Captain-Marvel

There are a lot of similar-sounding terms thrown around when talking about comics. We’ve got reboots, revivals, relaunches, retcons… they’re all important terms, but if you’re not familiar with what each one means, it can be really confusing. A reboot is the resetting of a universe. A “hard” reboot is something like DC’s 2011 New 52, where all of the canon and continuity up to that point was tossed out the window and they started fresh. A “soft” reboot would be more along the lines of Marvel NOW!, where a lot of books are started over again at #1, but the continuity is kept intact – it’s more of a place for new readers to jump in than a fresh start. Soft reboots even tend to reintroduce some of the characters’ origins, history, and motivations, where a hard reboot pretty much just starts from square one. A relaunch, on the other hand, is when a title that had previously been cancelled gets a new run. A relaunch technically is a revival – of a book, a character, or even a name; in some cases, it’s a combination of two of those, or even all three. Relaunches also tend to involve at least a little bit of retconning, or changing of retroactive continuity. Basically, a retcon is changing something in a character’s past and pretending it’s always been that way – like the retcon of Iron Man’s origins, which brought them from Vietnam to Afghanistan to make it more modern. With these terms in mind, let’s talk about Captain Marvel.

In 1962 Marvel Comics changed the face of the comic industry by creating Spider-Man. Peter Parker was a teenager who wasn’t stuck in the role of sidekick. He was able to be the hero of his own story and he managed to do it while balancing the struggles and drama of teenage life. Over the years from the X-Men to the Young Avengers, Marvel has continued making dynamic teen heroes that struggle to come of age against the backdrop of superhero life. The most recent addition is Kamala Khan, a young Muslim girl trying to find her place among her peers in New Jersey while taking up the mantle of Ms. Marvel. This title has already drawn a massive amount of attention because it’s the first time a Muslim character is headlining their own book at Marvel. Now, just to be clear, Kamala is not the first Muslim hero at Marvel. She’s not even the first Muslim heroine, but creating a title around her and giving her a beloved legacy title is an extremely important step toward diversifying comics and broadening representation.

Mainstream comics have traditionally featured superheroes or, more recently, anti-heroes. Whether it’s Batman, Starfire, Captain Marvel, or Iron Man, the characters that inhabit most of the comics published by the Big Two – and, to a certain degree, smaller publishers as well – feature someone (or a team of someones) who beats up the bad guys to protect the innocent. What drives someone to put on a costume and use his or her powers for good, though? ...

As you may remember Christina Blanch is running a class on Canvas.net about gender in comic books. This week we were assigned to read three different interpretations of Carol Danvers. Last week we read three interpretations of Superman, but one key difference is that Marvel Comics tends to (with few exceptions) stick to the same origins for their characters. Unlike DC, resetting their universe every 15-20 years, Marvel characters tend to just get more things tacked onto their origins, but the basics don’t change. We read the following three Carol Danvers books: (technically we had a lot of issues to read for the final one, but I thought it’d be interesting to limit the comparison to #1 issues) ...