PEGGY CARTER (MPU)

Margaret 'Peggy' Carter, aka Agent Carter, is an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

She can also be said to be an agent of the OSS, the French Resistance, and the Strategic Scientific Reserve (SSR).

[Note to start this off: In the Marvel Multiverse, there are a very large number of different Earths, each a tad different from the others. Each of these Earths have been assigned a number. The one known most commonly as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is Earth-199999. The one most often seen in the comic books is Earth-616, also called the Marvel Prime Universe (MPU).

Each of the two mentioned Earths have an incarnation of Peggy Carter and both are similar in some ways and wildly different in others. There are also other Earths with their own unique version of Carter.

It is not the purpose of this entry to be the complete biographer of Agent Carter, a huge task considering the numerous Carters that there are. Marvel has an extensive database available showing extended biographies of each of these versions thus far discovered.

This page is devoted to the Peggy Carter of the MPU.]

According to the Marvel Fandom Database Wiki:

"Peggy Carter was born into the wealthy Carter family of Richmond, Virginia in June of 1920, and was considered "Virginia royalty." Having grown up alongside her brother Harrison, a teenaged Peggy met and fell in love with a young black man, who left her due to the racial climate of the times. On the night of their break-up, Peggy was approached by Alexa Volkoff, a member of the Daughters of Liberty, to recruit the young girl into the organization, becoming her handler. Fully trained as a cunning agent, Peggy eventually learned of World War II and left for France to join in the fight.

"By 1943, Peggy had joined the French Resistance as a field agent, codenamed Agent 13. While working undercover in a café during a very rainy day, she met a young soldier named Steve Rogers. The two shared what she believed to be a brief romance, though Rogers (in his role as Captain America) would walk in on Peggy after she'd killed a roomful of Nazi soldiers, and the two struck up a long-term romance. Unbeknownst to Cap, Peggy had been instructed by the Daughters of Liberty to get close to him in order to monitor him and keep him out of the wrong hands, though her love for him was genuine. Peggy would also join the original five Invaders in battle."

The history of Peggy Carter is intimately connected with the storyline of Captain America. It is in the pages of his second series of adventures that we first meet her, albeit unnamed initially.

The first Cap series [published by Timely Comics back in the 1940s] had the shield-slinging superhero totally absorbed in his fight against the Axis. There was no time for something as frivolous as romance as each issue of adventures was jam-packed with excitement and danger and fisticuffs and, of course, tossing that impervious shield around. He did have the constant companionship of teenaged Bucky Barnes but his presence, much like Robin to the Batman, was more a ploy to attract young male readership [you too could be a sidekick to a superhero!]

When Cap was resurrected from the suspended animation of the ice floe by the Avengers and resumed his crusade against dictators and world-conquers, the writers of these new stories eventually alluded, at first, to the fact that Cap was human and was attracted to the fairer sex after all, though the first mention was in a super brief flashback and a time with the unnamed Peggy Carter. We would soon be told a bit more about that battlefield romance but learn that other missions would call Cap away and poor Peggy would suffer from a war injury and lose her memory!

Soon back in the present the character of Peggy Carter would be brought back into play but she would be a much older woman, not having spent two decades frozen in the Arctic ice. This Carter would be in her mid-40s though she initially was portrayed as even older. At first she is addled-minded and confused, not to mention a bit love-struck. All rather understandable when you consider the man she loved and lost in the 40's shows up again in the 60's and he has not changed a bit!

Of course, love does not go smoothly as he has a new relationship with Sharon Carter, Peggy's much, much younger sister (retconned to niece and then great-niece). Before too long, though, Peggy will find a new lease on life in the service of S.H.I.E.L.D., complete with skin-tight full-body suits and one very impressive athletic body. She will be for a time a partner of a young black man named Gabe Jones and they would make a pretty good team. In addition to some dangerous missions infiltrating some pretty nasty terror groups, she would also spend a fair amount of time at a monitoring station as a Communications Officer, helping direct resources to trouble spots.

Occasionally we will be given longer looks into the past as we are told adventures that occurred during that too-short period of time back during WWII when she and Cap were an item.

There really is not a whole lot to adventures of the Peggy Carter in the Marvel Print Universe because her heyday was during WWII and her introduction into the Captain America cycle came long after the WWII adventures had been told in the Timely Comics runs.

Of course back then the idea of someone as dynamic and stoic as Cap taking time to spend a moment (or night) with a woman was unthinkable! When he was defrosted over two decades later and given some time to remember his earlier times, then we learn about his affection for the woman.

I did appreciate the fact that his love and devotion to the lady remains, though she is a whole lot older than he (physically) now.