Like all the Elders of the Universe, the origin of the Collector is lost in antiquity. What is known is that he is one of the oldest living beings in the universe, having been among the first of the universe's races to become sentient in the wake of the Big Bang. Virtually immortal, the Collector spent the first millennia of his existence with his wife and daughter on the tranquil world he chose as his home base. When their daughter had grown to maturity and left them, the Collector's wife died of mysterious causes. The Collector was unprepared for her demise: he had thought her as immortal as well. In meditation, he realized that an important factor in an Elder's immortality is the will to live, and his wife had simply lost hers.

Determined not to succumb to his wife's malady, the Collector meditated upon what he might do to give his life meaning. In a vision, he foresaw that beings of great power would arise one day determined to destroy all life in the universe. To prevent this from happening, he decided to devote his life to collecting living beings and artifacts from throughout the known universe, and placing them in safekeeping. As a fail safe if what he foresaw came to pass, he could repopulate the universe and bequeath to them the knowledge and culture of the past.

Building himself a large starship, the Collector set forth, stopping at every inhabited world he found to acquire a sample of their finest achievements as well as living representatives of the world's life-forms. In a matter of years, his ship was completely filled, and the Collector was forced to suspend his mission in order to build expanded facilities for his permanent collection. With the aid of robo-mechanics acquired from the planet Cron, the Collector converted several uninhabited planets into giant museums, and transferred his collection there. Every time his ship's hold was filled, he would return to the museum-worlds to deposit his recent acquisitions. At present, the Collector has filled ten museum-worlds with artifacts from a hundred thousand planets.

Over the eons, the Collector's monomania became more and more obsessive; making him lose sight of the original reason for which he began his collection. In recent years, the first being of great power he had foreseen as a threat to all life, Thanos of Titan, had been born and defeated without the Collector's intervention. When the second such great threat to life, Korvac of Earth, appeared, the Collector decided to send his daughter Carina to spy on him. Korvac slew the Collector before he could reveal to Earth's heroes what he knew of Korvac. A short time later, the Collector's kinsman, the Grandmaster, played a contest of champions with the spirit of Death itself, winning the power to resurrect the Collector apparently at the cost of his own immortal life.

Resurrected, the Collector resumed his ancient task. In his most recent known vision, he foresaw the attempt of Surtur to destroy Asgard. The collector also saw fit to foil the juvenile plans of Enmity by using the female members of the Guardians of the Galaxy; Gamora, Mantis and Quasar along with the Lady Liberators members the Invisible Woman, She-Hulk, Storm, Thundra, Valkyrie and the Skrull known as Lyja the Lazerfist, together these powerful women defeated Unum. The collector returned all the women to their respective places in the universe as he returned to his business of preserving the universe in his own strange way.