The Four Color Media Monitor

"The Life of Captain Marvel", a so-called origin story for the real Ms. Marvel, didn't look very impressive when it first came out a few months ago, and this current retcon they're shoving into the 3rd part is no improvement:

To give some context, Carol Danvers' original origin included her getting her powers after being saved by Mar-Vell. He was able to get in the way of the Psyche Magnetron to protect her, but the radiation it was giving off seeped through him and changed Carol's DNA, resulting in her having powers. Her family and friends aside from Mar-Vell were still Earthbound, but it looks like that has changed now.

The mysterious warrior that is searching the source of the signal (which Carol accidentally unearthed in her father's things) arrives at Carol's house after she's already dealt with several robotic sentries. She successfully led them away from the house, but when the warrior shows up she tells her mom to go inside and says she will protect her. Marie asks Carol to let her help for once, but Carol refuses, telling her "You can't be out here! You don't get it, Ma!"

Marie doesn't listen though, saying "Stop sweetheart! I can handle it! Besides...she's here for me."

At that moment Marie takes off the necklace she's been wearing which if you look closely has a symbol much like the Hala star. It starts glowing when she removes it, and the last page shows Marie in full Kree armor, and pretty slick armor to boot. Carol's definitely shocked, and now the questions start pouring in.

So now they're changing her mother's background so she's an alien herself, implying Carol's powers were merely inherited? It sounds little different from DC's Millenium crossover of 1988, where former Kid Flash Wally West's father seemingly became an alien Manhunter, and a traitor to earth. Okay, more to the point, it sounds like Cebulski and company are ditching the original premise altogether, excluding Mar-Vell of the Kree from the origin, which is basically the problem with how they've handled things till now - there should've been a Mar-Vell movie first, but for modern Hollywood, the anti-communist metaphors the original was built on are apparently unacceptable, and the same goes for the idea of a woman supposedly getting her powers from a guy. Except that Carol didn't literally get hers from Mar-Vell, it was the penetrating radiation that gave her the set of powers she got.

While we're on the subject, The Week magazine wrote about Carol's history, and wouldn't you know it, they consider Kelly Sue deConnick's take the pinnacle definition of a heroine whose exact origins as Ms. Marvel curiously go unmentioned here:

After 10 years and 20 films, Marvel Studios has finally unveiled the trailer for Captain Marvel, its first movie starring a woman as the sole lead. It's a film that feels both wildly anticipated and immensely overdue after the small mountain of Marvel blockbusters with men in the lead role. But Captain Marvel is a special hero in the studio's canon, one with an unusual real-life story and a massive debt to the woman who helped tell it.

But first, Captain Marvel herself. Created in 1968 by Gene Colan and Roy Thomas, Captain Marvel was first known as Carol Danvers, an Air Force officer who would eventually gain superpowers and assume a number of superhuman identities. A complicated character with a convoluted history, Danvers was largely used as a supporting player in Marvel comics, despite arguably being one of its most powerful characters and one of the few female characters with a consistent presence in the books since her inception.

Fascinating. No mention of the 1977-79 solo book where she first took up her official crimefighting career as Ms. Marvel, as mentioned, and I'm not sure the claim of consistent presence is accurate either, seeing as she wasn't a big player after abandoning the Ms. Marvel identity to become Binary, and I don't think her appearances in the mid to late-80s were that frequent - they seemed mostly limited to X-Men titles, and a story in Marvel Fanfare #24 where she finds out about the death of Mar-Vell.

That all changed in 2012, when writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Dexter Soy relaunched the Captain Marvel series. In their version, Danvers inherited the title of Captain Marvel, donned a new, full-body costume (designed by artist Jamie McKelvie in perhaps the most iconic reinvention of a character's visual identity since Spider-Man put on a black suit), and shouted a rallying cry taken from the pages of the very first issue: Higher, further, faster, more.

While all of Marvel Studios films are works of synthesis, blending stories old and new to weave a fresh, definitive take, the Captain Marvel shown off in this week's trailer is almost entirely cut from the cloth woven by DeConnick, Soy, and McKelvie. That's a smart decision — DeConnick's tenure writing Captain Marvel is the character's high point, one that converted plenty of new fans and started one of the most recognizable fan movements to come out of comic books in the last decade: The Carol Corps.

As I mentioned, the article doesn't clearly reference her stint as Ms. Marvel, which makes the above paragraph all the more confusing. And seriously, what's so great about the full-body costume, especially when, not clearly mentioned here either, Carol was masculinized as deConnick's stories become more and more pointless. I can't say Spidey's black costume was all that iconic either, and besides, it was eventually abandoned after Eddie Brock became Venom.

Unsurprisingly, the superficially informed writer chooses the leftist feminist writer's stories over even the most questionable stories from Brian Reed's previous rendition of Carol in her Ms. Marvel role. And if deConnick's writing really inspired such a huge following, how come it hasn't translated into stratospheric sales over the past 5 years? There's been probably 3 different volumes since, mainly centered on the notion of depicting Carol looking like a man and dubbed by real fans as "Carl Manvers", laced with SJW mentality and ultimately no real story in sight. Plus, what're the moviegoers going to think if they open up a deConnick book and discover a bizarre masculine hybrid instead of a woman who's as lovely as she's powerful and brave?

It's bizarre and a little unsettling that the business of comic books — the extremely low-cost breeding ground for what will become billion-dollar film juggernauts — remains an industry that so rarely rewards creators, largely because that's how things have always been — and because monthly superhero comic books of the sort published by Marvel and DC are a drop in the bucket compared to films, with sales numbers that rarely break five figures. It's hard to drum up concern for an industry that so few pay attention to.

And it's hard to care when an article like this is so slapdash, and doesn't care about history in its entirety. Because for somebody who laments creators unrewarded, he left out Chris Claremont, who surely defined the character 4 decades ago, yet is just one more important name curiously omitted from the puff piece. For somebody talking about the ignorance to comicdom, he's surely doing just that after he turns in his draft to the editor for publication.

And CBR's no better:

The Life of Captain Marvel #3 effectively establishes that Carol’s run-in with Mar-Vell and the Psyche-Magnitron was not her first time encountering the Kree. This is a major departure from the hero’s original origin story, which saw her effectively stumble into her powers as a well-meaning citizen just trying to do some good in a weird, alien situation. The new issue may hint that Carol was always predisposed to become a hero, and that her Kree-human hybridization might not be the result of the Psyche-Magnitron at all, but rather a matter of simple genetics — if we are assume that her mother is, in fact, Kree and her father was human. Now that’s a comic book coincidence if there ever was one.

The revelation also has the added effect of fleshing out Marie’s character even more. Up until this point, Marie Danvers has been portrayed as a woman who was cheated on years ago and simply doesn’t want to address it, much like she doesn’t want to address the fact that her husband was an abusive jerk. The reveal that she is a Kree fighter (we have to assume she’s a fighter, as she claims she can take care of the Kree clone, who doesn’t seem receptive to the diplomatic approach) adds a layer of complexity to the character, putting her on the same power level (or greater) as Carol, but casting her in the tragic light of someone who knows a relationship is bad but won’t leave. “I thought could save him,” Marie says. For a Kree warrior, she’s certainly swamped in a very human, and relatable, drama.

Oh please! If anything, this makes the matriarch seem less human, and more contrived. If you have to have alien/humanoid characters as cast members, create new ones instead. This doesn't do anything for a character who, despite what some news sources might claim, was sadly never made use of as successfully as they want to claim she was.

I've seen some argument that, until now, the movie promo footage available of Brie Larson in the role doesn't show her smiling. It's beginning to sound as though this is a film where a woman can't display a real sense of humor either, and that doesn't help what may be a botched promotion campaign for the movie, which the Life of Capt. Marvel seems written to either give the screenwriters what to go by, or, was written up to reflect the movie's premise, at the expense of the past developments. None of which matters to press propagandists with no respect for or investment in history.

Labels: dreadful writers, marvel comics, msm propaganda, women of marvel