THE CAPTAIN WAS A MARVEL, PART 2

So there she was: Monica Rambeau, an African-American woman, late of the Coast Guard in New Orleans. She had acquired the power to become energy of any wavelength and taken on one of the most venerable names in super-herodom, Captain Marvel. Directly she stepped off the bus in Manhattan, she was recruited into the ranks of the Avengers themselves. She rose quickly to the very leadership of the team. Captain Marvel had arrived. She stood at the top of the super-hero heap. She was one of the shining lights of the Marvel Universe.

And in a flash, she was torn down and discarded.

Marrina, formerly of Alpha Flight, betrothed of the Sub-Mariner (who had recently joined the Avengers), had gone insane and morphed into a colossal sea serpent. When the Avengers set out to corral her and contain her rampage, Captain Marvel struck with the full force of her power and became a mighty bolt of lightning...and disappeared! The Avengers feared the worst for their new leader, but a short time later, Captain Marvel rematerialized at the mansion as a shriveled, nearly dead, powerless husk of a woman. Having accidentally discharged herself over the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, she could barely pull together even this much of her mass. She was no longer in any condition to lead Earth’s mightiest heroes, and in a story centered on the dismantling of the Avengers as they were at that time, she stepped down and returned to New Orleans to recover. I was heartbroken. What had happened?

As I understand it, part of what happened was that Roger Stern, Captain Marvel’s creator and an old acquaintance of mine, was replaced as writer of The Avengers. The new writer was Walter Simonson, another former acquaintance. (In fact, Walter is an alumnus of Rhode Island School of Design, where I spent my first couple of years of college, which is a story for another time. A very, very long and unhappy story...) Part of Walter’s mandate for the book was to replace the Avengers lineup. And part of Marvel’s agenda was that the company wanted Captain Marvel gone. Since Roger was leaving, he couldn’t take his brilliant creation with him (all Marvel characters are Marvel’s property, to be done with as the company wishes), so he was forced to leave her fate in other hands. Hands that didn’t love her as much as Roger (and I) did. So, this most wondrous of super-heroines was doomed to be nearly killed, rendered powerless, and written out of the book that had been her home, never to be a regular, full-time Avenger, let alone their leader, again. To say the least, I was displeased.

At a comic convention a short time later, I approached a Marvel editor--and I only wish I could remember this person’s name--and asked him why Captain Marvel was treated so shabbily. The answer I got was exactly this: “She was too f***ing powerful.”

At that same convention, or perhaps another about that time, I approached my old acquaintance Walter himself about the Captain Marvel question. Do you know what he told me? “She was too f***ing powerful.”

Listen to how that sounds. Captain Marvel was an African-American woman. She was the single most powerful mortal, human character ever to serve in the Avengers. (Remember what I said about Thor last week.) She had risen to the leadership of Marvel’s most powerful hero team. She was one of the most prominent members of the Marvel cast. And... “She was too f***ing powerful.”

Mind you, Thor is not too f***ing powerful. But Captain Marvel was. And I have always been of the opinion that if this Captain Marvel had been male and white like the one before her (extraterrestrial that he was), she would not have been considered so f***ing powerful that she had to be torn down and discarded from Marvel’s most important team after the Fantastic Four.

Since the story in which she was nearly destroyed and written out of the Avengers, Captain Marvel has had to endure a series of indignities to her standing in the Marvel cast. They did a couple of one-issue specials about her. In the first one, she spontaneously manifested a different set of powers related to the dimensional field across which she initially exchanged her mass for energy. She seemed to have a personal static warp field that enabled her to move at supersonic speeds and simulate super-strength and invulnerability. Those were nice powers to have, I guess, but they were nothing compared to the powers that Roger gave her. But she remained only a reserve member of the Avengers.

In a subsequent special, CM manifested powers a bit closer to what she originally had. She could now emit electromagnetic energy of any wavelength. Not become it, just emit it. Well, that was a step in the right direction, of course. But she was still only an Avengers reservist, not a regular, full-time member.

In a miniseries called Starblast, CM was among the characters participating in some cosmic conflict. At the height of that battle, the cosmic entity called The Stranger decided that he needed all of the heroes that he had brought into the battle at their full strength. So he restored Captain Marvel to her original powers. She was back in full form--but not back on the team where she belonged.

So they had put her back the way Roger Stern had her, and what did they do next? They decided that the prior Captain Marvel, who was originally a warrior of the alien Kree Empire, had sired a hitherto-unknown son, and that this character was now going to be the official Captain Marvel with his own book. (Apparently the first Captain Marvel of Marvel Comics was a bit of an interstellar tomcat like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk. He has at least two other children from different affairs. One of them is his son with the Skrull Princess Annelle; we know him as the Hulkling, a gay character, in The Young Avengers.) With a different Captain Marvel headlining a new series, Monica could not keep the name with which Roger created her, so they had her rechristened as “Photon”. This was yet another comedown. Any super-hero with energy powers could be called “Photon”. This name was nowhere near special enough for this character. And yet...Photon she was. And even as Photon, she was still not restored to her standing in the Avengers.

At least Photon still got to take part in some Avengers missions, even if it was only as a reservist. She got some play in the stories of Kurt Busiek, George Perez, and company. In the opening story of the “Heroes Return” Avengers, she was among the characters with enough of a strong sense of having been an Avenger that she could shake off the effects of Morgana Le Fey’s spell on the world and join Captain America in fighting back. She stood with the Avengers against the menace of Pagan and Templar. She was part of the resistance against Kang the Conqueror’s overthrow of Earth. Roger Stern got to write his creation again in the miniseries Avengers Infinity, in which Photon, Thor, Starfox, Moondragon, Tigra, and the Jack of Hearts faced the threat of the Infinites. That was another of Monica’s shining moments, reunited with the writer who brought her into the world and loved her best. The Avengers Infinity team also took the spotlight in The Avengers Vol. 3 #35, the only story except for her origin in which the former (and still rightful) Captain Marvel was drawn by her originating artist, John Romita Jr.

Perhaps Photon’s greatest moment at this point in her career was her participation in Avengers/JLA, the George Perez-drawn miniseries in which the Avengers met and battled DC’s Justice League of America. This was where Photon actually defeated the Green Lantern! In the epic clash between the two teams, she matched the energy output of the Green Lantern’s ring and sucked all the power out of it, leaving him helpless, and used his power to put a righteous zapping on Firestorm and Captain Atom to boot! That was one of the few stories after her ignominious takedown in which Monica really demonstrated what she’s capable of doing. Talk about “justice”!

And even so, not only has Monica remained on the sidelines, they’ve even gone so far as to take away her name--again! When the first Captain Marvel’s son thoughtlessly assumed the name of Photon, Monica was furious with him at first (as well she should have been), but relented and decided to call herself “Pulsar”. Can you believe it--from Captain Marvel to Photon to Pulsar? Why not just call her Generic Energy Power Woman and have done with it? And even this didn’t stick. Next, they decided to make her the leader of something called Nextwave: Agents of HATE, a group of third-string and lower Marvel heroes in which she called herself “The Captain” and nattered on about having once been the leader of the Avengers. And even more recently, in Ms. Marvel, the robotic hero Machine Man had himself a Life Model Decoy made of the former Captain Marvel who whined about having once been the leader of the Avengers, and onto whose body Machine Man put his own head! So there we have it: Monica Rambeau has gone from Captain Marvel, most powerful (mortal, human) Avenger and leader of the team, to a throwaway character on reserve status, to “Photon” to “Pulsar” to the leader of a lot of third-stringers, and finally to being a JOKE!

But what else could Marvel do with her, right? I mean, after all, she was black, she was female, and she was “too f***ing powerful”.

After Roger Stern was removed as writer of The Avengers, the entire history of the great and awesome super-heroine that he created has been about people taking something away from her. Take away her powers (and almost her life), take away her place in the team, take away her name. And oh yes, she doesn’t even use the costume that John Romita Jr. designed for her any more; let’s rob her of that as well!

I told you last week that this was not going to be a pretty story. As I write this, I have given up on Marvel Comics ever doing right by this magnificent character. She is an unloved, devalued creation, seen as being nothing but fodder for jokes. Here we have this heroine who could have battled the entire Justice League of America single-handedly and probably defeated most of them, this leader who once took the Avengers through a battle with the Greek gods themselves and hurled a bolt of lightning that actually hurt Zeus--and this is all they can do with her.

It’s another one of those situations that make me wash my hands and just say, “They’re not my characters. I have no responsibility for them and no one has ever wanted me to have any responsibility for them, so just let them do whatever they see fit with their property.” No one at Marvel seems to care about this character or have any kind of positive regard for her, and it’s a shame and a disgrace and a waste.

It’s been argued that Monica Rambeau was created as “a placeholder,” a means of retaining Marvel’s rights to the Captain Marvel name and keeping that name “in play” until the company decided what it really wanted to do with the property. The trouble is that the character my old acquaintance Roger Stern created had far greater possibilities. Even at the pinnacle to which Roger took her, she was a character on her way up. Roger had given her a history and a family and the potential for a relationship (there was this Denzel Washington-like government agent character who had his eye on her), and could have made her something truly unique in the super-hero genre: a fully developed, fully realized black, female lead character. This, however, was not to be.

But you know what? No matter what they call her and no matter what indignities they heap on her, she’ll always be Captain Marvel to me.

THE CAPTAIN WAS A MARVEL

When you hear or think of the name “Captain Marvel,” odds are you picture a man in a red, gold, and white costume flying around yelling “SHAZAM!” That character, for complex reasons we are not even going to begin to address right now, has become the property of DC Comics, where he was once entangled in a legal dispute over his supposed resemblance to Superman.

However, there was another Captain Marvel, this one belonging to Marvel Comics, which, in another set of circumstances we’re not going to talk about right now, won the right to use the name as the title character of a comic book. (When DC does a comic book about the first Captain Marvel, they have to title it SHAZAM.) That character was killed off in a much-praised 1982 graphic novel by writer-artist Jim Starlin, who is known for his cosmic and metaphysical storylines involving death, frequently as an actual character. Starlin’s particular set of fixations could be, and may one day be, the subject of a Quantum Blog post of their own. What concerns us here is that the first Captain Marvel of Marvel Comics was immediately followed by a second one--and writer Roger Stern (an old acquaintance of mine), whom Marvel commissioned to create this character, decided that SHE would be black!

The second Captain Marvel of Marvel Comics, created by Roger Stern with John Romita Jr., made a high-profile debut in the 1982 Amazing Spider-Man Annual. Right off the bat, Marvel was treating this character as someone that they wanted to be seen, and having her appear for the first time in a Spider-Man story was the perfect way to get fans’ attention onto her. In “Who’s That Lady? Call Her Captain Marvel!” we are introduced to New Orleans Coast Guard Lieutenant Monica Rambeau, a tall, beautiful African-American woman, who has come to Manhattan with an unusual and dangerous problem. She possesses the literal power to become energy--any wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum--but she can’t control it and is desperate to find help before her power builds to a dangerous overload that could cause massive destruction and take countless lives. She is seeking the help of the Fantastic Four (super-heroes in trouble tend to run to the Fantastic Four for help), but she first encounters Spider-Man instead. Spidey chases her to the Avengers Mansion, where she accidentally shuts down Iron Man's armor before he and the Webhead finally help her to discharge herself safely into the sky. Impressed with Captain Marvel’s power, the Wasp, who is leading the Avengers at the time, recruits her on the spot. So it is that in just her first few hours in the Big Apple, Captain Marvel has found her way into the elite of the world’s super-heroes!

How did a Coast Guard Lieutenant come by this power and that name? It started with Monica being consistently passed over for promotion to Captain. During one of her bouts of frustration over the glass ceiling, Monica got a visit from an old family friend, Professor Andre LeClare. The Professor’s work on drawing energy from other dimensions had fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous engineer named Felipe Picaro, who meant to develop it for the use of a South American dictator. LeClare, who affectionately called Monica “Mon Capitaine” (the very thing that her Coast Guard superiors were preventing her being), needed Monica’s help to get onto the oil rig where LeClare was working and shut down the experiment. Our heroine agreed and charmed her way onto the rig and into Picaro’s company.

Naturally, the Professor and the Lieutenant were found out, and in the ensuing struggle, Monica tried to disable the dimension-tapping device with her bare hands--a brave act that physically put her in the interface of the machine and caused it to overload. The result was that Monica was endowed with mass/energy exchange powers that she at once used to defeat Picaro and his henchmen; this after her first manifestation of power transmitted her back to New Orleans, where she cobbled together a costume out of Mardi Gras items she found in a warehouse. When the Navy came to the oil rig to do a mop-up operation, one of Picaro’s men, who had overheard LeClare’s nickname for Monica, was babbling in Spanish, “Capitan est maravila,” or “The Captain is a marvel!” This got into the press, and the name for the mysterious new super-heroine stuck: She was officially the all-new Captain Marvel!

I accepted and loved Captain Marvel immediately. I thought she was magnificent. I loved it that she, an African-American woman, was given one of the most venerable names in super-hero comics. I loved it that practically no sooner had she gotten off the bus at Port Authority, she was immediately put front and center in the Marvel Comics cast as a member of the Avengers, a position second in prestige only to the Fantastic Four themselves. Furthermore, Captain Marvel, who could actually become electromagnetic energy of any type, was the single most powerful mortal, human member the Avengers ever had. (I felt the need to use the qualifiers “mortal” and “human” because one of CM’s Avengers colleagues--and a founder of the team--is the mighty Thor, a hero surpassed in power only by the Silver Surfer.) I was proud of Captain Marvel. Except for the founding quintet of Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Henry Pym in his various guises including Ant-Man, and the Wasp, Captain Marvel at once became my favorite Avenger. And the storytelling of Roger Stern assured that she would earn the distinction.

Captain Marvel proved capable of handling herself in whatever awesome situation the life of a super-hero could throw at her. Under the tutelage of the Black Knight, she learned what she could do with her energy powers. She stood up to some of the most fearsome threats in the Marvel Universe. She faced the Beyonder, the Skrulls, and Magneto. One of my favorite things that happened with her was when the Masters of Evil planned their devastating attack on the Avengers and their invasion of the mansion. Baron Zemo II, in laying his plans against Earth’s mightiest, realized that one Avenger by herself was a greater threat to him than all the others put together. He actually pondered the danger that Monica Rambeau posed him: “I know we Masters can handle the other Avengers--but what are we going to do about Captain Marvel?” This was a first in Avengers history. Villains had always respected Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and the other Avengers--but Captain Marvel was the first Avenger who actually scared the bad guys! The Masters of Evil thought they could take CM off the board by trapping her in the Darkforce Dimension, but when she escaped by using the Darkforce-channeling hero the Shroud as a conduit back to Earth, she was not happy, and Moonstone, the villainess who came up with the idea, flew off thinking, Please don’t let her get me! She was so afraid of Captain Marvel’s wrath--and rightly so, because CM could have destroyed her--that she flew into a cliff and broke her neck!

Her meritorious conduct as a new Avenger earned Captain Marvel the most exalted spot of all: the chance to lead the most powerful group of organized super-heroes in Marvel Comics, a position that Captain America himself encouraged her to take! The black lady who had been passed over for promotion to Captain in the Coast Guard was now the leader of the Avengers! This was just brilliant. Captain Marvel had climbed--or soared--to the top of the super-hero pyramid and handled it as if she were born to do it. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if Roger had it in mind for her all along.) I was sure there were no limits to what could be done with Captain Marvel.

As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The fictional Coast Guard of Marvel Earth was not the only place with a glass ceiling. Little did I know it, but soon Captain Marvel would strike a barrier even more impenetrable than the Null-Field of Annihilus (Fantastic Four #256 and The Avengers #233). Next time in The Quantum Blog, we’re going to look back at one of the most shameful and disgraceful episodes in the history of Marvel Comics: the near-destruction, ruin, and marginalizing of Captain Marvel. It’s not a pretty story.