GALACTUS

Galactus never took a wife, built a family, or announced an heir — his daughter simply happened to him. Galacta, who calls herself Gali, explains that she began as a metaorganism that spontaneously generated inside her father’s Power Cosmic field: in effect, Galactus gave birth to her himself, asexually, and she emerged as a second, smaller devourer-class being carrying his hunger in full. She debuted in Marvel Assistant-Sized Spectacular #2 (June 2009), in a story by Adam Warren and Hector Sevilla Lujan that won a fan vote against the anthology’s other tryout tales.

Where her father consumes worlds, Gali made the opposite career choice. Living on Earth in human form, she uses her cosmic senses to hunt the things nobody else can see — alien viruses, living bioweapons, invasive organisms threatening the planet — and eats those instead, secretly working as Earth’s one-woman biosecurity service. It keeps the hunger survivable. Barely. Her follow-up solo stories, collected as Galacta: Daughter of Galactus (2010), turn on the day the hunger spiked and she found a ‘cosmic tapeworm’ growing inside her.

She went to Galactus for help, was refused, and nearly reached for the Ultimate Nullifier before her father intervened with the punchline only a planet-eater could deliver: the parasite was no parasite. It was the next generation — Gali was pregnant, exactly the way he had once been with her. Marvel’s editors later exiled Gali to her own reality rather than Earth-616 proper, which may be the most Galactus outcome of all: even his daughter’s canon status got consumed.