Over the past couple of months we’ve been looking at the concluding issues of writer Steve Englehart’s runs on several different Marvel comics titles — and that “farewell tour” continues today, with our coverage of the end of Englehart’s tenure on Captain Marvel.  This one’s a bit different from our earlier forays into the writer’s final Avengers and Doctor Strange stories, however, as the ostensible main topic of this post, Captain Marvel #46, doesn’t carry a formal credit for Englehart at all.  That said, this issue most definitely concludes the multi-part storyline he and his co-plotter, artist Al Milgrom, had been developing since issue #41, and I see no good reason to doubt the author’s claim (made on his website as well as in his 2011 introduction to Marvel Masterworks — Captain Marvel, Vol. 4) that he and Milgrom had worked out the plot for this final chapter before his abrupt departure from the book (as well as from Marvel Comics overall) — especially since, to the best of my knowledge, neither Milgrom nor Chris Claremont (CM #46’s scripter of record) have ever disputed that assertion. 

In any event, seeing as how we haven’t discussed an issue of Captain Marvel since the aforementioned #41, we’ve got several Steve Englehart-scripted issues to take a look at prior to getting into #46, anyway.  And also seeing as how our post on that earlier book was published a whole ten months ago, it’s probably advisable to review where we’d left things at the end of that issue, before jumping into what immediately followed.  So, then: as you may (or may not) recall, after years of being involuntarily bound together by a strange fate that required them to swap places with each other between our universe and the Negative Zone, this series’ two lead characters — the titular hero, aka Mar-Vell of the Kree, and his less-than-fully willing partner, Rick Jones of Earth — found themselves unexpectedly free to go their own separate ways.  Captain Marvel opted to return to his home planet, Hala, while Rick planned to resume his long-neglected musical career.  But a humiliating experience before a live audience quickly led Rick to change his mind, and so — taking advantage of the duo’s newly-found ability to merge into a single being — Rick hitched a ride with Marv, traveling with him to the Kree Galaxy.

Once they’d arrived on Hala, however, our heroes received an unpleasant surprise, as the Supreme Intelligence — the ruler of the Kree, who’d previously presented himself as a benefactor to both Mar-Vell and Rick — revealed that he’d been manipulating them both for years, all for the purpose of shaping the former into the “perfect opponent” who, when merged with the latter (whose latent mental powers had been instrumental in ending the Kree-Skrull War way back in Avengers #97) would allow the S.I. to leapfrog the Kree’s supposed evolutionary “dead end” through defeating him/them and absorbing his/their consciousness.

Marv and Rick weren’t having any of that, though; and in the climax of #41, they successfully resisted the S.I.’s underling, Ronan the Accuser, before moving on to confront the Big Bad himself (art by Milgrom, P. Craig Russell, and Terry Austin)…

Issue #41’s closing “Prologue” sets up the events we’ll see transpire over the reminder of the Englehart/Milgrom run, beginning with #42.  It also reflects a shift in the way that the two creators worked to co-plot the series.  As Englehart explained in his Masterworks introduction:

…Al and I were definitely co-creating, and to this point, I’d been driving most of the plot points.  On the one hand, it was okay, with both him and me, because I was the seasoned vet and he was just getting started as a creator in his own right.  On the other hand, he wasn’t getting enough “co” as a creator.  So beginning with #42, we shifted the balance of power and let him take the lead for a while.

 

Anyone who remembers his “Editori-Al” pages from his later stint as a Marvel editor knows Al is a natural comedian, and so it was that when he looked at Captain Marvel, he saw the comedic aspects, and he was less concerned with the character’s history than the here and now.  So in #42, Mar-Vell fell into a Western tale, complete with robot mule.  It was part of another epic I was spinning, but the epic was now the thread holding everything together while the everyday events came from Al.

Humor is subjective, of course; I personally find the Milgrom-managed “A” plot of “Shoot-Out at the O.K. Space Station” to be silly, but not especially funny.  Your mileage might well vary.  But, given that we have five comics to deal with in this post, plus the fact that I’m driving (ahem), we’re going to pay only cursory attention here to Captain Marvel’s cover-featured “shootout” with the Stranger (as well as most of the story’s other Western genre parody bits), and focus primarily on the plot elements that will continue into our saga’s later chapters.

Briefly, then: As the story opens, our heroes find that the Supreme Intelligence has teleported them to a remote asteroid.  Unfortunately, the air there is poisonous; thankfully, however, their arrival has been spotted by a grizzled old prospector named Shabby Dayes (rhymes with “Gabby” Hayes), who reaches them just in time with a couple of spare oxygen-providing bubble-helmets.  Believing Mar-Vell to be the space marshal he’s summoned for help (the man has a star on his chest, after all), Gabby offers to guide them to the O.K. Space Station of the story’s title.  Before they go, however, Rick has an idea he wants to try out, involving the single Nega-Band he now wears following the S.I.’s having split the set of two between him and Marv in the previous issue (all interior art for CM #42 by Al Milgrom, Frank Giacoia, and Mike Esposito.)…

The colors Rick has chosen for his new superhero costume echo not only those of Captain Marvel’s, of course, but also those of the outfit he’d worn in his brief stint as Captain America’s partner, several years prior; while that’s almost certainly a coincidence, it’s still kind of interesting.

We readers had glimpsed the Millennia-Bloom in issue #41’s last page “Prologue” (just a couple of panels after getting our first look at Shabby).  So we know it’s significant, somehow, even if Captain Marvel and Rick Jones don’t.

Our heroes have a brief dust-up with some alien gang members, after which Gabby leads the new arrivals to the inevitable Old West-styled saloon, the Red Dog.  There, he proceeds to explain how, after expelling their traditional enemies, the Skrulls, from a nearby planet called Deneb IV, the Kree took over this asteroid as well as others in the same sector; though they largely ignored the place at first, that all changed with the discovery thereon of a valuable mineral called thyamite.  The Kree then promptly began mining operations, which led to the establishment of the OK Space Station.  Just as Shabby is starting to explain about their more recent troubles, however, Rick finds his attention beginning to wander…

Before Rick has a chance to wonder much over this mystery, menace arrives in the form of the Stranger — that giant-sized, cosmic-level-powered, enigmatic entity who you’d think could find something better to do with his time than play “space cowboy”… but apparently can’t.  Having some time earlier found the inhabitants of the asteroid already enacting a bizarre collective fantasy of the American West (a fantasy he attributes to their long-term exposure to the poisons produced by the mining operation), he’s set himself up as the “Big Boss” of the gang of alien lowlifes currently plaguing the station — the situation that’s prompted Shabby’s call for law enforcement help.  Now, the Stranger happily challenges the new “marshal” to a gunfight, saying he’s prepared to destroy the entire installation if he doesn’t get what he wants — and seeing no good alternative, Captain Marvel accepts…

Mar-Vell is reluctant to fire back at the Stranger for fear of damaging the dome that allows the inhabitants to breathe, putting him at a decided disadvantage.  And, eventually, a deflected raygun blast does indeed crack the dome — though, thankfully, Rick is able to use his newfound Nega-Band powers to repair the damage before the populace succumbs to the poisonous atmosphere.  As for the duel, the Stranger ends up accidentally shooting Marv in the back, which ruins the game for him — and so he abruptly departs, never to return.

Earlier in the issue, Shabby had mentioned Deneb IV — evidently the closest inhabited full-sized planet. and thus as logical a place as any for our heroes to head next.  As Captain Marvel #43 (which, incidentally, finds Al Milgrom handling inking as well as pencilling duties) begins, Marv and Rick are between worlds, riding Rusty the robot mule through deep space.  Unbeknownst to them, however, they’re being monitored by the Supreme Intelligence, who’s continuing to manipulate essentially everything that happens to them.  Having been responsible for the gleam of light that alerted Shabby Dayes to their plight last issue, the S.I. now sends a beam of energy directly from Hala to Rusty, making the mechanical beast buck wildly, which in turn prompts Marv and Rick to make an emergency landing on a nearby moon.

As Marv checks Rusty over, Rick wonders why they don’t just fly through space on their own power.  Marv explains that Rick is too inexperienced, which doesn’t sit well with his younger partner; meanwhile, the senior hero is himself more uneasy with Rick’s new powered-up status than he’s ready to admit.  Things are tense between the duo, and Rick decides to go off somewhere by himself to “practice”, while Captain Marvel continues to tinker with their ride.  Flying over the moon’s surface, Rick soon gets a pleasant surprise…

“Meanwhile…”  Yep, that’s Drax the Destroyer, well known to the readers of the acclaimed Captain Marvel run by Jim Starlin that directly preceded the current Englehart/Milgrom era.  Left at loose ends by the apparent demise of his only reason for existing — i.e., the Mad Titan, Thanos — back in CM #33, Drax has recently learned of Thanos’ return to the land of the living (a fact that had also been revealed to us readers per Starlin’s Warlock #9, published some five months prior to this story).  He’s stymied in his compulsion to resume his quest for Thanos’ destruction, however, due to the simple fact that he has no idea where in the universe to look for him.  That, unfortunately, makes him a prime candidate for distraction — which is just what happens when his random flight path brings him close enough to the moon where Captain Marvel and Rick Jones have made their pit stop, and the Destroyer quite literally picks up on Mar-Vell’s vibes.  As you might surmise, this is all due to the machinations of the Supreme Intelligence, who in addition to messing with Rusty might also have influenced the direction of Drax’s passage through space (for the record, I’m basing that speculation on the first panel of issue #41’s “Prologue”… although it’s also possible that the indistinctly-rendered “space traveler” shown there was actually intended to be the Stranger, in which case, never mind).

Marv is still working on Rusty, trying to find a mechanical cause for his earlier malfunction, when the Destroyer comes rocketing down from the sky, taking the hero completely by surprise and smashing his bubble-helmet to bits.  (Luckily, the moon’s atmosphere isn’t poisonous.)  But why should Drax attack Captain Marvel, you might wonder?  Weren’t they allies together against Thanos?  Mar-Vell himself asks that same question, to which the Destroyer replies: “You took my mission from me!  You destroyed Thanos!”

While it’s easy to sympathize with the Destroyer’s existential distress at his recent lack of purpose, this still seems like a really bad excuse for trying to kill a former comrade-in-arms — especially since we’ve been expressly told that Drax knows that Thanos is alive again, and thus has had his reason to live restored.  (You have to wonder if Englehart and Milgrom had already roughly plotted out this particular development before they learned what Starlin was up to in Warlock, and then had to work to make it fit.).

The two combatants ultimately take their fight up into space, where the Destroyer soon gains an advantage, grasping Captain Marvel by the foot and swinging him hard into first one orbiting asteroid, then another…

Two months later, Captain Marvel #44 picked up right where its predecessor left off, with both our heroes still facing their dire predicaments (and with Al Milgrom still on full art chores, as well as co-plotting with Englehart)…

While Captain Marvel returns to the fray with renewed vigor, the still-watching Supreme Intelligence begins to grow a little impatient for his plans to move to the next stage.  So, even as the life-or-death battle continues above the unnamed moon, the S.I. sneakily shoots another bolt of energy to its surface, instantly repairing Rusty…

Hmm… it seems it’s not just Rick’s memories that are flooding Marv’s mind, but his speech patterns, as well…

This makes for a nice little recap of the Destroyer’s origin, for anyone who’d missed it the first time around — or who were unaware of his paternal relationship with Moondragon, who was of course being featured in Steve Englehart’s Avengers stories around this same time.

Finding Rick still lying unconscious in the glade where Fawn left him, Mar-Vell realizes that his young friend’s sudden collapse after taking off his helmet was a direct result of Marv’s drawing on extra strength for the fight with Drax… strength that came directly from Rick’s own life-force.  Marv returns what energy he can — but there’s a limit to how much he can give up, given how badly he himself was mauled earlier by the Destroyer, and in the end, he realizes that the only way to save Rick is for them to get to their original destination, Deneb IV…

The Null-Trons — who come across basically as jet-propelled Easter Island heads with mechanical arms — may be familiar to Captain Marvel, but this is the first time we Marvel Comics readers have ever seen them — or Deneb IV, for that matter — which makes it hard to avoid a general sense of having to play catch-up all through this sequence.  This is a problem that will continue into the next issue, as well.

Mar-Vell manages to break free of the Null-Tron’s grasp, shattering its metal hand as he does so — but that hardly fazes the strange being, who uses his remaining extremity to smack Marv to the ground…

I’m pretty sure that the plant which so irritates the Null-Tron in the last row of panels above is intended to be another instance of the soon-to-blossom Millennia-Bloom — although Englehart’s script never actually says so,

Captain Marvel fights furiously against these metal-men, but ultimately must succumb to their greater numbers, and is in the end dragged away as a prisoner…

“The Bicentennial!”?  Really?  That seems like an odd title for a story set in a remote sector of the Kree Galaxy — but, as regular readers of this blog already know, Steve Englehart had the United States’ 200th birthday on his mind in the spring and summer of 1976, as most prominently exhibited in his (sadly never finished) “Occult History of America” over in Doctor Strange.  That take on the Bicentennial theme turned out to be pretty interesting, so let’s give the writer the benefit of the doubt, at least for now… though it’s probably worth mentioning that by the time we get to the splash page of Captain Marvel #45, the styling of our story’s title has changed just a bit…

… with a hyphen having been inserted between the “Bi” and the “Centennial”, and the red, white, and blue color scheme being replaced by a less patriotic, and more binary, blue and magenta (the latter of which matches the hue of that big round jewel we now see positioned right in front of the Null-Tron’s piehole).

Along with the presence of said jewel, there’s been another change to this scene since the closing panel of #44, and it’s that the skin color of the “Head” of the Underground has changed from, er, “pink Kree” to a bright yellow.  That’s significant, though I’m going to postpone explaining why until we’re a little further into the story…

After running things over in his mind (and thus providing a helpful recap of recent events for any latecomers), Mar-Vell ultimately decides that his — and Rick’s — best chance for survival as discrete beings is to accede to the Head’s request:

“…the fabled six Soul Gems, strewn across the stars!”  If your humble blogger is not mistaken, this is the first indication offered in any Marvel Comics story that the Soul Gem possessed by Adam Warlock (first bestowed upon him by the High Evolutionary way back in Marvel Premiere #1 [Apr., 1972]) isn’t the only such object in existence, let alone that there are precisely six of them.  Later stories would of course clarify that the “Soul” designation properly belongs only to the gem then carried by Warlock (for the record, the orb we encounter in this story would eventually be rebranded as the Mind Gem, and have its color changed to blue); nevertheless, this story represents a major step in the conceptual development of what will eventually be known as the Infinity Gems (and, later, of course, the Infinity Stones) — and thus contributes a significant building block to the Marvel Universe’s larger cosmology.  While it’s entirely possible (and maybe even probable) that Jim Starlin originally came up with the idea of six gems, and then loaned it out to his pals Steve and Al for their use here — Starlin would himself use it in a Warlock story just three months later — Englehart and Milgrom were nevertheless the first to get the concept into print, for which they should probably get more credit than they generally do.

Al Milgrom is clearly having a great time with this surrealistic sequence; yes, it may be derivative of similar stuff his friend Jim Starlin had done earlier on this title, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  Kudos are due as well to the late Ellen Vartanoff (1951-2019), of which this issue comprises one of her four documented coloring credits (a later effort, co-credited to her sister Irene, would appear in Captain Marvel #53, which was written by her brother-in-law Scott Edelman),

I mentioned the Head’s lemon-yellow complexion earlier, with the revelation of the face beneath Rambu’s helmet, it seems pretty clear that both characters — and by extension, the other cyborg Revolutionaries — are members of the race of the Aakon, who first appeared in Captain Marvel #8 and #9, back in 1968.  I have to say “seems”, though, since Englehart’s script only ever refers to the cyborgs’ pre-bionic status as either “mortal” or “human”.

Just in case you missed it, Rambu’s account of how he literally stumbled over the half-buried Soul Gem pays off the second panel from #41’s “Prologue”…

…while the Supreme Intelligence’s explanation of how he boosted the Null-Trons’ power levels does the same thing for the third panel in that sequence.

While I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of Rambu and his fellow cyborgs, who really do seem to have drawn the short end of someone else’s stick, the whole Deneb IV backstory is so convoluted, not to mention incomplete, that it’s hard to feel as invested in the Revolutionaries’ fate as I believe our storytellers would like us to be.  I mean, the first thing we learned about Deneb IV, back in issue #42, was that the Skrulls ruled here before the Kree pushed them out, at some indeterminate time in the past… but the present conflict doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Skrulls.  And if the Null-Trons were outlawed back when the Supreme Intelligence first came to power, which we know was a long time ago, where have they been since then?  Even if we assume that their genocidal invasion of Deneb IV (which, going by the stll-burning fires and fresh humanoid corpses we saw when Mar-Vell first made planetfall in issue #44, has evidently either just concluded, or is still ongoing) was orchestrated by the big, bad S.I., who then “dispatched” the Aakon forces to fight against the invaders?  And if the Aakon were merely hirelings, and the original Deneb IV populace has been more or less exterminated, why haven’t the mercenaries just left, rather than submit to cyborgization?  And so on, and so on.  It’s all a big muddle.

I don’t know about anybody else, but it really irks me that, after all they’ve been through together, both Captain Marvel and Rick Jones conclude almost immediately that the only way either can preserve his own individual identity is to utterly destroy that of his old friend and partner.  I realize that both of our heroes are under severe mental stress, and that their minds have been messed with by their recent experiences of merging, but their virtually instantaneous animosity still doesn’t work for me as a reader.

In the next moment, Mar-Vell and Rick both find themselves assaulted by their very environments — a circumstance that’s mirrored on the Denebian battlefield, as the ground shakes violently enough to topple both the cyborgs and their Null-Tron foes.  “The planet itself must be disintegrating!” exclaims one of the latter.

Alrighty, then!  Now we all understand why this story was called “The Bi-Centennial!”  Er, don’t we?

Honestly, I can get where Englehart was coming from with the “Bi” part.  After all, this story is all about binary conflicts (Marv vs. Rick, the Null-Trons vs. the cyborgs) and their proposed solutions — whether the cynical “both sides are the same” approach favored by the Head/General, or the more optimistic “neither side can truly win” viewpoint promoted by Fawn.  But “Centennial”?  That word has a very specific definition; it means “pertaining to a period of a hundred years”, and that’s all it means.  Given that there are no actual 100-year periods referenced within this story, I think we have to count this as not simply a case of the writer’s reach exceeding his grasp, but one in which the reaching was a bad idea in the first place.

We’ve now come at last to June, 1976’s Captain Marvel #46, the cover of which was produced by Al Milgrom as a complete art job.  It’s a different story inside the book, however, as after contributing inks as well as pencils for the previous three issues, Milgrom is joined here by new finisher Terry Austin.  It’s a good fit, in my opinion; while Austin’s inking style (at least as applied here) isn’t all that dramatically different from Milgrom’s own, his touch adds a welcome extra crispness to Milgrom’s renderings.

As previously noted, there’s no attribution offered to Steve Englehart as co-plotter of this issue.  Nor, for that matter, is any such provided for Milgrom; rather, the sole credit for “author” goes to the just-arrived Chris Claremont.

We’ll pause here long enough to note that one of Claremont’s captions above refers to Rambu as “the last of a vanquished cyborg army”.  Which is interesting, as it implies that all of Rambu’s comrades have perished, or at least been soundly defeated — something we didn’t see happen in Captain Marvel #45, and something which would seem to fly in the face of Fawn’s promise to the cyborg warrior that his helping her save Rick Jones would result in also saving his own cause.  So what did happen in the end between the Null-Trons and the Revolutionaries, back on Deneb IV?  You’ll have to make up your own answer to that question, because our storytellers aren’t going to tell us.

The Millennia Bloom (no more hyphen) is still mostly a mystery to our heroes — or, at least, it should be, since their only encounter with it so far has been the innocuous one back in the early pages of CM #42.  But I don’t suppose they really have time to ask the Supreme Intelligence what the hell he meant by that cryptic remark, given the urgency of their current situation…

Back in 1976, my younger self was certain that this new version of the Supreme Intelligence — “the physical manifestation” which, following his lead, we’ll refer to henceforth as the Supremor — would serve as the primary visual identity of the character going forward.  After all, now that Marvel had made him an outright supervillain, didn’t it make sense to give him a way to more directly mix it up with the company’s superheroes?  But, as most of you out there reading this are already aware, that didn’t happen, and the classic blobby-green-face-on-a-screen visual would remain the S.I.’s dominant (if not quite his only) look for the next half-century (and counting).

Over the next page, Captain Marvel and Rick Jones both continue their battles with their own individual iterations of the Supremor, unaware of the other, parallel conflict — and heedless of the fact that when one of them draws on their Nega-Band for extra power, it weakens the other one… as happens now when Rick powers up to sock his Supremor, thus leaving Marv “suddenly weak as a kitten” before his…

We don’t see Rambu again after that third from last panel above — nor, after Fawn’s dialogue in that same sequence, is he ever mentioned again — so I think we’ll have to assume that the poor guy buys the farm in this scene, even if the fatal moment isn’t directly shown.

I hate to spoil the somber mood of this moment, but the question must be asked: if the late, lamented Fawn was no more than a mental construct of Rick Jones, how was she able to tell the Destroyer where to find Thanos, back in issue #44?  That’s not information that either Rick or Marv possessed, so how could an extension of Rick’s own personality know it?  It’s the kind of thing that makes one wonder if this really was Englehart and Milgrom’s original intent for the character.

As he continues his gloating, the Supremor explains that, once Rick/Marv has become his “ultimate weapon“, their first mission will be to destroy the planet Earth — thus freeing the Kree from ever having to worry again about “the seeming plethora of terrestrial super-beings: the Avengers, the Inhumans, the cursed Fantastic Four…”

That last page above contains seventeen, count ’em, seventeen panels, most of which feature more than a handful of words.  I’d say that Claremont, Milgrom, and Austin do as good a job as anyone could in keeping this page from feeling crowded, but, in the end, there’s only so much that can be done.  Was this storyline originally supposed to go for one more issue?  It sure seems possible, if not necessarily probable.

“They’ll all recover…”  That seems a pretty optimistic prognosis, given that many of Hala’s residents were probably piloting vehicles when the “short-circuiting” occurred, and it’s hard to imagine that they all escaped fatal accidents in the wake of it.  Just sayin’.

An editorial note on this issue’s letters page indicated that Chris Claremont would be continuing as Captain Marvel‘s new regular writer, but that didn’t happen.  Instead, Gerry Conway stepped in for two issues (with a co-scripting assist from Bill Mantlo on #47) — which was just long enough to not only get Captain Marvel back to Earth, but also to stick Rick Jones back in the Negative Zone, where he and Marv would resume their old place-swapping status quo… and even to bring back Kree Sentry-459, the first super-foe fought by our hero at the beginning of his four-color career, way back in 1967.*  Can you say “Everything old is new again”?  As we discussed in a previous post, Marv Wolfman pulled a similar gambit on one of the other Marvel titles abandoned by Steve Englehart around this same time, Doctor Strange; there was something in the air, it seems.  (To his credit, Conway’s successor as CM writer, Scott Edelman, deep-sixed the Negative Zone shtick as early as issue #50, allowing Marv and Rick to once more coexist in the same universe — although I don’t think he or anyone else ever picked back up on the idea of the duo sharing the Nega-Bands and their associated powers, so that aspect of Englehart and Milgrom’s approach remained rolled back.)

Taken as a whole, Steve Englehart’s run on Captain Marvel may not stack up all that well against his more substantial stints on Avengers, Doctor Strange, and Captain America; still, it had its share of memorable moments.  And it’s not as if Englehart and his primary collaborator, Al Milgrom, didn’t have an extremely hard act to follow in the form of the auteur who had immediately preceded them, i.e., their friend Jim Starlin.  For better or worse, Starlin had redefined the character for Marvel’s readers, and his work would continue to overshadow the efforts of everyone who followed him on Captain Marvel for the remainder of the series’ run.

Starlin himself would return to his OG cosmic hero as early as 1977, when the good Captain appeared among a host of other characters in Avengers Annual #7 and Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2 — and again in 1982, when Marvel Comics, having decided to replace Mar-Vell of the Kree with a brand-new character bearing the same trademark codename, entrusted the creator of his best-received adventures to chronicle the tale of his demise.  But that latter tale is, of course, a topic for discussion in another post, on another day… some six years from now.  I really do hope to see you all then.

 

 

 

*In addition to his two issues of Captain Marvel, Gerry Conway also found time during his brief return to Marvel Comics in 1976 to help launch this mid-level title’s somewhat unlikely spinoff, Ms. Marvel — a project which, like the creation of Mar-Vell himself, was probably greenlighted as much for copyright and trademark purposes as for anything else.  Not a very impressive property in its early going, it would ultimately become quite significant in the larger Marvel Universe, with its original star — former Captain Marvel supporting character Carol Danvers — eventually acceding to the Captain Marvel identity, while a new hero, Kamala Khan, became a new Ms. Marvel.