power of infinity, killing half of all life in the cosmos. Astro's former home was rendered nearly uninhabitable by the titan in his quest to build a throne to death, and humanity was forced to the fringes, clawing back only through rigorous genetic experimentation that would allow them to live in a barren solar system.

But these remnants too were nearly wiped from the universe in a more recent catastrophe in the form of the Badoon. Trapped on a planet beset by two apocalypses in a single millennia, Astro owed his life to his containment suit that protected him from the ravages of a thousand years of suspended animation--as well as his newly awoken telekinetic mutant abilities. Found by a group of resistance fighters piloting the Captain America, a vessel named in honor of one of the last remaining heroes to fall in battle against the mad titan in the long distant past, Astro quickly made a name for himself among their ranks as a man of action and dynamic leadership. When their captain Geena Drake lost her life in an attack on a Badoon stronghold, Astro was given the shield of the man their ship had been named after, and was coined the new leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

----

As the Guardians' leader, his call sign becomes "Major Victory." His containment suit was supposed to be a temporary measure for his Starjump experience but it is basically the only thing keeping him alive after spending a thousand years in a suspended state, so the Guardians upgraded its capabilities and armor to keep him safe and make his life more comfortable.

The original Guardians of the Galaxy team is a fun concept to me. I liked how the MCU reinterpreted them as the middle-aged predecessors of the modern Guardians but that leaves Vance Astro and his whole story high and dry (no surprise he's one of the few members of the classic team who has never appeared in the MCU even in a cameo form), and he's my favorite member of the original team so I'm sticking with the comics' team of a future timeline. But there was a *lot* of backstory to get from point A to point B here, even having already mentioned Astro in passing in Quasar's entry all that time ago. So this is a separate timeline Astro ended up getting flung to, one where Thanos's snap was never undone (in addition to him completing his throne to death I mentioned I think in Mar-Vell's entry that decimates much of what is left on Earth). Another thing I changed was having Astro become the Guardians' leader after the death of Geena Drake, a more recent addition to the Guardians 3000 mythos that I don't really have plans for and I thought it would be a neat way to get her mentioned at least in passing (as she is named after Arnold Drake and Gene Colan, the original creators of the Guardians), so you can imagine her in whatever way you will. I'm also specifying Astro's powers as "telekinetic" instead of "psychokinetic" as they do in the comics, I think there is *supposed* to be a difference but I'm not even going to bother getting into that, he just moves shit with his mind, that's enough for me.

Anyway, like I said, Astro is my favorite of the original team and that is down to both his far out origin story and his really distinct look, especially the more classic blue and white containment suit look combined with Cap's shield from his more modern appearances (in the old comics he never had both at once). So that was something I wanted to make work here. But it was trickier for me to do than I had anticipated. It took me a long time to come up with a design that both called to his classic look while still looking more like an actual medical containment suit he has to wear. Another thing I wanted to push was to make the Guardians of the 31st century look like they live in a post-apocalyptic space age, and to achieve this I made his suit really damaged, weathered, and beat up, and the band and pack thing he wears helps make him look prepared for life in a rough galaxy.