And…this is the last of these posts that I’ll be doing for a while, as I wanted to do posts up to the contemporaries of the Black Widow, to illustrate which female Avengers might be good film candidates. That said, given the surprising popularity of the series, maybe if I have time, eventually I will return to the series.
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Please note Ms. Marvel’s name. She is one of the first Marvel characters with a liberated name. In an age of the Invisible Girl or Marvel Girl, Ms. Marvel emerges as a mod character.(Note the two incarnations of her outfit: the oldest on the right, a little damaged, and the newest on the left.)
Her origin is equally progressive. Carol Danvers was a member of the United States Air Force, already a woman with a career. Through an interesting accident, her human DNA was merged with Kree DNA and she gets her super powers. She has a solid super hero career in the 70s, working with the Avengers in several encounters.
Things go south in the 80s. I don’t know if the guys at Marvel just couldn’t handle a strong, together woman, so they essentially had her brainwashed, seduced and impregnated, essentially raped against her will by a character called Marcus. The truly appalling part of this is that all the Avengers characters let her go when she told them this was what she wanted, in spite of its contrariness to past behavior.
Chris Claremont uses Danvers as a plot device. She returns to Earth after Marcus dies of old age and promptly has her powers absorbed by the mutant Rogue. Professor Xavier restores her memories, and Ms. Marvel rebukes the Avengers for their role in her rape.
And then Danvers becomes Binary because of Brood experimentation. Eventually Danvers reverts to her Ms. Marvel powers. She calls herself Warbird for a bit and rejoins the Avengers, but has some issues with alcohol. Hell, I should think so! She goes through a comics phase as an active conservative supporting the Mutant Registration Act. When that all blows over, she returns to the Avengers, and pretty much most of her troubled past is glossed over as Marvel returns her to her strong woman roots.
Ms. Marvel would be an AWESOME addition to the Avengers films. She is an unapologetic strong woman with immense powers and a sense of duty. Not always the most likeable character, she is nevertheless a hero who is consistent in doing the “right thing.” She’d round out the team nicely.
I had the entire initial Ms Marvel 22-issue run and it’s interesting to look back on it in the light of, um, ouch, 35 years of cultural shifts. It’s horrifying, in some regard, to think how progressive it was at the time, because it’s very, very rooted in its time and has not aged well. But it was an important milestone in comics – although of course Wonder Woman, over at DC, had been headlining her own comic book for a long time already.
The handling of the character around #200 was indeed very very scary, and Claremont was rightly annoyed about it, but as you note only used the character to power up his new flame, Rogue (and there’s another female superhero with an …interesting… history).
I can’t see them making any use of Ms Marvel, though. I don’t think she has any visibility outside comics aficionados, and her powers are pretty generic (She flies. She hits stuff. Groundbreaking for a woman in 1975, maybe, less so in 2012).
Please do return to the series if you can. I’d be interested in your take on “Captain Marvel” – i.e. Monica Rambeau, another character created for the Avengers but never (IMHO) well used.
I would like to see a comparison between Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel’s initial costume.
Recovering rape victim would be an interesting character, but may not be for Avengers’ sequel material.
Just the other day I happened across some Marvel news (haven’t been keeping up as much lately since they are boring the pants off me). Apparently Ms. Marvel is being rebooted yet again as Captain Marvel. That must qualify as the most used name in comics now — both DC and Marvel!
I would love to see Monica Rambeau. Sersi was fun for a while also: Inhuman Avenger by day, A-list Manhattan socialite by night! Of course, she became yet another woman who couldn’t control her growing power level. Sigh.
Oops, Eternal, not Inhuman. Hard to keep these pantheons straight sometimes.