AYE, AYE, CAP’N
Just who is captain marvel?
In the early 2010s, Ms Marvel was promoted to Captain Marvel. It wasn’t her biggest upgrade – in the 1940s, Captain Marvel was a man. Published by Fawcett Comics, this hero appeared for over a decade before a lawsuit from DC claimed he was too similar to Superman, and Fawcett was forced to ditch him. When the copyright lapsed, Marvel launched their own Captain Marvel in 1967 and trademarked the name. (These days, DC publish the original as Shazam!)
Created by Stan Lee, he was an alien Kree spy despatched to Earth to observe the planet’s burgeoning space exploration programme. Marvel soon turns traitor and sides with Earth’s inhabitants, becoming the planet’s protector against alien threats. With bigger titles to compete against, Captain Marvel remained a B-grade hero throughout the ’60s, and while he underwent numerous transformations (in 1969, writer Roy Thomas gave him a new costume, more powers, and sidekick Rick Jones), sales were middling. The series was cancelled in 1979. “Marvel didn’t seem to quite know what to do with him,” noted comic historian Don Markstein, adding that Marvel only kept the character in publication throughout the ’70s “to maintain their trademark on his name”.
A chance encounter with Carol Danvers in an earlier issue made way for a spin-off, Ms Marvel. In the issue, Captain Marvel rescues Carol when she’s seriously injured by the detonation of a Kree device. In the first Ms Marvel, published in January 1977, Carol discovers she’s acquired some of Captain Marvel’s Kree powers. The character became a semi-regular Avenger, appearing in various titles until the ’00s, when a false reality created by Scarlet Witch reimagined her as Captain Marvel. The shift stuck and, in writer Kelly Sue DeConnick’s 2012 reboot, Ms Marvel became Captain for a story in which Carol explored her own history and discovered how the inhabitants of the Marvel Universe react to her new identity. “She’s eyes up, chin up, head up,” DeConnick says of the character. “Everything about her wants to leave the Earth. So let’s let her go and see what happens.”