The True Story of ALL the Captain Marvels! DEATH AND ENERGY! (part 7 of a bunch)

Some of the sources of and publications mentioned in this post can be found among these fine products:
      

By the early 1980's, comic books had regained a lot of the creative diversity that had been lost since the establishment of the Comics Code in the 1950's and were exploring new territories of creativity and publishing formats. Independent comics companies were publishing stories with creator-owned characters that included content that would not have passed the Comics Code. Writer/artists like Will Eisner and Gil Kane were creating stories in formats that came to be called "graphic novels." Marvel Comics decided to get in on this trend.

For several years, Marvel had been producing Epic Illustrated, a slightly toned-down version of the adult sci-fi/fantasy magazine Heavy Metal (itself an American version of the French Metal Hurlant). Now they decided to launch a new line of comics with creator-owned properties under that same "Epic" imprint. At the same time, they decided to launch a line of "graphic novels," which would basically be large, premium format, self-contained, novel-length comic books.The first of these would be The Death of Captain Marvel.

 

Jim Starlin, who had made a name for himself, and Mar-Vell, with his Thanos War, agreed to take the job, provided Marvel would publish his creation, a character and comic series named Dreadstar, in their new Epic Comics line (This was the latest of a continuing epic that had been preceded by an ongoing series in Epic Illustrated called Metamorphosis Odyssey and a graphic novel called The Price). Starlin had been the one who had given Mar-Vell his cosmic awareness in the Thanos War, and was the writer-artist most strongly identified with the hero.

 

Starlin used the job the help him deal with the recent death of his father by cancer. In the story, Mar-Vell succumbed to a cancer he had contracted, ret-conned into an incident in which he had sealed a poison gas canister with his hands. The graphic novel is very highly regarded, often making it into top-ten lists.

So Marvel Comics had this trademark, but no living character to cover it. It was noted that the name was no-gender-specific, and there were not many black female superheroes around, so it was decided to make the new Captain Marvel a black woman.

First appearing in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 (1982), Monica Rambeau was a New Orleans harbor patrol officer facing the "glass ceiling" (for her gender, not race, as was apparent because her boss was black). In the course  of investigating suspicious doings on an off-shore rig, an explosion bathed her in extra-dimensional radiation that gave her the power to become electromagnetic energy (visible light, x-rays, gamma rays, ultra violet, etc.). A Mexican guard had overheard a friend calling her "Mon Capitain" and, slipping into unconsciousness after witnessing the explosion, mumbled "El Capitan es un maravilla..."

 The next day the newspapers read "Who is Captain Marvel?" and the name stuck. She was invited to join the Avengers as a "probationary" member, but proved herself quickly enough. She studied all the records of their foes and was able to direct the battles against them. Eventually Captain America selected her to replace him as leader of the Avengers.

In my personal opinion, she made a better feminist role model than Carol Danvers/Ms. Marvel. She was strong and independent without being socially aggressive. She dealt with her uncertainties (should she be a superhero? Should she lead the Avengers?), maturely, seeking opinions from those she trusted, making up her mind, and not losing sight of her objectives. She also did not have that whole "Schizophrenia" thing that Carol Danvers had in her early days as Ms. Marvel. Or any of Danvers' soap opera drama, for that matter.


In time, however, the decision-makers at Marvel wanted to bring back Captain America as the leader of the Avengers. This bothered Roger Stern, whiter of the book and co-crater of the character. He did not feel it would look good to get rid of a black, female superhero from the lead position of Marvel's premiere superhero team. Stern quit the book, and a story was concocted about how a character named Dr. Druid used mind powers to manipulate events to get himself elected leader. As part of that storyline, Monica lost her powers and nearly died battling a sea-creature, and was a wasted husk of herself afterwards.

She eventually recovered and regained a slightly altered version of her powers...but that is a story for another time.

NEXT: The Crisis of 1986!

The below items also contain material mentioned in this post:
                 

Jude Law as Marvel's first Captain Marvel, Mar-Vell (real news!)!

It seems I am a little behind the news on this one, but to quote a very young Queen Elizabeth, "Dear me, I've been busy." With what Ihave been busy are subjects for my other blog, my other, other blog, my other, other, other blog, and my Facebook page.

So here is the news: JUDE LAW IS GONG TO PLAY CAPTAIN MARVEL (MAR-VELL...probably)!

The clickbait press was all over this one as soon as the sister publications Deadline and Variety announced that Jude Law was "in talks" and "negotiations" for the role. Headlines over the next couple of days were about 50-50 between "is" and "might be." That "in talks" status seems to be what is current, though the Net-o-shpere is pretty much taking it as a done deal

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Variety describes the role played by Law as "Doctor Walter Lawson, a.k.a. Mar-Vell, who becomes a mentor of sorts to Danvers as she tries to figure out her new powers."

I think this is an interesting choice. Physically, Jude Law is not as tall as Mar-Vell, nor does he have white or blonde hair and blue eyes, as Mar-Vell has had. He is lean and fit, though.

Mar-Vell has gone through several looks during his time. Initially, as drawn by Gene Colan, Don Heck, Dick Ayers, and others, he was a beefy, square-jawed hero, with short white hair and a frustratingly generic average handsome white man face. Gil Kane made him leaner and his face longer and more expressive. Jim Starlin continued that trend, also cueing off of Kane's had given him, and finally Pat Broderick gave him his version of a hero face, with a pompadour and sideburns growing through his mask.

 

The difference between the Colan and Broderick Mar-Vells were so great, it was almost laughable when, in a Broderick-drawn story, a character saw him without his mask and identified him as Walter Lawson (an alter ego he had not used for ten years, real-time)

This just goes to show that Jude Law's specific features and physique are not so important when casting the role, so we can just move on from that. Instead, let's consider the character and Law's previous body of work.

 Marvel Comics' first Captain Marvel was never a top-tier character in terms of popularity. His comic was always teetering on the precipice of cancellation, switched from monthly to bi-monthly, and even was cancelled a few times. The character went through some wild, shark-jumping escapades, being put through major changes at a dizzying rate, often in an attempt to boost sales. Through all these changes, the character, understandably, was confused. He was often "seeking his place in the universe." Having deserted the Kree, then driven from Earth, he was a man without a home for a while. During his lengthy period of sharing time in the Negative Zone with Rick Jones, neither he nor Jones were able to put down any kind of roots anywhere.When the two finally separated their time-sharing for good, he bounced around from place to place, never staying in one place for more than two issues, until he finally found the love of Elysius and settled down on Titan for a few brief years, until he died of cancer.

This rootless uncertainty made him a bit of a tortured soul. Even his "cosmic awareness," granted to him during Jim Starlin's run with the character, could not calm his uncertainty. It did, however, enable hi to handle challenges of a super-villain nature with a sense of yogi-like serenity.

Jude Law has shown himself to be very good at serious, sensitive roles in movies like Gattaca, Cold Mountain, and Enemy at the Gates. If that aspect of his character is explored in the movie, Jude should do well in the role. He has also played a hero mentoring an adventurous female in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I could see some of that coming into play in his relationship with Carol Danvers.

Mar-Vell was an accomplished warrior for the Kree when he was first introduced in the comics, and his stocky build was perfect for that role. He was constantly battling giant monsters or hordes of enemy soldiers. Jude Law's smaller frame is not, at first glance, built for such a role. In Enemy at the Gates he was a sniper, so being smaller he was able to sneak and hide, and he did not have to engage in fisticuffs. He just had to serenely find his target and shoot.

This would serve the "cosmic awareness" aspect of the character better than the "alien warrior" aspect. When the cosmic entity Eon gave Mar-Vell the power of Cosmic Awareness and made him the "Protector of the Universe" With this new power, instead of having to engage in a slugfest with a powerful foe, he could sense his adversary's weak points and center of balance and defeat him with a minimum of effort in a minimum of time with a minimum of damage. With that ability, the hero does not have to have big, showy muscles.

In the "Someone is Wrong on the Internet" department, Cheat Sheet has posted a whole "What We Know About..." article by Brendan Morrow. However, despite most of the article being pretty darn accurate regarding the character of Mar-Vell, the author commits one unforgivable sin. He states "the first time we were ever introduced to someone called Captain Marvel, the character was a man who was referred to as Mar-Vell. He also used the pseudonym Walter Lawson."

As anyone who has watched my video of the history of the many Captain Marvels knows, the original Captain Marvel was Billy Batson's alter ego, into whom he transforms when he says "Shazam!" The fact of this error is compounded by the GIF that is posted in the article of Garret Craig as the Fawcett-DC hero in the 1979 TV special "Legends of the Superheroes: Superhero Roast."

And here is your clickbait roundup:
GeekTyrant brings attention to how Variety's article at first did not mention Mar-Vell, then updated itself to do so.
NY Daily News
 io9.gizmodo mentions that "Keanu Reeves was being considered for the role before passing."
WGME
BBC America
Channel24
CinemaBlend
DigitalSpy
Newsdotcom
NME
Nerdist actually shows a cover of Marvel's "Captain Marvel" comic book.
Uproxx
SyfyWire supposes that Ben Mendelsohn will play the leader of the Skrulls.
Vulture
Gamespot
ign
CBR
AVClub
Collider
Entertainment Week
comicbookdotcom
Slash/Film
Independent
sciencefictiodotcom
The Wrap
Hindustan Times
mashable
FilmJunk
EpicStream
HeroDaily
The Action Pixel
GeeksOut
MovieWeb
Screen Rant
moviesdotie
Comics-x-aminer
WQLZ
ImpulsoHQ
Geeks of Color
Por La Libre
Se Estrena
Screenweek

New lecture video: The Death of Mar-Vell and the Coming of Monica Rambeau

The lecture at the Wicked Faire went well, but I am realizing that one hour is really not enough time to cover the whole history in the depth that it deserves. I put together this little video of a part of the history that doesn't get a lot of press...

NY Comic Con Report

So I just got back from the NY Comic Con at the Javits Center this weekend.

It was a good one for the Captain Marvel Culture project. I have just produced a new abridged edition of Captain Marvel Culture, outlining the history of the many different Captain Marvels. I was able to sell a bunch of copies of the booklet, along with some copies of my Watch This Space magazine, which includes a chapter from the book about how the McCarthyist anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950's were reflected in the Kree-Skrull War, the Civil War, and the Legends miniseries.

I was also able to meet with and get on camera Jim Starlin, Lee Weeks, Len Wein, and Gary Frederich talking about their particular parts of Captain Marvel history. I hope to have some of that footage up soon.

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.

Marvel's First Marvel

History is undecided on what happened next. In Les Daniels' official history of the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee says that he looked around, decided that it would be only right for Marvel Comics to have a Captain Marvel, and engaged in complex legal negotiations to get the name. Roy Thomas, who was assigned writing duties for the character after Stan Lee's first story, states both in articles in Alter Ego magazine and the Marvel Masterworks edition reprinting the first Marvel Comics Captain Marvel stories that it was Martin Goodman's idea, that he had to “protect his investment in the name”...Marvel. One thing is for sure, it was a perfectly reasonable business decision to grab a hold of the name Captain Marvel when your company is called Marvel Comics. There is no end of stories of people assuming that Captain Marvel was a product of Marvel Comics simply by word association alone. In any event, in 1967, Stan the Man created a new Captain Marvel. This one was an alien from the intergalactic Kree empire. He was a Captain in the military and his name was Mar-Vell. He was assigned to spy on Earth and determine if the human race was a threat to the Kree, and thus should be wiped out.

He took the guise of a mild-mannered yet mysterious rocket scientist named Walter Lawson and infiltrated the Cape, a US military space exploration base (they never actually called it Cape Kennedy, which was the name of the US space base at the time, but some years later, in flashbacks, it was referred to as Cape Canaveral). There he earned the suspicions of Carol Danvers, the beautiful female head of security. As he worked with and observed the humans, he began to feel sympathy for them and resisted opportunities to kill them, even fighting to defend them from various threats such as robots and monsters from various sources that seemed to make a habit of attacking the base (using the superior strength of his alien physiology and the superior technology and weaponry of his Kree space suit). In the course of saving the base from these threats, his name, Captain Mar-Vell, came to be pronounced by humans as “Captain Marvel.”

There was also a complex romantic polyhedron going on. Mar-Vell was in love with a medic, Una, on board the Kree ship that was orbiting Earth. She loved him too, but Colonel Yon-Rogg had lustful designs on her, and had a seething hatred for Mar-Vell as a result. Meanwhile on Earth, Carol Danvers was falling for Captain Marvel, who was beginning to develop affection for her, while she was ever suspicious of Walter Lawson, who kept on disappearing at remarkably convenient moments and around whom strange, unexplainable things happened.

Put all this together, and you had a character who was in many ways, more like Superman than the original Captain Marvel. An alien from outer space with powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men, who disguises himself as a mild-mannered person, then slips away to change into his heroic costume and save the world. He had a hyphenated name that ended with “el.” He even had a Lois Lane parallel in Carol Danvers, who incidentally has the same last name as Superman's cousin, Linda Danvers, Supergirl (Roy Thomas, who created her, insists was an accident).

Stan Lee likes to justifiably boast about the seemingly magical success about every one of his creations from the 1960's. However, in his autobiography, there is not a single mention of Captain Marvel. Whether he forgot, or was embarrassed, the fact is that his Captain Marvel did not sell as well as most everything else he created in the 1960's. Gene Colan, who designed the uniform and drew the first few issues, said it was the worst superhero costume ever.

Captain Mar-Vell first appeared in the pages of Marvel Comics' compendium book, Marvel Super-Heroes, and after two issues, he got his own book. However, after a year of repetitive stories, there began a series of plot devices and shark-jumping changes galore. Unfortunately, none of these changes really were able to grab a loyal audience.

Both his love-interest, Una, and rival, Yon-Rogg were killed, he was used as a pawn in Kree politics, got swept up in racial conflict within the Kree Empire, then ultimately was given new powers, a new costume, and then unceremoniously dumped into the Negative Zone. Then Rick Jones, Marvel Comics' official all-purpose sidekick (yes the kid who got Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk), found a pair of golden bracelets called “nega-bands,” and by banging them together, found he could trade places with Captain Mar-Vell in the Negative Zone. This was a new take on the Billy Batson/Captain Marvel transformation. This time, instead of it being a strict transformation, where the alter-ego was subsumed by the superhero and vice versa, the alter egos were actually able to communicate with each other, essentially living in each other's heads.

But the biggest change for Captain Mar-Vell was when, in 1973, Jim Starlin wrote and drew a storyline that had Mar-Vell being chosen by the cosmic entity Eon to be the Protector of the Universe and granted Cosmic Awareness (the ability to be aware of absolutely everything in the universe, past, present, and future. A handy ability, and one that can give great serenity to one who has the mental and emotional stability to handle it). This turned the alien warrior into a cosmic space hippie, very much a product of his times.

Despite this, and a very concerted effort by Marvel Comics to identify this Captain Marvel as one of the front-line heroes in its universe, the title was eventually canceled in 1979.

Next: Don't Miss the Ms.!