The Mighty Captain Marvel #0-1

[informationgeek]

"Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, pretty much owns the spotlight right now – that wasn’t my doing. I mean, my run begins with Carol as the biggest superhero celebrity on the planet, taking calls from POTUS and suffering through a TV show based on her life. But emotionally, Carol’s just come through a tough period of conflict with her closest friends – Tony Stark, Jessica Drew, Kamala Khan – which has absolutely changed her. Responsibility – and the price of responsibility – has forced her to take a hard look at who she is, both as a person and a hero. So there’s already so much going on, both around her in and her mind, that there’s really no “trick” to writing her, other than to just let Carol be Carol. She’s had fifty years to develop as a character and has really just now hit her stride." - Margaret Stohl

Written by: Margaret Stohl
Art By: Emilio Laiso and Ramon Rosanas



We start with The Mighty Captain Marvel #0.

Carol wakes up from a nightmare where Iron Man is attacking her. It's been a recurring dream of hers and she's been having trouble getting to sleep. So much, she's actually in therapy.







Therapist: You can click that remote all you want, but there's no off button for feelings.

Carol: I FEEL fine. I feel great. In fact, you could say I'm on top of the world... literally.

Turns out she's at Alpha Flight's space station. She then meets up with a woman named Wendy, who is monitoring the situation out in space and informs the audience that the Earth is getting loaded with alien refugees recently from different galaxies for some reason. While they figure out the situation and how to deal with these people coming in, we get this bit...





Then comes your flashback to fill in the audience about Carol's backstory and we get some spaceship smashing, and then...








And that's Issue #0. So let's move onto a brief look at #1, where Carol & Jess are at the set of a tv show... Carol's movie.





Suddenly, a call comes in from Alpha Flight! There was an attack at an alien refugee camp1





...she's Kree.

That lights a fire under Carol and she blasts off! You see, as she and the comic explains, it's her biology, being part Kree, that makes her want to rescue this kid above all else. She arrives at the scene and goes after the person causing the problems...





Carol: Seriously? A shape-shifter? So old-school!


And that's it for now...

Comments

[thehood]

Is the bad guy being a shapeshifter a reference to the days Mystique was a Carol villain?

[byc]

She killed tons of Skrulls during Secret Invasion. War Skrulls I think, that had powers of the people they were intimating. But that was only what, 8 years ago?

[randyripoff]

Hmph. I was hoping that the Jess/Carol split would last much longer than this. It was one of the few things that I liked.

[thehood]

It was explained in issue 0.

Still, even in Jessica's own book, she only lets Carol babysit Gerry begrudgingly because she had not other options.

[katefan]

She's concerned about cleavage? According to Finch's artwork she used to wear a thong so I'm not sure why she's complaining.

I'm...just having so much trouble buying into this idea that Carol is now Earth's most popular hero for all but killing Iron Man. Was Iron Man that despised? And most powerful hero? When did this power creep happen?

[byc]

I think it's just to promote her as the "face" of the MU. People in the MU need a face for their heroes. A tall blond bombshell would be an easy choice. She is a flying brick for the most part.

[mastermahan]

Carol becoming super-popular is right in keeping with how the MU public is generally portrayed - i.e. too stupid to dress themselves. Hawkeye is currently the most popular Avenger in-universe for killing Bruce Banner, with one comic giving his approval rating at 90% (no, I'm not sure how Clint and Carol are both #1). They thought handing national security over to known insane murderer Norman Osborne was a good idea. Cyclops is now considered to be Hitler. The list goes on.

At this point, Carol should realize that having the public's support is like a blaring alarm that you're doing something wrong.

[tcampbell1000]

Argh, I really, really want to like this, and it's not without wit and charm, but there are just so many problems.

The sooner they lose that TV show, the better it'll be for everybody. Jokes about cheesy Hollywood adaptations are way out of date at a time when even most superhero fans are comparing comic-based movies favorably to comics (pop quiz: which got the best reception, CIVIL WAR the comic, CIVIL WAR II, or CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR), and the notion that she needs to keep this show going to SOMEHOW finance her GIANT SPACE STATION OF INTERPLANETARY DEFENSE makes less political and economic sense than anything coming out of Washington lately, and that takes some doing.

I mean, I get it: the portrayal of women is still often weird and backward... but that totally runs counter to the idea that Carol's this big celebrity now. Would you tune in to a scripted show about your favorite celebrity that got every detail about her wrong?

And yeah, as katefan says, the idea that she's super popular with the public after Iron Man is just bizarre. Like, at BEST, she should be a "controversial" figure, with some rabid fans sticking by her the way Kamala used to and others (outside the immediate superhero community) drinking the haterade.

The rift between Carol and Jess is over in about one hot minute: there's not even tension between them in issue #1. I'm starting to think "I need to move on, Jess, we both do" is code for "We obviously can't totally ignore CIVIL WAR II, but I need a series that's not gonna get bogged down too much in last month's continuity."

The nerd-touchstone references feel weird, too: how is Jess Spock? The Dagobah comparison is a little more appropriate, but if you're trying to convey your lead character is still suffering terrible guilt and trauma from nearly killing her friend (and only NOT killing him by dumb luck), maybe don't have her be cracking jokes about how unoriginal her own dream sequence is while she's having it.

I could go on, but this is starting to feel like punching down. I really do want to see the idea of Captain Marvel succeed, I'm glad Marvel's committed to the character, and I'm hoping she'll be more or less on track when the movie comes out. But this transition is going kind of rough.

[thehood]

Except it's not a stretch, we see it happen a lot in the Marvel Universe.

How the civilians embraced Stark after Civil War and then Osborn after that. The Civilians of the MU are fickle assholes.

Another example is how they flip flop on Banner over the years.To the point that in Greg Pak's run he rolled his eye at people cheering him, knowing that they will call him a monster again soon enough.

[stubbleupdate]

Kelly Sue Deconnick's first run was alright, but awful heavy on the airplanes.
Kelly Sue Deconnick's relaunch wasn't as good, with carol in space and not doing a huge amount of interesting stuff.
The Alpha Flight relaunch that we just had was a bit boring
This relaunch is not for me.

I understand how Star Lord fans feel, because this version of Carol isn't the version that got me hooked, post House of M.



I'll see you in September for the re-launch

[byc]

This is the 3rd relaunch I think. The 4th should be around when the movie is released.

I don't follow any comics that closely anymore, but it's been consistent inconsistency for Carol and many other Marvel characters ever since CW. Summer events are so good at that.

[thehood]

Well no shit, Carol is a pilot, of course her book would be heavy on the airplanes and people loved it because they focused on her air force background.

[starwolf_oakley]

Has there ever been a total "Here's how the Psyche-Magnitron re-wired Carol's body, mind and even personality" explanation?

A "Your understanding of Kree history is why you are such an effective (if controversial) leader" retcon isn't too farfetched.

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix4/psychemagnitron.htm

[stubbleupdate]

A Kree Wishing Machine, is what I'm almost certain Kelly Sue Deconnick called it.

[miss_abnormal]

One thing that's been nagging at me for a while is the overuse of quips and jokes like the ones done above (and this is not a criticism of the writer as being the only one who does this; I've seen this across the board, so to speak).

I feel like a lot of comic book writers, in recent years, have tried to write quippy dialogue for nearly every character. Quips and jokes aren't inherently bad, of course, and it can even work for characters in highly-stressful situations that use them as a sort of defense mechanism.

However...

When it comes to something as traumatic and devastating as Civil War II, with multiple deaths and near-deaths and betrayals and disappointments, one would expect Carol to limit herself on the jokes. Or, if she's using it as a defense mechanism, that at least some of the other characters, like Jess, would hold back on the quips and jokes. But seeing everyone engage in these things, especially after Civil War II...

It's similar to what I wrote about Bendis in the Avengers Disassembled: it's not bad to write characters in certain ways, but if you start writing nearly every character like that, they all start sounding the same, no matter what their background and experiences are. And, in this case, my annoyance is based more on how I've been seeing this type of dialogue in so many comics by so many writers. If it were a few characters that talked/thought/narrated like that, even in highly-stressful situations, then yeah, okay, go ahead. But if you make every character have 1) the same way of dealing with these situations/their trauma/their guilt/etc, 2) have the same narrative voice/dialogue, and 3) make similar, if not identical, jokes in terms of tone and style, then the characters will start sounding as if they had the same voice.

I don't know if I'm explaining myself well enough with this. It's just been annoying me for a while. Not every writer does it, and some writers that write quippy dialogue know how to limit themselves to characters in which such dialogue will make sense personality-wise, but... yeah.

[stubbleupdate]

The humour in Captain Marvel seems to be trying too hard to impress me. I can't stand people pandering to me.

[informationgeek]

Quipy and jokey nature in some Marvel books doesn't bother me that much... except for the recent Hulk #1. With its use of quips and some snarky text boxes, it felt tonally out of place to me.

[captainbellman]

This was poorly coordinated. Were I the writer on Spider-Woman, I'd be royally pissed.

[thehood]

They did have Jessica and Carol making up in issue 0 of Captain Marvel. But i get what you mean, when even in the current arc of Spider-Woman Jessica is still upset with Carol and only let's her babysit Gerrymandering because she has no other option and even then, she does so begrudgingly.

[shadowpsykie]

Carol still thinks she didn't do anything wrong... she isn't doubting herself one bit all I see is her saying "Boohoo, I can't sleep because my friends don't like me anymore" okay that is a bit extreme but she is clearly under distress and suffering from PTSD but the fact she won't admit that MAYBE she should could have been wrong, or done things a different way, She still admits to ordering the Code red because she is on the damned wall... right now she is every military character I have ever disliked.... I did my job and that's it!...

[katefan]

I think the problem stems from the fact that maybe the writers/editors don't think she did anything wrong, that she was completely justified in putting Tony into a coma. Like the one youtuber pointed out: either she lost control of her powers, doesn't know how to handle her powers, or was seriously trying to kill Tony Stark. None of that makes her very heroic if she doesn't show a trace of remorse.

And you're right, she does come across as a thoroughly unsympathetic jerk and almost a parody of a gung-ho military type.

[tigerkaya]

Crap getting flashbacks of post a Civil War. I really Carol I do, I was one of the first to suggest that Carol take the mantle of Captain Marvel along with the Nega Bands. So far I've been dispoointed by the writers making her stories more earth bound. She should be wielding the negative bands using her cosmic awareness to fight threats beyond the stars.

Many of her titles I have looked through feel like fluff. I hope it improves.

[starwolf_oakley]

Carol "using her cosmic awareness to fight threats beyond the stars" sounds interesting, but that limits how often she interacts with "regular Earthlings" and whatnot. Yes, that can be interesting, but would it work for Carol as a character?

Also, who has the Nega Bands these days?

[violetclm.livejournal.com]

Maybe Carol needs to go back to her roots and beat up some cars.

[stubbleupdate]

Mighty Captain Marvel chat with Margaret Stohl and Sana Amanat

[jaxjyls]

I'm so calling her Captain Murder from now on

[caivu]

Who did she murder?

[philippos42]

Well, I guess I'm an oddball here. I liked the Alpha Flight relaunch, to my surprise, and I thought this #0 was OK. I haven't gotten the #1 yet.

Carol was overstressed with Ulysses, and she's sort of a PTSD case right now. The book is about a (presently, very) messed-up character, and the book knows it, and despite trying to bury it in work, the character knows it.

I for one don't actually miss Tony anyway. He'd kind of been turned into the white version of Forge. He was almost a mix of the Bat-God and a Super-Dick, and they already have card-carrying royal psychos T'Challa and Namor for that.

Oddly, I like both Forge and Namor, but the text doesn't keep swinging between a) telling me that they know best and I need to make them dictator of America and b) making them Red Skull, Junior.

I'm glad Carol and Jess are trying to be friends again. I think they both need someone.

[tugrul]

I had disliked Tony since the first Civil War and there was Illuminati, but I don't remember him being a dick recently.

[kore]

I liked the previous relaunches and the Alpha Flight book too. I'm kind of handwaving a lot of Civil War II away because everybody in it acted OOC and it wrecked basically all my faves. I'm really noooooot a fan of the TV show, though, I've seen too many Marvel attempts at characters dealing with in-universe fame go splat.