Tuesday, July 21, 2020
No need to explain Ms Marvel
The Captain Marvel movie was fine, just like all the Marvel movies, but the daughters of a workmate loved it to bits, so I gave them a nice copy of Ms Marvel #1 from 1977 that I had. I have no idea where I even got it from, and had no emotional attachment to it at all (there are a couple of later Ms Marvel comics that Deathbird were, however, the very first Marvel comics I ever remember reading, and I'm holding onto them for life).
I probably could have made a quick and dirty fifty bucks off it - especially when it's surprisingly easy to unload old comics these days - but fuck it. Sometimes comics just go where there are supposed to go.
When I handed it over, I had to explain that it wasn't actually the first Carol Danvers comic, it was just her first solo series. And then I had to resist the urge to explain that the original Captain Marvel was a white dude from Kree who would switch places in space and time with Rick Jones and then later die from cancer, and he was replaced with the excellent Monica Rambeau, who brought eighties super-science to her time in the Avengers (which might have led to some digression over Nextwave), and that Carol Danvers only made the Captain Marvel identity hers in the past 10 years, when Marvel had the suddenly bright idea to have women write a woman's adventures, then I wondered if I should make a digression into the current Ms Marvel, and how she is one of Marvel's very best characters of the past decade, but decided that it would be hard enough explaining how Carol Danvers became Binary for a while, or how there is a part of her that still lives in Rogue's head, or her Warbird the Drunk phase, or that whole business with Avengers #200, (which is some seriously repugnant shit), or that there was another actual Captain Marvel from the 1940s who has his own complicated history and would spark a whole other world of digressions, because this stuff gets complicated
And then I figured, nobody needs to know all that shit. I don't know why I know all that shit. But if the girls who got the comic want to find this shit out for themselves, I'm not going to ruin it with some old man explaining. it's way more fun to follow it on your own.
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