Comic Review: Captain Marvel - In Pursuit of Flight

Preamble - I used to be a major Marvel obsessive. From the nineties through to just after the millenium I bought anything and everything - Wonder Man, Ghost Rider 2099, even Infinity Crusade, voraciously hunting down back issues and trades, loving the universe. Then in around 2002 a mixture of being poor and Grant Morrison & Kurt Busiek being replaced on my favourite books by Chuck Austen & Geoff Johns put me off. Once I was out I dabbled occasionally - Civil War, nextwave - but never really followed much. Modern ongoing comics had no appeal to me and I was pretty sure it was all rubbish. An attempt to at least follow IDW's disastrous Transformers for some sort of connection to an art form I theoretically love twice ended badly, the most recent resulting in me not actually reading any even vaguely new comics for something like six months, leaving me assuming everything was that smug, that intolerably insular, that derivative and that obsessed with meta. However, a friend recommended I give Marvel's NOW! relaunch a go for something different but not contrarian, sending me a reading order. The same person recommended I watch Drive and that's a track record you can hang a few comics recommendations on. The starting point given was just before NOW!, with the seventh series of Captain Marvel. As said, apart from a few storylines I've read nothing since about 2002, so these are the musings of a lapsed fan trying to get back into the universe. Preamble ends...

The seventh volume of Captain Marvel (the first was Mar-Vell's adventures, the second a mini-series starring Monica Rambeau, the third through fifth focused on Mar-Vell's son Genis and the sixth seems to have been about a resurrected Mar-Vell who turned out to be a Skrull doppelganger) focused on Carol Danvers. I was vaguely aware of Danvers assuming the title, mainly from the Lego Minifigure of the character and the first tricklings of the upcoming big screen outing, and I'm trying not to cheat too much by looking up what happened in between, though I do see that Carol returned in what seems to have been a well-received revival of Ms. Marvel.

My memory of Carol was that she spent much of her life being an 'issues' character - whether it was being packed off to an alternate dimension with a guy controlling her mind, having her powers vacuumed up by Rogue or becoming an alcoholic in a second-hand Iron Man storyline there was always some massive crisis giving her problems, as if the writers were only happy with her recovering from some sort of damage. This new series by Kelly DeConnick dispenses with most of that, scaling the crisis level down to the simple sort of life-threatening stuff male superheroes deal with and the result is Carol is vibrant, human and three-dimensional. Support is provided by Tracy Burke, a long-standing former magazine colleague and fellow recovering alcoholic in the early stages of cancer but equipped with an acid tongue.

After an initial issue setting up the change of codename from Ms Marvel to Captain Marvel the volume largely focuses on a plot that sees Carol attempt to match an aerial record by Helen Cobb, a recently deceased aviatrix and mentor, and ending up going back to WW2. There she joins up with a group of female pilots named the Banshee Squadron to fight alien-augmented Japanese forces. It's seriously entertaining, iced with Danvers' wry narration, and allows the new three-dimensional character to be shown off. Her air force pilot career gets some proper space, with a sheer love of flying shining through, while her powers and tactical skills are also well-presented without making the character unbearable. Interlaced with this is a flashback plot covering Cobb's battles against sexism and then a revisiting of Danvers' first acquisition of superpowers.

It all intertwines nicely and moves on at a fair old rip. Dexter Soy's art in the first four issues is beautiful stuff, which never hurts and while Emma Rios is less individualistic the quality remains high. DeConnick's dialogue is sparkling, dry and witty without being overbearingly quirky and characters are well-drawn, all making for an enjoyable mix of retro-tinged time travel superhero adventures and modern sensibilities. Points are made subtly rather than used to beat the reader's head in, giving both the book and its' lead a mix of strength and charm. An excellent start.