Elders of the Universe

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Left to right, down from the top: The Runner, The Gardener, The Collector, The Champion and The Grandmaster.

The Elders of the Universe are a group of fictional characters in the Marvel Comics universe. Each is the last survivor of one of the first intelligent races that developed after the Big Bang. As such they have achieved virtual immortality and mastered incredibly advanced technologies.

Every Elder has a different personal obsession, followed fanatically, apparently as a way to endure their eternal existence (one of them, The Collector's wife, eventually allowed herself to die because of it.) It must be noted that the Elders are not truly cosmic entities though some have achieved cosmic levels of power and knowledge. The heroes of Earth have encountered them in several occasions, sometimes as enemies and sometimes as allies.

The Elders, because of their links to the first era of the universe's history, have come to regard each other as siblings, at least figuratively. Usually, they act independently but some have come together for certain schemes. It is not known how many Elders still remain; below is a list of the ones revealed so far. According to the cosmic entity Eon, there are at least 1,000 Elders in existence.

Several of the Elders possessed some of the Infinity Gems, though even they were unaware of their full power. All of them were stolen from them by Thanos.

During the Contest of Champions miniseries, the Grandmaster challenged Death to a game of strategy, that involved many of Earth's heroes, in order to resurrect his 'brother' Elder, The Collector (who had been recently killed by Korvac) and won; however he had to die for this to happen, which he agreed to. Later, however, the Grandmaster usurped control of Death's realm, but was stopped by the Avengers; this led to Death becoming angered with the Elders, preventing them from ever entering her realm - in other words, making them truly immortal- which had been the Grandmaster's true goal all along.

Later, some of the Elders joined forces in an effort to try to destroy the universe. The Elders discovered that by killing Galactus, Eternity and Death would become unbalanced, fall into stasis and the universe would then undergo a Big Crunch. The Elders believed since they were immortal they would be the only beings in the universe who could survive a Big Crunch and thus they could emerge in the next universe as a race of Galacti, each with virtually infinite cosmic power to pursue their special interests with. The Elders were thwarted by the Silver Surfer and his allies. The superhero Quasar later encountered several new Elders during his adventures in space.