Is Galactus A Celestial? The Cosmic Marvel Character Explained

The character of Galactus first appeared in the pages of Marvel Comics' "Fantastic Four" #48, way back in March 1966. Galactus, as all Marvel fans can tell you, is a giant being from outer space — outfitted with a cylindrical helmet — who traverses the galaxy infected with a bottomless hunger. He sends a herald ahead of him, the Silver Surfer, to announce to a planet's population that he's coming and that their world will end soon. Galactus then arrives and eats the planet. He has been doing this for untold millennia.

Visually, Galactus merely resembles a very large human in silly purple armor. In early appearances, he even sported a giant letter "G" on his belly. As a concept, though, Galactus is much more terrifying. He is essentially a minor deity whose very existence in the cosmos denotes a structured sense of universal entropy. Galactus seemingly cannot die, and he drifts through the heavens casually committing planetary genocide, merely to indifferently slake his inner, physical pain. He is an indifferent Old Testament God, flippantly enacting acts of mass destruction and not caring a whit for the lives he ends.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Galactus appeared in Matt Shakman's "The Fantastic Four: First Steps," played by Ralph Ineson. In that film, he stood opposite the Celestials, a species of near-immortal living statues that can create entire planets as part of a complex breeding cycle, as explained in the movie "Eternals." If the Celestials were distant, indifferent cosmic deities that created worlds, Galactus was a more active deity of destruction.

But then the question arises: Is Galactus also a Celestial? Or is he something else entirely? At the very least, Galactus is a little chummy with the various gods — or, rather, Cosmic Entities — of the Marvel universe.

Celestials first appeared in Marvel Comics' "Eternals" #2, back in 1976, and was created by Marvel's most psychedelic writer/artist, Jack Kirby. The actual origin of the Celestials is heady and vast, as they are countless billions of years old and were present before the creation of the currently-known Marvel universe. The story goes that there was once a universe that was a life form unto itself, i.e. a universe-sized consciousness known as the First Firmament. The Firmament then created a species of angels, called Aspirants, to serve as its company. In turn, those Aspirants went rogue, frustrated by their position below their creator, and created the Celestials, themselves beings who could create entire planets on their own.

The Celestials have their own modus operandi when creating worlds and reproducing. They can summon entire planets and pepper them with DNA, assuring that advanced life forms will eventually evolve there millions of years down the line. They do this because, as shown in the "Eternals" movie, once a native planet's population reaches a certain density, a Celestial zygote at the planet's core will be activated by all the life energy on the surface. The Celestial will then hatch, destroying the planet. A world will be destroyed, yes, but the new Celestial will spend the next trillion years creating countless other worlds. The titular Eternals are necessary because they're long-lived androids that can reside on a planet for millions of years without having to worry about evolution. The Celestials live on that long of a timeline.

The Celestials are repeatedly presented throughout Marvel history as distant and ineffable. Their true power and identities cannot be measured or even grasped by human minds. Is Galactus one of them? It seems that he is not, so his origin lies elsewhere.

Galactus has been around in the Marvel Comics universe for almost 50 years, so his history is long and detailed. However, when you look into Marvel's back issues, it's clear that Galactus is most certainly not a Celestial, even if he seems to serve a similar (if opposite) godlike function in the Marvel universe. Indeed, in 1993's "Fantastic Four Annual" #26, it's theorized that Galactus had a duty to perform alongside his world-devouring habit, and once that duty was fulfilled, he would be rewarded by becoming a Celestial. He's like an aspiring Celestial or maybe a Celestial assistant manager.

Galactus' actual origin was first explored in the comic "Super Villain Classics" #1, published in May 1983. That comic explained that Galactus was originally a member of an alien species called the Taa-an and that his name was once Galan. He existed in a universe that predates our own by several universal generations, making him impossibly ancient. It seems that, in his native universe, there was a massive cataclysm that destroyed almost all the life within it. Galan managed to escape the cataclysm in a high-tech vessel, but he was snagged by the contracting walls of his own universe and crushed by the Big Crunch. Specifically, he was crushed inside an egg-like shell and was kept alive by cosmic powers for billions of years, absorbing energy and gestating. When the next Big Bang occurred, billions of years later, Galan emerged as the ever-hungry, undying Galactus.

Details about Galactus' backstory have been expanded and explained further throughout Marvel's comic books, usually in the cosmically-bent titles like "Silver Surfer" and "Thor."

Marvel Comics, as you've likely intuited by now, is loaded up with its own panoply of gods and deities, often referred to, neutrally, as Cosmic Beings. The MCU has already depicted several of these godlike beings in its stories. In addition to Galactus and the Celestials, Ego the Living Planet (Kurt Russell) was a central character in James Gunn's "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2." Elsewhere, in "Thor: Love and Thunder," the antagonist Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) sought magical aid from Eternity, a being that physically contains the whole of the universe. "Love and Thunder" also revealed that Thor isn't the only mythic God in the MCU. At one point, that film visited Zeus (Russell Crowe) on Mount Olympus and even featured a credits cameo from Hercules (Brett Goldstein). Similarly, the animated series "What If...?" is hosted by the all-seeing Watcher (Jeffrey Wright).

But on the page, there are many more such gods. In the "Infinity Gauntlet" comic series, Thanos spent an issue battling the many gods of the Marvel Universe. It seems that the universe is overseen by a series of by laws, interpreted by a three-faced golden giant called the Living Tribunal. Eternity, meanwhile, is paired with a being that contains all of time known as Infinity. There's also another time deity known as Kronos, who is Thanos' grandfather, while the all-powerful Lord Chaos and Master Order oversee all chaos and order in existence. Even Love and Hate are physical beings, whereas other Cosmic entities have practical functions that remain a mystery. Who is, for instance, The Stranger?

When such Cosmic Beings gather, Galactus is typically present with a few Celestials. He's not a Celestial, but he's buddies with some of them.