Get to Know a Hero: Ms. Marvel (original)/Captain Marvel
All information from the official Marvel Wiki. Don’t kill the messenger.
Aliases: Carol Danvers, Ace, Binary, Lady Marvel, Warbird
Born: Boston, MA
First Appearance: Marvel Super Heroes #13 (1967)
Powers/Abilities (current): flight, enhanced strength, durability, blaster hands, pilot, hand to hand combat
Group Affiliations: Avengers, Queen’s Vengeance, Starjammers
Other Careers: Air Force pilot, Chief of Homeland Security, intelligence agent, NASA security chief, and, like every other superhero ever, reporter
The Story:
Carol Danvers enters the Air Force Academy directly out of high school. She is good at her job. So damn good at it, she is recruited out of it to work for the C.I.A. She is really good at that job too and it is during the doing of it she first becomes acquainted with a certain Nick Fury and a Canadian agent named “Logan.” Adventures are had.
As is so often the case with our female heroes, she is captured (in this case by the KGB). Her home agency orders she not be saved so, it comes as no great surprise that, when Logan defies those orders, she comes home and finds a new job, this time as the head of security for NASA. It is in the course of this position she meet Mar-vell, a Kree warrior also known as Captain Marvel (why? Because Americans are lame. I can’t even tell you how many friends I have from other countries who have adopted an Americanized nickname because they’re sick of hearing our lazy tongues butcher their actual names). The two become… let’s go with “close,” shall we?
At which time, coming as a shock to no one, Captain Marvel’s enemy Colonel Yon-Rogg kidnaps Carol and uses her as bait to trap Mar-vell. He flies to the rescue and, in the process, Carol and Mar-vell are exposed to Kree tech that leaves him the same as always and changes her into a Kree-human hybrid with all of Mar-vell’s knowledge and powers. One would think it would be a two way transformation and he would gain some of her attributes. One would be wrong.
I don’t make the news, I just report it. As regards this particular story, anyway.
Because she fails to return Captain Marvel to NASA, despite surviving physical and psychological trauma, Carol is fired. She writes a novel and is hired as the editor of the feminist WOMAN magazine, a subsidiary of the Daily Bugle (because of course it is). Just as things are looking up, of course, Ms. Marvel begins to emerge, effectively splitting Carol’s personality (or giving an alien a chance to take up residence in her head). As she accepts her new lot (as woman must, of course do *sarcasm font*), the personalities merge and a second exposure to Kree tech transfers her suit’s powers (flight, changing into costume at will) to her actual self.
Carol continues to hero, fighting a bunch of different villains. She eventually joins the Avengers and, in the course of her time with the team, becomes the obsession of Marcus, Immortus’ son. Marcus kidnaps her (are we sensing a theme yet?), “seduces” (read: rapes) her, and impregnates her with himself to enable him to escape Limbo. Returned to the Avenger with no memory of preceding events, and with none of her supposed allies questioning what Marcus has done, Carol finds herself pregnant and gives birth to a son who grows up in a matter of 24 hours. Confused and certainly suffering from severe PTSD, Carol follows her “child” back to Limbo where he ages quickly, dies, and leaves her alone.
Figuring out how to return to Earth, Carol declines to return to her former team. She moves to San Francisco but a prophesy suggesting she will be the destruction of Rogue drives Rogue’s foster mother, Mystique, to a frenzy of hatred. Hearing of the prophesy, Rogue attacks Carol and absorbs too much of Carol’s power, taking it from her “permanently.” Suffering Carol’s trauma by proxy, Rogue loses it and throws Carol from the Golden Gate Bridge. She is rescued by Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew), who takes Carol to Professor Xavier. Xavier is able to return Carol’s memories to her, but not any sort of emotional connection to those memories.
*Deep breath*
Carol and Jessica hang at the X-Mansion for a while, then decide the Avengers deserve a good telling off (they do) and Carol proceeds to do so. She runs missions with the X-Men for a time, gets kidnapped again and, even more horribly, experimented on. Those experiments lead to her regaining her powers. She considers joining the X-Men permanently and then, who but Rogue should show up asking for help. Carol punches her ass into orbit at which point her new friends prove to be just as bad as her old friends and admit to her that the good professor has permitted the bridge-thrower-offer to join their team. Carol, completely justified, decides Earth can fuck itself hard and becomes a space pirate.
Space pirating proves boring and, when the Sun is threatened, helps the Avengers to save the planet whose inhabitants have tried their best to destroy her. She reconciles with the Avengers. A conflict with Morgan le Fay leads to a second depletion of her powers she attempts to hide from the team, bringing her back into conflict with Captain America. She also develops an alcohol abuse issue, which is immediately noticed by Tony Stark (for obvious reasons). After several screw-ups that risk the lives of other Avengers, Carol is tried by her peers (not that they did anything to help her when her life was in danger) and quits rather than being demoted to second string.
Leaving New York for Seattle, Carol attempts to rebuild her writing career but has a difficult time admitting her substance dependence and, in a drunken rage, kills a plane full of people. After nearly ending her own life with alcohol, she accepts her illness and starts going to AA.
A lot has happened since then, but I’m not going to tell you, because I cannot do any sort of justice to Kelly Sue DeConnick’s run on the book, Carol’s resurgence as Captain Marvel even more remarkable in light of the above history.
She is the hero we want. She is the hero we need.
Here’s a a peek:
Go forth. Read.
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