Connor MacLeod from Highlander.

Born in 1518, he is an Immortal, doomed to walk the Earth and watch everyone he loves grow old and die — but eventually, he must battle the few other remaining Immortals for the Prize. And in the end, wait for it... there can be only one.

Captain Jack Harkness from Torchwood.

He's just your average run-of-the-mill con man from the 51st century, until he dies, and the temporarily all-powerful Rose Tyler brings him back to life. Only now, he's a "fixed point in time and space," eternally young and invulnerable forever, no matter what. His wife dies of old age, his daughter is the same age as him, and eventually (maybe) he'll be just a head in a giant jar.

Jenny Sparks from Stormwatch and The Authority.

Born in 1900, she stops aging when she reaches her 20th birthday. Maybe its to do with the fact that she's a being of pure electricity. In any case, she befriends Hitler, visits an alternate universe where she marries an alien prince, and finally gets to join two of the Wildstorm Universe's biggest super-teams, until she finally dies at age 100.

Wolverine, from the X-Men.

Logan used to be just a guy with a tremendous healing ability, but recent comics (and his new movie) revealed that he's actually ageless, and fought in the Civil War and every big war since then. He can smoke as many cigars as he wants, and he never gets weird cigar-related wrinkles. Various comics have shown him surviving long past the end of the world, or at least vastly outliving all his compatriots.

Enoch Root in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon.

One of the great mysteries of Cryptonomicon was how Enoch Root managed to show up, hale and hearty, 55 years after he dies in 1945. We eventually do learn that Root has the secret of rejuvenation, which he uses to keep himself (and sometimes others) alive.

John Carter of Mars, from the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Even before he gets whisked off to Mars, aka Barsoom, he's mysteriously gifted with eternal youth. And no matter how many times they try to kill him, he always comes back. (Although sometimes, he comes back on Earth instead of Barsoom.)

Nick Fury and (maybe) his Howling Commandos, from Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Nick Fury (the comics version, not the movie version played by Samuel L. Jackson) fought in World War II, where he gave his eye for his country. But he's miraculously still young and spry in the present day — and he didn't get frozen in an iceberg, like Captain America. Instead, Nick Fury got exposed to something called the "Infinity Formula," and (at least in some versions) so did his men, including "Dum Dum" Dugan — who's now been going by "Dum Dum" for 70 years.

Lazarus Long, from Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein.

Born in 1912, Lazarus Long is the third generation of a selective breeding experiment by the Ira Howard Foundaiton, so he lives for nearly two thousand years in good condition — with only the occasional rejuvenation treatment required. And he eventually finds out that he actually can't die.

Claire Bennet, from Heroes.

The cheerleader doesn't really seem to need saving — it turns out that even scooping her brains out can't kill her, and it's been hinted she'll stay young and healthy forever. At least, Sylar believes that hundreds of years from now, only he and Claire will still be running around, and eventually they'll fall in love. Or something.

Richard Alpert, from Lost.

Is he a hero? We're still not sure. He's definitely taken part in some questionable decisions, but who hasn't on this show? In any case, he's mysteriously ageless, whether we see him in 1954 or the present day. Here's hoping we find out his secret this coming season.

Runners up: Superman (who ages in some versions but not in others), Kane from the sword-and-sorcery novels by Karl Edward Wagner, Wonder Woman, Samantha from Bewitched, Dorian Grey, The Endless from Sandman, Thor, Takeshi Kovacs from Richard K. Morgan's novels, John Amsterdam in New Amsterdam, Peter Pan, Earthworm Jim, Aes Sedai from the Wheel Of Time, Kai on Lexx, and a host of robot/cyborg characters.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Thanks also to Matt Jones, Ron Hogan, Ekaterina Sedia, Jason Shankel, Missy Feigum, Hiya Swanhuyser, Victor Infante, Jefferson Robbins, Jessy Randall, Stephen Tiano, Becka Robbins, Jennifer Brissett, Ashley Edward Miller, Andrew Liptak, Paul McEnery, Ryan Britt, Yoz Grahame, Shannon Rosa, Espana Sheriff, Lisa Heselton, Lane Kneedler, Naomi Alderman, Darren McKeeman, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Shane O'Brien, Hanne Blank, Lucas Zen Hannon, Mariah Bear, Lun E'Sex, Micky Shirley, Swill Magazine, and anyone else I forgot!

Oh, and there are spoilers below...

Here's the footage we saw:

Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit, his helmet off, sits against an early morning sky eating a donut. As we pull back, we realize he is sitting in the hole of a giant promotional donut for Randy's Donuts. He calls down to a man standing on the ground, "Sir, I have to ask you to exit the donut." And we see the man is Nick Fury.

Inside the donut shop, Fury and Stark sit across from each other. Stark, still in the suit and possibly hungover, is wearing sunglasses. "Look," says Stark, "I told you I don't want to join your super-powered boy band."

"Oh no," Fury replies, with a knowing smile, "because see I remember you like doing things on your own. I'm here to see how that's going."

"I'm sorry," Tony interrupts. " I don't want to get off on the wrong foot. Do I look in the patch or the eye? I just want to know if you're real or if you're a figment of your imagination."

Fury leans in. "Oh, I'm very real. I'm the realest person you'll ever know."

Stark sighs, "Just my luck"

We switch over to a congressional hearing. Stark is at the hearing table, but he's distracted, talking flirtatiously to Pepper behind him while she looks slightly exasperated, much to the Defense Chair's chagrin. "Mr. Stark," he calls out sternly.

Stark's head whirls around. "Yes, dear?"

The Chair asks Stark whether or not he has possession of a special weapon. "No," says Stark. "Well, that depends on how you define the word weapon."

"Do you or do you not possess the Iron Man Weapon?"

"I don't define it as a weapon. I define it as a hi-tech prosthesis." The audience behind him laughs. "No, really, that's the most accurate description I could think of for it." He turns back to the Chair. "Look, if your priority is the safety of the American people..."

"My priority is to see the Iron Man Weapon turned over to the United States of America."

"I won't turn over Iron Man. I am Iron Man, and if I turned over myself, that would be indentured servitude — or prostitution, depending on what state you're in."

The Chair is confused. "Well, I'm not an expert —"

Stark interrupts him, "On prostitution? A United States Senator? Of course not!"

As the crowd erupts in more laughter, the Chair, angrily flustered, calls Lt. Colonial James Rhodes to the stand. This is the first time Stark seems phased. "Are you shitting me?"

Rhodes walks down the hall while the audience murmurs and cameras flash. Stark meets him halfway and gives him a hug. "I didn't expect you to be here," he whispers in his ear.

Rhodes is all business. "Look, it is what it is. Let's just do this."

The both sit down at the table, and the chair once again demands that Stark turn over the suit. Stark is furious, but still very much collected and in control. "You should be thanking me," he tells the Committee. "Look, I'm your nuclear deterrent and it's working. You want my property; you can't have my property. But hey, I did you a big favor, I privatized national security!" Stark stands up and starts addressing the crowd, who are obviously enjoying his performance. He starts verbally abusing the Committee, pointing at them and referring to them as assclowns.

This is the breaking point for the chair, who says, into the microphone and on the record, "Fuck you, Mr. Stark."

We now cut to a series of short clips, alternating between Whiplash, who has newspaper clippings of Tony Stark adorning his wall, and Stark himself, playing under Whiplash's voiceover: "You come from a family of thieves and butchers. You try to rebuild your history...They are the blood in the water and the sharks will come." We see a glowing chestplate on Whiplash's work table like the one in Stark's chest.

We see a series of action clips, including the images of the Black Widow we've seen before, and the image of Whiplash attacking a fallen Tony Stark at a racetrack. The moving clip offers a bit of insight into the weird He-Man quality of the image. It appears that Whiplash strapped his supersuit power supply to his naked chest because he was hiding it beneath an orange jumpsuit. The clip shows that he has ripped off the top half of his jumpsuit to use the deadly electrical cords he twirls from his hands. The streaked hair, however, still looks a bit off on the big screen.

We cut to another scene, this one inside a hangar, where a suit-wearing, lollipop-sucking arms dealer approaches a group of MPs, including Rhodes, who are standing behind a table. On the table is what looks like part of the War Machine suit. "What have you done here?" The dealer asks jovially, with a mock tsk-tsk. "Is that what I think it is?"

The MPs don't answer him, and Rhodes notes that they came to him because they need firepower.

"You've come to the right person," he says, and proceeds to take out a small arsenal of oversized guns, laying them out one by one."

Rhodes tells him he'll take it. "Which one?" the dealer asks.

"All of them."

Cut to a two-second clip of the gray, steely War Machine firing weapons in all directions.

Talking to MTV's Splash Page blog, Jackson said that Iron Man 2's Fury won't be the super spy that we've been hoping for:

Not this time, not yet... We still haven't moved Nick Fury into the bad-ass zone. He's still just kind of a talker.

With Jackson signed to a nine-picture deal with Marvel Studios, maybe it's not surprising that they're choosing to wait before unleashing the full action Jackson, but if we're not seeing a bad-ass Fury by the time that 2012's Avengers rolls around, then something has gone horribly wrong.

Sam Jackson Says Nick Fury Won't See Action In ‘Iron Man 2' [MTV Splash Page]

The new agreement comes following Jackson claiming, at the start of this year, that negotiations to play Fury in future Marvel projects had stalled over the subject of money. The deal covers Iron Man 2 and contains an option for future movies like Captain America and The Avengers. Interestingly enough, reports also mention that one of Jackson's Marvel movies may be titled SHIELD (which is the name of Nick Fury's spy-organization in the Marvel Universe)... That suggests Jackson may be getting his own headlining movie out of this new deal. When we asked the studios ourself, a Marvel Studios rep said that the studio "does not comment on active negotiations", which sounds as close to a "Maaaaaayybe," as they can get away with saying.

Jackson irons out Marvel pact [Variety]

Samuel L. Jackson strikes fear into the hearts of all right-thinking people by raising doubts as to whether he'll return as Nick Fury in the Marvel Avengers movie.

Jackson told the LA Times:

There was a huge kind of negotiation that broke down. I don't know. Maybe I won't be Nick Fury. Maybe somebody else will be Nick Fury or maybe Nick Fury won't be in it. There seems to be an economic crisis in the Marvel Comics world so [they're saying to me], 'We're not making that deal.'

Okay, the recession is hard on everyone, even Marvel. And it's possible his trippy turn in The Spirit left a battery-acid taste in people's mouths. But this would be a big mistake. Sure, Jackson may be using the press to puff up the fans and put pressure on the studios, but you know what? It worked.

Listen up guys, put him in the movie. He's an honest fan, who will do a great job. You're going to want an A-list cast in this bigger-than-life-movie, and this is not something to cut corners on. We want to see the beginning of SHIELD and the Avengers Initiative, and we can't do that without him in the next Iron Man. Well, we could, but would we want to?

Either way, if Avengers is supposed to be as big as everyone is hoping, it's going to need a nice long drumroll to get everyone hyped up. So let's involve the big dogs now, please. Stop cutting people who want to be involved and are talented. At this rate, after Terrence Howard getting replaced, we can't help wondering: is Robert Downey Jr. next?

David Guivant is an aspiring production artist by day, and a fan filmaholic by night. What's more impressive is that he made this trailer for a fictional Iron Man television series using Apple's iMovie software and Adobe Photoshop for the 2D special effects that look like they were rendered in 3D. It's been a two year labor of love for the resident of New Caledonia (a tiny island between New Zealand and Australia) which really showcases the power of doing it yourself.

Now, if these characters only had some actual lines... we'd think he might be onto something.

Yup, Sam Jackson will be cameoing as one-eyed S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Nick Fury. Crossovers like this happen in comic books all the time, but this mega-movie scene-swapping is the first on a scale this massive, and putting Jackson into the mix as Fury is just icing on the cake. This is sure to cause a fangasm among comics readers, and it sounds like the perfect way to tie these two properties together. All this ensemble stuff also makes it sound like Marvel might be ramping up to compete with the DC'sJustice League movie by responding with their own big-screen version ofThe Avengers.

Want To Hear A Really Groovy Marvel Rumor? [Ain't It Cool News]