Essays, Not Rants! 345: A New Origin

Captain Marvel’s new series, The Life of Captain Marvel, sees Carol taking some time to reassess. In the aftermath of infighting with Tony Stark and some other less than great events, she goes to her family’s summer home in Maine to spend some time with her mom and injured brother. There’s a lot of self-reflection, some reveals of family secrets... and a Kree hunter after, presumably, Carol. Because who else?

The Kree hunter closes in on the Danvers house and prepares to wreak havoc. Carol steels herself for a fight, only for her mother to reveal that the hunter is here for her. Turns out her mother is a Kree warrior, who for years has been living a quiet life on Earth. And she has superpowers.

As the next issue reveals, Carol’s Mom, Mariel (or Mari-Ell, as she was once known) was a Kree special operative, sent to Earth to asses it as a potential threat. But she met Carol’s dad, fell in love with him and Earth, and abandoned her mission. So Carol’s not the only superpowered alien-ish woman in the family; her mom is too. Flying and punching hard is in her blood.

This is a significant retcon of Carol’s old origin story. Originally, she was caught in the blast of the Psyche-Mangnetron, a Kree device that gave her the powers of the original Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell… yeah, Kree names are weird). Now, Mar-Vell was, at the time, an on-and-off-again love interest for Carol. She was up to her own things, of course, but in this skirmish she was the bait Yon-Rogg used to lure Mar-Vell in — essentially, she was the damsel. Long story short, Psyche-Mangnetron goes boom, Mar-Vell saves Carol, she gets Mar-Vell’s powers. All because of an accident that’s essentially caused by two men fighting over her.

Now, Kelly Sue DeConnick’s run on Captain Marvel saw this get changed a bit; now there was a time-traveling Carol Danvers (long story) watching the fight play out, all the time knowing that she could jump in there, stop it all and never have to deal with the powers and responsibility. She chooses to let it play out, to let herself become who she now is. The difference this makes is pretty neat: Carol now has a measure of agency in her powers. It didn’t just happen to her randomly, it’s as a result of (future) her making a choice. She has a hand in her own creation.

But it was still an origin intrinsically tied to a male character. Those powers weren’t inherently

hers, rather a byproduct of wanting to be like Mar-Vell. It’s not the end of the world, by no means, but it’s still a pretty lackluster origin, especially given that Carol’s tenure as Captain Marvel has pretty much eclipsed Mar-Vell’s.

The new explanation for her powers reframe all of it. All this time she had latent Kree warrior abilities, but it took the Psyche-Mangnetron to activate them. As Mari-Ell tells Carol, her powers are "Not borrowed. Not a gift. Not an accident… They’re not anyone’s but yours. They never have been."

It’s a huge change in a comic that’s full of them (For example: Carol’s father’s alcoholism and controlling nature was because he was scared of Kree threats coming for them; during the night he told Carol he wouldn’t pay for her college [that led her to run away and join the Air Force], Mari-Ell was pawning her wedding ring to pay for Carol’s tuition [hey, look, more female agency!]). Carol Danvers’ powers are innately hers, passed on to her by her mother. It mayn’t seem like a really big deal but it puts Carol front and center of her own narrative. This is important since Carol, as a character who’s been around for ages, has a lot (and I mean a lot) of baggage with her. By placing Carol and a maternal legacy at the center of her genesis her story is able to be that much more hers from the get go; Marvel’s major female hero’s backstory is no longer based around a male character. This retcon isn’t the Biggest Retcon in Comics Ever, but it’s still a really cool step forwards and one I’m totally onboard with.