The MCU has built its own continuity over the last 11 years.
Many of the references in each of these films have become about the movies themselves, not
just their comic book source material.
But there are still nuggets tucked away in the movies for the longtime comics fans.
Here are some of the Easter eggs in Avengers: Endgame.
Major spoilers for the film are ahead, of course.
Infinity Gauntlet goodies
At the end of the 1991 story The Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos is sent off to an unnamed
planet for time out to think about what he's done.
The Thanos of Endgame meets a very different end.
Twice.
But we do find the post-snap Thanos who appears early on in the movie similarly situated on
a planet without a name.
Like the Thanos of Infinity Gauntlet, he's taken up a quiet life of farming, having placed
his armor on a stake as a scarecrow.
Later, the Avengers-built gauntlet of the movie becomes almost a literal football, with
different carriers running it down the field toward Ant-Man's van.
In the comic, it also passes between numerous holders, including Nebula, who seizes it from
Thanos.
The two movie Nebulas play both sides of the conflict over the gauntlet.
Another Infinity Gauntlet nod comes when Captain America prepares to march up to Thanos alone
to face him one-on-one.
Until the revived heroes arrive, it's reminiscent of the comics moment where Captain America
stares down Thanos, fully aware he's walking into certain death.
Hammer time
One of the biggest applause moments in the movie comes when Captain America reaches out
his hand and summons the Mjolnir Thor retrieved from Asgard.
Not only has Cap wielded Thor's hammer in the comics before, it's actually happened
multiple times.
It first goes down in Thor #390 from 1988.
Thor gets knocked to the ground by a particularly nasty foe named Grog the God-Crusher, dropping
his hammer in the process.
Steve Rogers, in his identity as simply "The Captain," goes to retrieve it, and not only
picks it up, but takes out a bunch of henchmen in the process.
In the 2011 event series Fear Itself, upon Thor's apparent death, Steve Rogers lifts
the hammer once again to rally the Avengers.
In probably the most controversial instance, the Hydra-allegiant version of Captain America
raises the Hammer in 2017's Secret Empire.
The moment is also a callback to Avengers: Age of Ultron, where Steve tries to lift Mjolnir
but doesn't quite pull it off.
Dads and daughters
A lot of MCU superheroes have daughters that appear in Endgame, and almost all of them
are direct or indirect versions of characters from comics.
The most direct comics connection is Cassie Lang, who appears in Endgame as a teenager.
In the comics, she's a teenaged, size-changing superhero who goes by the name Stature and
joins the Young Avengers.
Scott even remarks to her in the movie, "You're so big!"
"I eat fear for breakfast."
"Oh wow.
That is super-cool."
In Endgame's opening moments, we see Clint Barton training a young girl, who we find
out is his daughter Lila, in archery.
A quick glimpse of that scene in the trailer had some observers thinking the girl might
be Kate Bishop, who also goes by Hawkeye in the comics.
It isn't, but a sure nod to Kate occurs when Clint calls Lila "Hawkeye."
Then there's Morgan Stark, Tony's daughter who loves him 3,000.
In the comics, however, Morgan Stark is a very different character.
He's Tony's cousin, and believes Tony's dad stole all his ideas from his father.
He teams up with supervillain Count Nefaria [ to try to kill Tony, and later turns into
a giant living robot.
He doesn't love Tony 3,000.
New Asgard
A lingering question from Avengers: Infinity War was whether any of the Asgardians who
were on the ship Thanos attacked survived to resettle on Earth, as they planned to do
at the end of Thor: Ragnarok.
"Earth it is."
Endgame lets us know that they did, building a small but thriving "New Asgard" community
headed up by Valkyrie in Thor's absence.
Though there's never been a comics version of Asgard in the Nordic region, there have
been a couple times Asgard came to Earth.
The version actually called "New Asgard" is from a story where an alternate-future Thor
has become lord of both Earth and Asgard in the year 2020, and Asgard has been rebuilt
over the remains of a devastated New York City.
Once that all got reversed, Thor eventually created a version of Asgard on a giant landmass
hovering nearby the town of Broxton, Oklahoma for a while.
Sartorial allusions
Many of the hair and costume choices in Endgame either point to the passage of time like Black
Widow's blonde/red two-tone hair mix or dig into the history of the MCU.
Captain America wears almost every previous movie costume.
Two character looks are definite nods to comic fans, though.
The red-and-blue ensemble Rocket wears is a version of the red-and-blue outfit Rocket
and the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy team wore after the mid-2000s Annihilation
event.
There's also Captain Marvel's new haircut, which Rocket cracks a joke about just after
the five-year jump.
It's very similar to the hairstyle Carol Danvers currently sports in the comics, and which
she's had since taking up the Captain Marvel name in 2012.
Rescue to the rescue
Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts wears one of Tony's suits in Iron Man 3, and later gets
superpowers by the end of the movie, but she hadn't had a flying armor suit all her own
until the final act of Avengers: Endgame.
"Who's the hot mess now?"
"Still debatable."
Though she isn't called by the name in the movie, this is undoubtedly the MCU's version
of Rescue, the armored identity comics Pepper took up in 2009's Invincible Iron Man #10.
In that story, Tony goes underground, having been publicly blamed for a recent Skrull invasion.
Pepper is tasked with running Stark Industries responsibly.
Upon unleashing her fury at Tony by throwing a chair at a wall, she opens up a secret room
with the Rescue armor inside, and begins her superheroic career.
In the movie, Tony makes the armor for her willingly.
No chair throwing required.
The professor is in
The Hulk's absence in the trailers for Endgame was a very curious thing.
Fans who have seen the movie know now that it was to hide a pretty big reveal: Five years
in the future, Banner and the Hulk have figured out a way to coexist as one entity.
It's a very similar concept to the version of the Hulk who would come to be known as
"Professor Hulk," who first appeared in 1991's Incredible Hulk #377.
The movie version is a little more friendly and a little less openly menacing than the
comics version.
One moment of sizable Hulk strength from the movie is when he holds up rubble to protect
Rocket and Rhodey from being crushed under the debris of Avengers headquarters.
That moment has got to be an allusion to Secret Wars #4, in which the pre-professor Hulk has
to hold up the weight of an entire mountain range to save his friends.
Captain America variations
Instead of popping straight back to the present after returning the Infinity Stones to their
rightful places, the MCU Captain America chooses to stay in the past to finally have that dance
with Peggy Carter.
"Peggy?"
"I'm here."
"I'm gonna need a rain check on that dance."
He re-emerges as an old man, having lived a full life, and presents his shield to Falcon
to take up his legacy.
In the comics, Sam Wilson has also sidelined his Falcon persona to be Captain America.
Starting in 2015, he starred in his own Captain America series for a while.
Sam's stint with the shield also coincided with Steve Rogers becoming an old man, too.
Comics Steve's aging was the result of a conflict with the villainous Iron Nail, who neutralized
his Super Soldier serum.
'Nuff said
Will Endgame's Stan Lee cameo be the his last one in the MCU?
If so, it's a fitting tribute to the brash and undeniably charismatic figure he cut.
Lee's appearance comes when Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are forced to travel back to
1970 for another chance at recovering the Tesseract.
The world of 1970 comes to life when we see Lee, looking much like he did in the 1970s,
driving a muscle car by a military base, shouting at one of the guards, "Make love, not war!"
The bumper sticker on his car carries one of his many catchphrases: "'Nuff said!"
Not much more we can add to that, true believers.
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