Sunday Marvel Sunday "Captain Marvel #1 (2019)"

Captain Marvel #1

If there's one thing modern Marvel fans don't like it's...Uh, it's kind of Marvel.  Yeah.  They don't like Marvel.  This happens to fanbases all the time, actually.  They end up pretty much hating what they love.

I think it's actually starting to turn around recently, but the fans kind of decided they were getting enough of what they loved in the movies, I guess.  And the comics just kept driving them away.  Secret Empire happened, of course, but before that they didn't like Civil War II (which I loved) and before that there was Hickman's Secret Wars.  Yeah.  The fans were sick of Hickman.  Then of course in recent months they love him again because of X-Men.

A lot of this hate was derived from the perception that Marvel was attempting to ignore everything fans loved in an attempt to replace them with other things.  One of those things was Captain Marvel.  No, not the original one.  That one died in a graphic novel that those fans probably barely remember today, thanks in part to Marvel's complete inability to evergreen its past. For years this was unnecessary, since Marvel fans loved everything Marvel did, and everything was remembered and considered continuity, even with a thousand LMD gotchas (please don't make me explain LMD).  There were exceptions, round about when the company was facing bankruptcy in the '90s, such as the Clone Saga, and then Morrison's Xorn reveal, and Loeb's Ultimatum, and a few other examples.  But it wasn't until social media went full poison and everything was awful that Marvel officially lost its cool status.  In the comics, anyway.

Anyway, this Captain Marvel is Carol Danvers, a character with a huge amount of history behind her...and about as many identities.  Which is to say, it's hard to pin down her legacy, let alone her relevance.  Eventually, her status as the new Captain Marvel helped her settle down, and Marvel decided that she could have a movie.  And, in all horrible audacity, about equal status as Iron Man, which was why Civil War II was so upsetting, because Iron Man, who had been the bad guy in Civil War I, was now the good guy.  And Captain Marvel was the bad guy. 

And fans responded as if, even though they never really thought Iron Man was the bad guy in Civil War I, that Captain Marvel as the bad guy in Civil War II was bad enough to hate the character forever.  Until the movie, which was about as successful as any other solo MCU movie.

The point is, it's really tough being Carol Danvers, but Marvel is keeping up the commitment.  So this latest reboot (in an era of Constant Marvel Reboots) sees her chumming around as Just Another Significant Avenger, including a super awkward reunion with James Rhodes (who sort of died during Civil War II, or maybe it was Secret Empire), with whom she'd had a relationship (y'know, before he died).

And then she becomes the latest Marvel superhero to End Up In A Strange Land.  Because that's one of those things, most famously depicted in "Planet Hulk," which is what the Hulk arc in Thor: Ragnarok was drawn from.

Now you know way too much.  Or too little.  Either way, that's it for this sort-of review.

Digitally Speaking...23 "Captains America and Marvel, Avengers Forever"

Captain America and the Falcon #1 (Marvel)
From 2004.

Given recent developments, it's always interesting to look back at the history of Falcon's association with Captain America (in case you don't know, aside from Falcon's screen debut in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he is Captain America now, in the pages of All-New Captain America).  This is certainly a curious entry in that history, a series that lasted a little over a dozen issues.  The writer is Christopher Priest, perennially underrated, working with Bart Sears.  The pair seem to have somehow evoked the later Jason Aaron series Scalped, both in general approach and even art (Sears is distinctive enough in style, but here looks a lot like R.M Guera's work).  It's pre-Ed Brubaker, but is generally comparable in approach.  It's an exercise in making Cap socially relevant by entangling him in Guantanamo Bay (although that's because he's trying to figure out what Falcon is up to).  The copyright information in the digital edition listed the release date as 2013, which is less than accurate.

Captain America: The First Avenger - First Vengeance #1 (Marvel)
From 2011.

This prequel to the movie opens with action scenes of Cap at war with his scrawny origins as his mother offers encouragement and he meets Bucky for the first time.  I'm not sure how much overlap there is, because it's been a while since I've seen the movie, which I otherwise have fond memories of, considering it from the start to be one of the better entries in the Avengers cycle to date.  Writer Fred Van Lente tends to bounce around a lot, being, I guess, generally adaptable, which here he takes pretty literally.

Captain Marvel #1 (Marvel)
From 2014.

This is a reboot of a previous Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel series.  For those of you (like me) who know very little about this particular version of Captain Marvel, other than the fact that Danvers used to be a previous Ms. Marvel (as distinguished from the current one, making a spectacular splash and a personal current favorite of mine in the G. Willow Wilson series that launched at the same time as this), you won't receive too much clarification here.  Marvel can be notoriously impenetrable in terms of continuity, when it isn't doing soft reboots (which is often) that nonetheless imply connections to what came before.  Thankfully it's not too hard to follow along.  If you liked Guardians of the Galaxy, you'll be pleasantly surprised that the thrust of the issue is getting her into a general Star-Lord direction.  I had no idea.  All I knew was, the series relaunched, and she's there on the cover readjusting her glove (and I still have no idea why they went in that artistic direction, though it looks distinctive enough, and maybe that was all they cared about).  Apparently she's had a relationship with Jim Rhodes, although at this point relationships have probably happened between all of Marvel's characters (it's a real soap opera landscape in that regard; the new Storm series has explored a relationship with Currently Dead Wolverine that I hadn't known about previously, because last I knew Ororo's only notable relationship had been with Black Panther, because, uh, they're both African).  But the question remains, why does this series even exist if there doesn't seem to be much of a Carol Danvers narrative to exploit, much less in a relaunch that purposefully thrusts her in a new direction?

Avengers Forever #1 (Marvel)
From 2001.

Speaking of Marvel's soft reboots...This may have been the last hurrah of the pre-Bendis/Ultimate Comics era, what might be considered the culmination of Kurt Busiek's run on Avengers itself, a series that had considerable acclaim at the time, a return to form for a company that had suffered a great deal thanks to bankruptcy, the Spider-Man Clone Saga, the Heroes Reborn era, and the Image exodus in general, not to mention a whole X-Men era that failed to leave any meaningful legacy to that franchise.  But all good things must come to an end.  Avengers Forever itself has, so far as I know, no comparably lofty reputation.  Maybe it does.  My knowledge of Marvel lore goes only so far.  It's a story that attempts to take an expansive look at the legacy of the team, pivoting around Rick Jones (kind of hard to explain him these days, of which DC fans can say the same concerning Snapper Carr), even having a look at what probably turns out to be a possible future in which humanity has borrowed the idea of the Avengers to become galactic tyrants.  All of which is to say, Avengers Forever is now a curiosity at best.