Winter guard

Winter guard is an indoor color guard sport derived from military ceremonies or veterans organizations ceremonies. Unlike traditional color guard, winter guard is performed indoors, usually in a gymnasium or an indoor arena. Performances make use of recorded music rather than a live band or orchestra. Winter guard was invented in the United States, where to date is still by far the most predominant scene for the sport.

Winter guard ensembles commonly perform at judged competitions officiated by local and regional associations using criteria developed by Winter Guard International.

Team roles

A winter guard generally consists of performing members under the direction of an instructional staff. The staff of a winter guard team ("the guard") are drawn from many different specialties, which sometimes overlap: there are equipment instructors (sometimes one for the unit, sometimes broken out into the individual sections), dance instructors, and drill instructors. The equipment instructors create the choreography performed with equipment and teach it to the guard. The dance instructors create and teach the movement choreography in the show. The drill instructors focus on the position of the guard members relative to one another and to the boundaries of the performance area, in addition to where each member goes at which specific time during the performance. In some cases, all of these roles are fulfilled by one sole director.

Winter Guard

The Winter Guard is a fictional team of Russian superheroes appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.

The Winter Guard are noted for being "Russia's answer to the Avengers". Several members of the group formerly belonged to the Soviet Super-Soldiers, the People's Protectorate and the Supreme Soviets. Unlike those teams, which were often adversarial towards other costumed superheroes, the Winter Guard is much more heroic and representative in nature.

Unlike other superhero teams, the Winter Guard currently has a rotating pool of candidates to fill one of three roles on the team: Darkstar, Crimson Dynamo, and Red Guardian.

Publication history

The Winter Guard first appeared during the Kurt Busiek run of Iron Man, where they had several guest appearances. They would later appear in Busiek's stint on the Avengers.

The team made infrequent appearance in the Marvel Universe until Jeph Loeb brought them to attention in Hulk #1. The Winter Guard soon appeared in She-Hulk and War Machine: Weapon of SHIELD.