Where has Rick Jones been?

I haven’t seen any sign of him in the Marvel movies. For someone with undeniable connections to the origins of several heroes, Rick Jones has been curiously absent so far.

If not for Rick Jones, there would not be a Hulk. Teenager Jones was hanging out at a gamma bomb test site, just playing his guitar and chilling. Bruce Banner noticed the kid was there, rushed to the test site and pushed him out of the way. Banner of course caught the worst of the gamma blast and became the Hulk. (In fairness, Jones may actually have been in the Incredible Hulk movie but it was so bad, and the origin story was so glossed over, that I may be forgetting it.) Jones felt responsible for the creation of the Hulk and thereafter became the jade giant’s longtime ally.

There probably also wouldn’t be an Avengers team without him. Rick Jones was the one who sent a radio distress call — fortuitously intercepted by Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp —when Loki was attacking the Hulk. The superheroes may have come together on their own eventually but Jones facilitated their first meeting. The Avengers made him an honorary member and he developed a rapport with Captain America and for a time wore the costume of the then-deceased Bucky.

Rick also had a long history with the original Captain Marvel. For some time, he was for some reason obligated to share a body with Mar-Vell. While Captain Marvel was trapped in the Negative Zone, Jones would take his place on Earth. When Marvel was needed for superheroics, Jones would take his place in the Negative Zone.

Rick Jones later subjected himself to gamma rays but instead of developing super strength, he got cancer, later cured by the Beyonder. He also was involved with Rom the Spaceknight (a character now expunged from continuity due to licensing issues at Marvel), who fought the evil Dire Wraith aliens.

While associated with Mar-Vell, Rick got drawn into the Kree-Skrull War. The Kree’s Supreme Intelligence released Jones’ dormant but formidable Destiny Force, which Jones used to create facsimiles of deceased heroes from Marvel Universe’s Golden Age, who helped the Avengers end the war. In more recent years, Jones was part of the history-spanning Avengers Forever series, using the Destiny Force to recruit a group of Avengers from different points in the team’s history to battle the time lord Immortus. He was in a wheelchair in that series so I don’t know what happened there.

Apparently Rick now has some kind of super-strength and has the code name A-Bomb. I liked him better as a non-powered human with potential powers that he can only rarely tap into. I like that message that ordinary people can sometimes do extraordinary things like Rick did.

Rick Jones probably does not fit with the movies’ origins for the Avengers as radioing superheroes for help is a little too ‘60s. But he’s been Marvel’s longest-running supporting character and has witnessed so much history over 50 years that it would be a shame if the movies didn’t use him in some capacity.