The "Return"

Over at Marvel Comics, Their first Captain Marvel has been brought back...sort of, but not really.

Marvel Comics' 2006-2007 company-wide crossover event, Civil War, began with 3rd rate superheroes with their own reality show invading a supervillain hideout. In the struggle, Nitro, the villain that had given Captain Mar-Vell his cancer, detonated himself, killing 600 people, including an entire elementary school. This led to a public outcry, which led to the US government passing the “Superhuman Registration Act,” forcing registration of all super-powered beings with the government. This caused a schism in the superhero community reminiscent of the cold-war era communist witch hunts. On the one side, Iron Man led those heroes who followed the registration edict (including one former Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel), and Captain America led those on the side of the right to privacy of identity. A prison was constructed in the Negative Zone to hold those who refused to register.

In the midst of this storyline, Captain Mar-Vell appeared. It turns out that he is really an alien Skrull named Khn'nr who had been planted as a secret agent as part of a plot to conquer Earth, but was conditioned so well to believe that he is Captain Marvel that he has rejected his mission. He believed that at a point in the past after his battle with Nitro and before he became aware of his cancer, he accidentally slipped into 2007. After the expected awkwardnesses that comes with figuring out that everybody is trying not to tell you that you are supposed to be dead, he was recruited to serve as warden for the superprison in the Negative Zone.

The Civil War ended when Captain America realized that the rebellion he was leading was tearing the country apart, surrendered to the authorities, and was assassinated. Captain Marvel then appeared on earth, inspiring the founding of a cult that would do good deeds in his name. The leader of the cult was killed by a military assault in the Sudan, and now this Captain Mar-Vell is going through deep psychological torment over feeling a need to live up to the good deeds of the cult that he inspired and rejecting his mission as a Skrull agent.

Death and Other Changes

Over the next couple of years, a confluence of the growth of independent comics and the rise of the comics specialty shops and conventions, and the increasing recognition in America of the potential for comics to be serious, quality literature and art led to the rise of independent comic book companies, creator-owned comic book properties, and graphic novels. By 1982, Marvel Comics was jumping on this bandwagon. They used their Epic imprint (which had been so far used for their Heavy Metal-inspired , adult-themed magazine) to start a line of creator owned comics, and they began a series of graphic novels. They asked Jim Starlin to do their first graphic novel, The Death of Captain Marvel, and he agreed if they would publish his Dreadstar series in their Epic line of comics.

Jim Starlin used the feelings he had been experiencing over the recent passing of his father to write a very moving story about Captain Mar-Vell dying of cancer, a very un-heroic death for a very noble character. The source of his cancer had been established in the last issue of Captain Marvel that Jim Starlin had written, in which the hero had been exposed to a toxic gas while battling a villain called Nitro. His nega-bands had held back the cancer for years, but by the time he told anyone about it, and despite a team of the most brilliant scientists, doctors, and magic users in the Marvel superhero pantheon, it had progressed too far to be operable. Ironically, this story came out on the eve of the breaking of the AIDS epidemic, in which many, many people would know the tragedy of loss to such an illness.

Thus ended that Captain Marvel, for the time being.


Meanwhile, Carol Danvers was fed up with her old friends, and planet Earth for that matter. She made friends with the X-Men, and wound up adventuring in outer space. There she developed a latent power, bursting into a form with the energy of a binary sun. She then took the name Binary.