MARVELS and RUINS of the KINGDOM of ROSS! Blog History of the Many Captain Marvels Part 17!

The 1970's had been an era of creative exploration at DC and Marvel Comics because of the new directions pop culture was going at the time the generational change in editorial staffs, and some works of real genius wound up on the stands. The 1980's was an explosion of creative possibilities in the independent comics scene as brand new comic book companies gave creators full ownership of their properties and had no Comics Code Authority to censor their work.

Here is an interesting dialogue-style history of the Comics Code Authority from NPR.

The 1990's, however, incubated creativity through the need to come up with the next big, flashy, collectible "thing" that would prove to be a groundbreaking triumph and raise the bar for the comic book industry. Alternate covers! New first editions! Exciting new changes to characters! Foil-embossed! Polybagged with a trading card! Pogz!

All-Time Greatest Comic Book Gimmick Covers according to Comic Book Resources
Memories of Comic Book "Gimmicks" Resurface
Blown Cover: 15 Covers from the '90's that Destroyed Comic Books
A Pintrest page of gimmick comic book covers through the ages

The success in the late 1970's and '80's of comics that broke ground creatively and in format while referencing or reinventing familiar superheroes and other comic tropes (Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark, Eastman & Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Frank Miller's Ronin and The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen) and works that re-set or re-organized the superhero universes of Marvel's and DC's superheroes (Marvel's Secret Wars, DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths) had established precedent for what was thought to be needed to have a popular, top-selling comic book.

The work that may well have had the most success as a creative re-imagination of a superhero universe, comic book format, and gimmicky concept and packaging, was 1994's Marvels limited series, by writer Kurt Busiek and artist Alex Ross (that is, the artist Alex Ross, not the music critic Alex Ross).

    

   

 

    

This series re-told the history of the Marvel Comics characters from before WWII up to the present day, but through the eyes of a news photographer, who called them "Marvels" (hence the title). The only Captain Marvel who appeared was Mar-Vell, who was in one double-page spread of the Kree-Skrull war, but The impact of this series, with its deluxe format and gloriously painted covers, was to become a superhero comic book benchmark.
    

This comic totally changed the game. Alex Ross set a new visual standard with his realistic painting, often compared with Norman Rockwell (he used models). The cover was a clear acetate sheet with a black border and the title framing the cover painting on the page beneath it. From thence on, the look of an Alex Ross-painted comic book, or even a book with his painted cover, would be seen as a mark of high quality epic storytelling.

The most directly-referencing work was a dark satire titled Ruins (written by Warren Ellis, painted art by Terese Nielsen, Cliff Nielsen, and Chris Moeller), in which everything that could have gone wrong with the Marvel superheroes did. In the case of Mar-Vell, he was part of a Kree invasion force that, due to a mishap involving the Silver Surfer, fell prey to American nuclear missiles that wiped out 90% of the force. They were captured and put in concentration camps in a former nuclear testing base.These last survivors and their children were slowly and painfully dying of radiation poisoning, and Mar-Vell was especially miserable, as his objection to the invasion was blamed for its failure.

     

Another, and much more well-known and impactful conceptual follow-up was from DC Comics in 1996, a vision of a dystopian superhero-deconstructionist future titled Kingdom Come, by writer Mark Waid and writer/artist Alex Ross. This story turned out to be the greatest use of the human/hero dichotomy of the original Captain Marvel ever.

   

  

  

 

Based on an idea Alex Ross imagined while working on Marvels and set in he hear future, super-powered being filled the skies and streets of cities having near-apocalyptic battles every day. Superman had retired to his family farm in Kansas, and Lex Luthor was organizing a movement against super-powered heroes. His personal bodyguard was Captain Marvel, dressed in a suit, standing quietly behind him lighting his cigar when needed. The threat of his power is enough to keep all other superheroes at bay.

A tragically destructive incident in a hero-villain battle brings Superman out of retirement, recruiting other superheroes to become the world's police and arresting and detaining those who decline or resist. Batman leads a resistance to this and teams with Luthor. I turns out, though that "Captain Marvel" is really a grown-up Billy Batson, brainwashed and mind-controlled by Luthor into believing that super-powered heroes are evil monsters. The climax occurs during a final, apocalyptic battle between all the superheroes and villains, and Billy Batson/Captain Marvel has the choice of either allowing them to all be destroyed (by a United Nations-launched nuclear weapon) or allow them to survive,  their conflict to continue, and thus doom humankind.

It is Superman who gives him this choice, the reason being that because he has seen life from both the normal human and super-powered perspectives, Billy Batson/Captain Marvel (along with  the wisdom of Solomon) is uniquely qualified to pass judgement on the existence of super-powers heroes. His decision sacrificed himself to same a portion of the heroes and inspired Superman to realize that it was the role of superheroes to help, but not lead, humanity to its future.

 

Other members of the Marvel Family were present in future-ized incarnations. Freddy Freeman/Captain Marvel, Jr. was now "King Marvel," with a costume redesigned to evoke an Elvis Presley jumpsuit (a deliberate homage to the King of Rock & Roll, who was a big fan of the Little Blue Cheese). Mary Batson/Mary Marvel was now either "Lady Marvel" or "Queen Marvel" (depending on which fan wiki you read). She and Freddy Freeman were married and had a child, "Whiz," who was the inheritor of the SHAZAM! power. Their family dynamic was obvious in their actions (always visible in the background), but none of these characters were given anything significant to do in the story.

    

This production established two things:

1. Captain Marvel truly was the World's Mightiest Mortal in the DC Universe, able to go toe-to-toe with Superman and with power enough to hold all other heroes at bay. His magic lighting could even be used as a weapon.

2. Alex Ross was a big fan of the original Captain Marvel, and his vision of the character became the most popular iconic image through which the character would be marketed by DC for some time. He has placed the hero in the same level as DC's "Trinity" of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Ross had worked on a potential new SHAZAM! series in the very early 1990's.

 An Alex Ross design for his early 1990's project. Note the deliberate resemblance between Captain MArvel adn Fred MacMurray, Mary Marvel and Kathy Ireland, and Captain Marvel, Jr. with Michael Gray.

It never came to pass, being superseded by Jerry Ordway's Power of SHAZAM!, but Ross' star rose with Kingdom Come and other projects. He soon got more assignments designed to take full advantage of his majestic interpretation of comic book superheroes. One such was four tabloid-sized issues, each featuring one hero of DC's Trinity, plus one with the original Captain Marvel. That book was titled SHAZAM! The Power of Hope.

 

In this gloriously-painted book (written by Paul Dini), what was presented as special and unique about Captain Marvel was that even with his mighty powers, he could still relate to children (being, in his alter ego, a child himself) and give them hope in the midst of despair.

Review of SHAZAM! Power of Hope from Ground Zero Comics.

Ross continued to use the Big Red Cheese as a subject for his art in other publications, and just this year produced this piece, which in one picture sums up the entire focus of my project here:

https://nerdist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/echoes_of_shazam_web1200.jpg

How many of these Captain Marvels and Captain Marvel-related characters can you identify?

Marvel's "Captain Marvel" Carol Danvers movie review (Part 2)

           

You can find Part 1 of this review at http://captainmarvelculture.blogspot.com/2019/03/marvels-captain-marvel-carol-danvers.html

Let's see, where were we...Oh yes, talking about the gender-switch of Mar-Vell.

There is a very important message in the film that the gender-switch enables, but there was another, non-gender-specific change to the character. I will cover later these later, as they are important factors in evaluating the film as a whole.

Vers breaks free from her imprisonment and proves to be a kick-ass badass. Though her hands are encased in giant cuffs that are blocking her photon blasts, she used the cuffs themselves as weapons, punching and kicking her way through a platoon of Skrulls.

In the course of her escape she crashes to Earth, landing through the roof of a Blockbister video, and the 1990's nostalgia and Easter Eggs begin. The very name of the store, of course, evokes what this movie will be once it goes to video. In the store she happens to pick up a box for the movie The Right Stuff obviously evoking her space travelling personae, referencing her Air Force test pilot past, and suggesting that she has the...you know...to be a hero. But behind her right shoulder we see the movies First Knight (which must be a reference to her leading position in StarForce) and Hook (which might be a reference to her forgetting, and later remembering, who she was when she was younger).

The loudest symbolic metaphorical element of the scene, however, is her blasting the head off of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a True Lies standee display. As we find out by the end of the movie, there are several layers of deception going on, and Vers has to peel them back, one by one, to find out who she is.

BTW, feel free to take a break from reading and enjoy this awesome little video that helped me remember which videos were in the store :)

Once outside the store, Vers meets with a local security guard, where we find out she has a "universal translator" and that she does not yet know that Earth (referred to by an alpha-numeric code designation) does not know that the Kree or the Skrulls exist. Moments later, we find out that she can use items found in a Radio Shack to turn a pay phone into an interstellar communications device, just like the extra-terrestrial in E.T. (which is technically a 1980's reference, but we still remembered it in the '90's).

Enter Samuel L. Fury.

Many reviews call this a "buddy cop" movie. There are actually quite a few "buddy" teams in this movie, each with a slightly different dynamic. It is almost as if this entire movie is about "buddies." These two-fers include:

Vers/Yon-Rogg
Carol Danvers/Wendy Lawson
Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau
Carol Danvers/Monica Rambeau
Nick Fury/Goose the Flerkin
Talos/"Science Guy"

But the characters that spend the most "buddy" time together are Vers and Fury. They seem to have a sort of professional connection, being as they both have military experience and are employed in a combination military/law-enforcement capacity. This has to go a long way in explaining why they stick together for the rest of the film, otherwise, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they do.

But then, there are a few bunches of things that don't quite make sense in this movie. Or do they? In the course of the film, Vers rides a motorcycle, finds an internet cafe and uses Alta Vista to search for something, reads road maps and secret government reports, looks up files, and does other things that you would not expect someone who needs a "universal translator" to be able to do on Earth. But then, we haven't gotten to the big reveal yet, have we?

Vers, having landed on Earth in her Kree Battlesuit, swaps it out for a leather jacket/jeans/Nine Inch Nails T-shirt ensemble (I am sure someone more familiar with that band can share the symbolic significance of that shirt). She and Fury hit the road, have a bunch of exposition in which we learn a whole lot of backstory (that we might not have expected unless Wonder Woman had her lasso of truth around him) and wind up sneaking around an underground S.H.I.E.L.D. base finding secret reports that show that "Dr. Wendy Lawson" was working on a special space-plane and died in a crash. They also find that Maria Rambeau, whom Vers had been seeing in her dreams, was involved in the project, and that Vers herself had been there, too.

This gives us the plot turn that gets us to the biggest "fan service" that is unique to Marvel's Captain marvel in their cinematic universe: Monica Rambeau.

In the comics, Mar-Vell dies of cancer in a graphic novel published in 1982 some years after exposure to a toxic gas. This meant that the "Captain Marvel" trademark now had no character to hold it.

By this time in America, if any group of five or so portrayed in the media did not include least one woman and one black person it was extremely behind the times. Marvel did not have many female superheros and even fewer black ones, and only one who was both, and she wasn't even American. So it was decided to make the new Captain Marvel an American black female.

This is Monica Rambeau's place in the Captain Marvel history. The fourth superhero of the name, the second one in the third company to publish a Captain Marvel. She was a strong, smart, beautiful black woman whom even Captain America trusted enough to make leader of the Avengers. She kind of got screwed over later, being replaced as leader of the Avengers and essentially forgotten as the name passed to another character and she changed her superhero name to "Photon."

Lashana Lynch's connection to Monica Rambeau had been made apparent from promotional photos showing her in the cockpit of a jet fighter displaying the name and callsign Maria "Photon." Rambeau. The assumption that she was Monica's mother was quickly and correctly made by the fan community, and speculation arose as to where Monica would fit in.

After a fun chase-and-fight scene that revealed that Fury's boss (Ben Mendelsohn) is really a shape-shifting Skrull, and that Vers can fly a "quad-jet" (presumably a precursor to the Avengers' Quinjet), Fury and Vers make their way to the home of Maria Rambeau and her daughter, Monica. It is in this act of the movie that Vers gets to deal emotionally with the issue of having been Carol Danvers and having had a life on Earth. Maria was a very close friend, and Carol even used to call her daughter "Lieutenant trouble," (a not to a character in the recent Captain Marvel comics written by Kelly Sue Deconnick in which there as a young girl given that nickname by Carol).

It is also in this act in which we get to know the Skrulls as surprisingly human and vulnerable people. Talos and his "Science Guy" show themselves as a flawed team of semi-competents and that there is a boatload of Skrull refugees hiding out somewhere, trying to get to a safe planet.

Oh, and BTW, Fury met a cat named "Goose" at the S.H.I.E.L.D. base who tags along with them, and the Skrulls call it a "Flerken," a thing of danger.

After a little bit of 90's nostalgia of waiting for a CD-ROM file to load, Carol finds out that Mar-Vell's research was in part to help those Skrull refugees and overall to make a new lightspeed engine out of the power of the teseract that could end the war between the Kree and the Skrulls. Vers has the necessary flashbacks to remember her life before she was a test pilot, that an explosion of Mar-Vell's experimental engine had bathed her in radiation that gave her super powers, and that Mar-Vell was shot by Yon-Rogg.

This reveal both pays tribute and turns on its head the comic book origins of Marvel's Captain Marvel and Carol Danvers as a superhero. It also finally gives Yon-Rogg what he always wanted but never achieved in the comics.

Yon-Rogg's jealousy of Mar-Vell was the guiding motivation in all his actions while Mar-Vell was under his command as a spy on Earth. He tried to kill him, either directly or by proxy, on a regular basis. It was practically the plot device of default for the first year of the character's existence. But he never succeeded, eventually sabotaging his own career. In an issue of Marvel's What If...? Yon-Rogg not only threw away his career, but his life as well trying to do away with his rival for Medic Una's attention and and honor and recognition from the Supreme Intelligence. But in this movie he managed to get the upper hand on Mar-Vell, both by killing her and by stealing her friend/protege and making that person a Kree soldier/weapon.

The explosion in question, in the comics, was of a Kree device activated by Yon-Rogg called a "psyce-magnitron." Mar-Vell rescued her from that explosion, protecting her with his body, a move that was later retroactively explained as allowing Kree DNA to be absorbed into her body (This is called "retroactive continuity" or a "retcon" in comic book fan/historian parlance). It was a secret device, retconned into having the power to enable people to realize their desires. In the movie the explosion was of a cosmic power source harnessed into an engine by Mar-Vell, activated by Carol Danvers shooting it to prevent Yon-Rogg from getting his hands on it t Mar-Vell's urging.

This places the event that gave Carol her powers the result of her own action and an act for which only she can take responsibility. It was not an accidental incident. Though she had no way of knowing what would happen, she could have chosen not to pull the trigger on her gun. She could have run and tried to not get killed or captured by the approaching alien (Yon-Rogg, whom she had not yet met). She could have chosen not to take Mar-Vell (whom she only knew as Wendy Lawson at the time) up on the irregular, unauthorized test flight. She could have chosen to give up the Air Force Academy when it looked like she couldn't take the training. She could have chosen not to join the academy, not get up when brushed back by that pitch in Little League, not driven the kiddie go-kart so fast. But that is not her. She gets up, she fights back.

This is consistent with her character in the comics. The reason she still exists as a superhero, and what makes her important and a good choice for a character to lead the surviving Avengers in the battle against Thanos, why she is (finally) a good female role model, is that no matter how bleak things have looked for her (and things have been pretty darn bleak, believe me), she somehow, eventually, came back took responsibility, and did something about it.

I don't have time to go point-by-point on the many setbacks of her life and career, but believe me, you would be hard pressed to find someone who has taken the type of risks and come back from as many and as deep personal low points as Carol Danvers. So maverick-ly helping a ground-breaking scientist and blowing up a secret energy source are not the toughest things she has ever done.

But it does take Mar-Vell out of the equation as a direct source of her powers. She is an indirect source, as Carol would not have been in that predicament without her, but she does not protect her from the explosion, rather drives her to the act that causes it. Yon-Rogg gives her more than that, directly. A transfusion of his blood was given that may have saved her life (hence the blue blood she bleeds through the movie). The Kree soldier becomes the mentor/trainer/superior officer to the young female amnesiac he "rescues" from that explosion, in the process becoming a big, fat, liar. He used her to try to find what Mar-Vell was hiding, what she was doing on Earth. It was definitely a long-term game (taking 6 years of Earth time) but in the end, in the movie, as in the comics, his plot backfired. "Vers" (the name given to her because that part of her name was all that was visible on the fragment of her Air Force dog tag that the Yon-Rogg found) became a super-powered, highly trained warrior who decided to defend the Earth and help the Skrull refugees.

The rest of the movie is a series of reveals, including the location of the Skrull refugees (in a hideout that had a remarkably, ironically, symbolically metaphorical collection of American pass-time devices, from pinball machines to jukeboxes to super-soakers) collection, the plots and plans of Yon-Rogg and Ronan the Accuser, The truth behind the Flerken, how Nick Fury lost his eye, the origin of the Avengers Initiative, the fact that the device on Carol's neck was an inhibitor, not an enabler, and the full extent of Carol's powers.

The emotional payoffs to all the setups is worth it. Maria and Monica and Carol have an emotional reunion of sorts when Carol's memory returns, Maria gets to go into battle with her old, returned friend. Monica gets to help Carol decide on the colors for her Kree Battlesuit (paying fan service to other Captain Marvel costumes in the process), and Yon-Rogg gets his comeuppance from the final final defiance of him by Carol.

A few final thoughts about this movie will come in the next post...

For those of you who want to see a whole bunch of Easter Eggs and references in once convenient, fast-paced video, check this out...

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: