WARNING: This article contains minor spoilers for Marvel's Thor: Ragnarok, in theaters now.


In Marvel's Thor: Ragnarok, Chris Hemsworth's thunder god is stranded on the far-flung planet Sakaar, where he's forced to participate in gladiator combat as dictated by the the world's ruler, the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), who refers to these battles as his "Contest of Champions." In director Taika Waititi's sequel, the Contest of Champions is more of a traditional gladiator contest, but in the context of the Marvel comic book universe, it's something much larger. Here, we detail the history of the Contest of Champions in Marvel Comics.

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Amusingly enough, it all began with the 1980 Summer Olympics. You see, Marvel Comics created a special Treasury Edition in which Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk fought some bad guys at the 1980 Winter Olympic,  held in Lake Placid, New York (now best known for the so-called "Miracle on Ice," in which the U.S. hockey team pulled an upset over the Soviet Union in a medal match and won the gold). That book ended with a mention of an upcoming story tied to the Summer Olympics.

Marvel decided to create a special-event comic that would pit superheroes against each other in a tie-in with the Summer Olympics. The special would have introduced a bunch of new international superheroes, because of the global aspect of the Olympics. A young John Romita Jr. was set to draw the book, which was to be written by Bill Mantlo, Steven Grant and Mark Gruenwald (who had collaborated on the previous Winter Olympics comic). However, as part of the protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided the country would boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. That made the nearly complete special edition unusable.

Or so Marvel thought!

Two years later, however,Marvel came up with an idea to re-purpose those pages for what would become the publisher's first-ever miniseries. Dubbed Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions, it featured a story rewritten by Mantlo to remove the Olympics references, and Bob Layton did an amazing job re-drawing the artwork to make characters match whatever changes had been made to their costumes in those two years (and, in the case of the no longer-superpowered Ms. Marvel, replacing her with She-Hulk).

Now the concept is that the Grandmaster had cut a deal with a mysterious being to make a group of superheroes fight against each other for pieces of the "Golden Globe of Life." Whoever collected the most pieces would win. Here is the Grandmaster choosing sides with the mysterious opposing entity:

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However, when the actual contest happened, a hilarious error threw the whole thing into retroactive chaos!

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Here are the results of the four matches:

Grandmaster's team strikes first.

Then the mysterious entity's team tied it up ...

Then Grandmaster's team took a 2-1 lead ...

Finally, mysterious entity's team tied it up, but the comic says that it was Grandmaster's team that won instead!

What a hilarious screw-up. Anyhow, as it turned out, the mysterious entity was actually Death herself! And even though Grandmaster won, which meant she would have to bring anyone he wanted back to life (he wanted to save the life of his brother, the Collector, who had been killed by Korvac during the Korvac Saga), it turned out Grandmaster had to trade his life for his brother's. He agreed to do so, and so the Collector returned.

Contest of Champions was a big sales success and proved to Marvel the sales viability of miniseries. Soon the company began releasing a ton of them.

A few years later, Tom DeFalco and Steve Englehart did a follow-up event that pitted the Avengers against the West Coast Avengers in Death's realm, as the Collector was plotting for a way to bring his brother back to life. That event tried play it as though the Grandmaster knew he didn't really win, but that he wanted to because he needed to die so he could strike against Death from within her own realm.

That event ended with the Grandmaster in control of Death's powers, but Hawkeye then tricked him into playing a "winner takes all" match in which Hawkeye cheated!

The distracted Grandmaster, who couldn't believe he lost, let his guard down, allowing Death to break free and return all of the Avengers home to repay them for helping her.

In the end, though, the Collector and Grandmaster succeeded in getting "banned" from Death's realm, thus making them effectively immortal.

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A second Contest of Champions happened almost 30 years later, in 1999, written by Chris Claremont and art by Oscar Jimenez and Eduardo Alpuente (and later Michael Ryan).

A group of seemingly benign aliens get the heroes of Earth to participate in the new contest, drugging them into not paying attention to anything but the contest. Secretly, the aliens are the Brood, who plan to absorb the powers of all the heroes participating in the contest.

It ended up with some especially bizarre results, like Domino beating Luke Cage ...

and Black Widow choking out Wonder Man (who doesn't even need to breathe, soooooo).

Eventually, the defeated heroes managed to band together to take down the Brood.

Most recently, following the events of Secret Wars, the Collector and Grandmaster were at it again with their new Contest of Champions. This time, they used leftover parts of Battleworld and used alternate reality versions of characters to fight against each other.

This series, written by Al Ewing, was a tie-in to the mobile video game of the same name. It notably brought Night Thrasher back from the dead, as he was plucked out of the past right before his death in Civil War to take place in the Contest of Champions. He eventually escaped, along with his teammates.

Contest of Champions has long been a fun part of the Marvel comic book universe, so it's nice to see it translated into such a fun film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe!


In theaters nationwide, director Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok stars Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Mark Ruffalo as Hulk, Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Cate Blanchett as Hela, Jeff Goldblum as The Grandmaster, Idris Elba as Heimdall, Anthony Hopkins as Odin and Karl Urban as Skurge.