An Elegy for the Last Mar-vell
This is dedicated to the one I loved...like a brother...a cartoon brother..this is gettin' weird...

Today is New Comics Day.

I haven't talked about comics in forever. I don't know how well I'm going to do today.

It's time to mourn.

Captain Marvel, my lifeblood in the realm of funny books, died a rather sudden and ignoble death unbefitting of such a finely written book. Well, formerly finely written. Let's discuss.

I don't understand how a well-drawn, funny, and intelligent book somehow gets passed up when I see on any given New Comics Day some fanboy @$$hole walking out of there with $70 in books. How does that happen? Granted, most of the stuff in is pile is crap, but if he's got so little discernment, isn't there a chance he picks up some good stuff too?

As I'm not so enraptured or just plain geeky as to actually read any comics-themed periodicals or those preview magazines, I was unaware what was happening until I started reading the comic book. Within a page or two, I knew I was about to lose a friend. Let's do some history.

Marvel comics' Captain Marvel came about after Fawcett Comics' cessation of publication of the original Captain Marvel (Billy Batson, now commonly known as Shazam or the dude in the red leotard with the lightning bolt on his chest and the smug look on his face) due to legal disputes with DC comics (née National Periodical Publications) over his similarities to Superman. Marvel comics, of course, thought it only fitting that they have a character named Captain Marvel. True enough I suppose.

The Marvel version was a member of the alien race, the Kree, who was sent to Earth to observe it. When he found out that his superiors planned to invade, he rebelled and helped Earth forces stave off the invastion. He then became yet another super hero of earth and eventually a defender of the cosmos. Sounds somewhat Superman too, huh? Well, Cap. Marvel had blond 'Luke Duke' hair and blue eyes, and his costume was red and blue....oh dammit. Well, it was a darker red and blue with a big gold star, and he used the power of the sun...crap. Well, unlike the Kryptonians, the Kree conquered most of the universe and the early ones had blue skin, with 'pink' skinned Kree being a strange off shoot. Oh, that and he wore these wrist bands and was molecularly molded to this guy named Rick Jones (long, long story...what? You like long stories...so be it)

Cap. Marvel ended up in the Negative Zone...and Nega Bands....No, wait. This is way too dorky. Forget the long story.

Now, I never would have never started reading the book if not for a guy named Jim Starlin. See Jim made famous one of my other favorite cosmic super heros Warlock. In collecting the adventures of Warlock...no, wait that's not right at all.

It is true that it's all Jim's fault, and it's true that I do enjoy an old-fashioned Warlock adventure, but that's not it at all. Truth is, Jim created a fella who I had only seen in the Marvel Universe Books of the Dead, Drax the Destroyer. Now, I thought that Drax was one bad mother just based on this one illustration, but I found that appearances of him were hard to find, but I didn't know why. At the Detroit Comics Expo, in a $1 bin, I found Captain Marvel's #42 and #43, and confirmed that Drax with his purple cowl, giant wrestling belt and bucaneer boots was just as cool as I thought he was. I had to have the origin, issue #32...

There I discovered that you can't have Drax without Thanos, the cosmic villain he was created to destroy. Somewhere in here there's an entry on Drax, I know I talked about Thanos on more than one occasion. So I'll skip that, but once I had that origin issue, Captain Marvel started to become a helluva lot more interesting. I got the rest of Starlin's run which led to the initial death of Thanos, and then some. By then, since I loved Thanos, I then turned to Warlock. Now Warlock, as a character, I liked much better than the Captain, but the Captain certainly had a certain charm.

Unfortunately, with the birth of the graphic novel in the 80's, Mar-Vell, the original Cap. Marvel, died of an incurable cancer. Starlin wrote the story, and it was one of the first time that comics had dealt with death in such a way, and with a real life disease. It wasn't cosmic raves. It wasn't some fusion detonator. It wasn't at the hands of Thanos. Even a super hero could die of cancer. Powerful stuff. In fact, Starlin actually got Marvel comics to do the unheard of: to never bring Mar-vell back to life.

They kept their promise...sort of. He's still dead, but he is one hell of an active ghost.

Now those of you who don't know squat about comics are thinking: "The 80's? This ended in the 80's? Geez, you big dork, you did take a lot of time to mourn."

Well, you know what happens when you kill a character with a name like Captain Marvel? You give it to somebody else.

Those of you who do know something about comics are thinking: "Whoa man, just lemme know where to skip ahead if you're going to prattle on about the chick Captain Marvel." (And no, not Ms. Marvel. I already talked about her on this thing somewhere.)

Let me start by saying that assuming you know nothing of Captain Marvel but based on what I've said, what do you think happened? (And if you don't hazard a good guess and if you think you're going to write for TV or Hollywood movies, lemme tell you now: You are so Wrong.) That's right. He had a son: Genis-vell. That's his name, don't ask me.

I want you to know that the early appearances of Genis are less than appealing. He was supposed to be this wounded wildboy who wanted to do the right thing but couldn't get out from under his father's shadow so he drank and womanized, etc. Oh, and that's not even mentioning how he got here in the first place. Mar-vell's wife took some genetic material from him, conceived and had the kid, and then they artificially aged him to protect him from his father's enemies. Umm, yeah.

Hey, at least the comics try to explain, weak though it may be. I want all you ladies to explain to me how soap opera kid characters go from 2 to 20 in less than two fortnights. I'm waiting...

Anyhow.

Genis...by himself, initially...ummm...sucked. But for some reason, when he became Captain Marvel and ended up back with Rick Jones, the whole thing got cool again. I didn't know that at first. What brought me back was my old friend, Thanos's nemesis, Drax the Destroyer. He showed up in a couple of issues...and I bought them like a year or so after the fact. Soon, I had the whole series. The art was strong. Peter David wrote fun and adventurous stories that brought back some of the craziest of the cosmic characters. Instead of the boring old Negative Zone switcheroo thing, they now had the Microverse (again, long and stupid sounding story). It was everything a comic was supposed to be: some good, reasonably intelligent, creative entertainment. It didn't have the useless foul language. It didn't have the gratuitously over-buxom half-nekkid heroines (well...for the most part it didn't). And it poked fun at the whole comics industry.

The most priceless moment came when an evil wizard who needed to sacrafice a hundred virgin souls opened a comic book store and lured in a hundred comic book fans....You see the joke right?

Then, it happened. The sales sucked, and the threat of cancellation was on the way. Marvel even made a contest out of it. Cap. Marvel would compete with two new title in sales, and whoever won would continue to be published. I didn't follow the life of the other two, but from what I could tell, the Captain won because he kept going. Thing is, the restarted the title from #1, and the storyline experienced massive changes. The humor was largely dropped. Suddenly the book took a turn for the heavy as Genis became a psychotic maniac. Much of what I loved about the book, especially in subplots, was stripped away. I understand it, so I can't really cast blame. Peter David was doing what he had to do to keep it alive, and the company just cared about the sales figures. They figured this turn toward the mainstream would get them there.

I almost gave up on it a couple of times. Like I said, it wasn't the book I snatched up super quick oh so long ago. But I stuck it out.

Eventually, it found a nice middle ground. They got rid of the psychosis. Some of the humor and characters from early on in the series returned. I thought it was coming around nicely. Then again, I should've known better: this stuff hadn't been promoting sales in the first place, hence the retread.

Now it's gone, and I didn't know until it was too late.

Who knows? They give that d@mn Silver Surfer a new book every few years. Guess I don't have to lose all hope.

I would like to thank Peter David for the good reads.

Cheers.