Ms. Marvel in the 2000s: Deconstructing Carol
To say that the character of Ms. Marvel was grossly under appreciated character with a problematic publication history is probably one of the biggest understatements of contemporary comics. Something I’ll get into more whenever I get around to indexing the first volume of Ms. Marvel (yeah, yeah), but I wanted to touch on just how cringe her previous outings. Created in the 1970s as a companion book to Captain Marvel, I’m quite sure that the creation of the character had everything to do with the fact that — at the time — Stan Lee was having the bullpen at Marvel churn out female versions of their most popular characters. Savage She-Hulk and Spider-Woman being the other two examples. This was all because Stan saw a fucking Benny Hill sketch with a female Hulk and worried that someone out there would create female versions of their most successful books and thereby prevent Marvel from owning the rights to those characters.
Ms. Marvel was Carol Danvers, a NASA employee, former fighter pilot and most importantly a feminist. However, given the writers tasked on writing her tales, this usually went on the wayside as writers struggled to figure out what to do with her. Then came the infamous Avengers #200, which was a story where Carol is essentially gaslit and raped by one of the Avengers foes and in the end, the Avengers are somehow okay with that. I talk about that issue more here, but if you’re cringing at reading this brief synopsis then you get what I mean. If you aren’t, then maybe spend some time looking in the mirror because there’s something wrong with you, but I digress.
They only writer who actually treated the character with any kind of respect was legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont. Claremont for his part usually treated his female characters well and gave them a pretty progressive amount of agency for the time. He wasn’t perfect, but he was certainly treating them better than most writers of his era. Female characters were usually trophies, wives, incubators for stillborn babies or some combination of those things. Still, despite his efforts he had Carol become Binary and had her fuck off into space where she spent years as a bit character usually only appearing in limited series and cosmic level crossover events and handled by so many writers that a lot of the ground work of her character and various plot threads or story telling potential was left dangling for the better part of the next few decades.
It seemed like we were getting back to form when Kurt Busiek put her back on the Avengers during his 50+ issue run on that title. However, being on a team that included nearly all of the veteran Avengers (Cap, Thor, Iron Man, Pym, the Wasp) she always seemed to get the short end of the stick. She had an alcoholism story arc that didn’t get the care an attention it needed. Then 9/11 happened, and America was in this patriotic fervor that bled into pretty much every piece of media created at the time. Writer Geoff Johns then had Carol fuck off again, this time to join Homeland Security and keep America safe from the terrorists.
Then came Avengers: Disassembled where Brain Michael Bendis began laying out the groundwork for a half decade long epic that saw Civil War, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign, and Siege. It was about this time that writer Brain Reed comes into the picture.
The writers at Marvel at this time had an affinity for bringing back long neglected characters from the 1970s (likely because that was the era they grew up reading comics in) so we saw the return and reinvention of the likes of Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Spider-Woman, and She-Hulk. It was a no brainer that Ms. Marvel would be among these characters. Enter: writer Brian Reed.
In the House of M storyline we caught a glimpse of a world where Carol Danvers (calling herself Captain Marvel) was the premiere human superhero in this reality. It showed us the full potential of what Carol could be if she hadn’t been so horribly neglected over the years. Reed then went on to pen some 50 adventures in the 2nd volume of Ms. Marvel.
This is was, I think, the period where Carol was slowly transformed into a character that female readers could relate and enjoy in what is a mostly male dominated hobby. It was certainly the starting point that led to Kelly Sue DeConnick’s legendary run with the character in the 2012 Captain Marvel series. But that’s not to say that it was a painless transition because there is still some vestigial cringe that clung to Carol’s character like a bad stink you can’t wash off. This is not to knock Brain Reed, in fact, I think his approach to the character was genuinely good, it’s just that it’s still a man telling stories from a female’s perspective and as good a writer as you may be, you’re still trying to convey an experience you haven’t actually lived first hand. Something is always missing no matter how many women you know IRL you can tap for inspiration. That’s not to say that Reed didn’t do his best. He is well regarded as being able to write strong female characters as he did in Spider-Woman: Origin and his later run on Red Sonja for Dynamite Entertainment is well regarded.
But the covers. Fuck me sideways, the covers. As progressive as things were inside the book, the covers tended to focus more on Carol’s physicality more than anything else. Be they the work of pin-up artist Greg Horn, or the traditional Japanese/anime/manga fusion work of Sana Takeda. A lot of these covers are just page after page of cake. While the art is very beautiful it clashes hard against the progressive elements of Carol’s character. I don’t hate them, but I can understand how female readers take issue with these salacious portrails.
I think where this series suffers in the same way that all other attempts to do something with Carol ultimately leads: A male writing trying to write in a female voice that becomes increasingly diminished by events overshadowing the important character development. The series started with a noble goal, to have Carol work her way up into a top tier hero. However, this goal, and attempts to set Carol up with a consistent supporting cast seemed to take a back seat. This was because in the 2000s, there was just one major event after another and Carol always seemed to get swept up in whatever was going. Civil War, the Initiative, Secret Invasion and Dark Reign kept on hijacking the plot threads that were being developed early into the series. There was a romance that went nowhere, Carol gets an agent with a mysterious past that’s never explored. One minute she’s mentoring Araña, then suddenly she has a SHIELD unit of her own, then she was briefly replaced by Karla Sofen, then the series was cancelled. There was never really room for anything to breath and things just kind of went by the way side. It all just seems so chaotic and like there was no real plan going on.
Then there was the constant changing artists throughout the book. Sometimes you’d have two artists filling in on a single issue and their art styles would clash with one another. Some issues just had very ugly artwork in my opinion. There wasn’t anything outstandingly bad, it just wasn’t my cup a’, YMMV.
The series also had the occasional lowbrow comment about Carol’s appearance and some really outlandish fat shaming in places.
Like I said off the top, it was a painful start, and it was certainly nowhere close to perfect. Still, I feel that it moved the needle forward a little bit. Sometimes you got to crawl before you can run and all that. Still, they got 50 issues out of this, which isn’t a bad run given the era. That said, there have been much better Carol Danvers stories since, such as the aforementioned 2012 series which finally (!!!) put Carol in the hands of a female writer. I’m not saying male writers can’t write good women, what I am saying is that sometimes to really sell the character that’s been created (remember, Carol has always been a feminist, that is baked into her creation), it kind of helps if the character is written from someone with personal experience. No matter how good a male writer is, they just can’t draw from such a place.
That said, this series isn’t a bad read, but it is definitely a product of its time and it shows in a lot of places.
