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How Carol Danvers’s evolution, from love interest to the most powerful Avenger, mirrors the ups and downs many female superheroes have experienced.
By Shelly Tan
More than a decade after the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched, we finally get to see its first solo film led by a female character. “Captain Marvel,” starring Brie Larson, officially premieres Friday and will tell the story of how Carol Danvers became the titular hero for the first time on-screen.
Brie Larson stars as Carol Danvers, who takes on the mantle of Captain Marvel. (Marvel Studios)
But Captain Marvel’s legacy extends far beyond the movie world. Carol Danvers, the most recent character to take up the name, has a rich and varied history that often reflects the highs and lows many female superheroes have gone through in their comic book portrayals. From the feminist to the not-so-feminist, here’s how Carol Danvers went from a supporting character to the most powerful hero in the MCU.
Starting off as the hero’s girlfriend
Carol Danvers initially appeared as a love interest, not the titular hero, in 1968’s “Captain Marvel” series. The original superhero was a male alien named Mar-Vell who posed undercover on Earth as a human scientist.
Mar-Vell was a member of the Kree, which had been locked in a multi-thousand-year war with another alien race: the Skrulls. (Both will be prominently featured in the movie.) Carol Danvers, a former Air Force officer turned NASA security chief, remained a secondary character in the series for almost a decade.
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Left: Captain Marvel flies through space in issue 37 of his solo series. Right: Mar-Vell, undercover as Dr. Walter Lawson, meets Danvers for the first time in issue 13 of “Marvel Super-Heroes.” (Courtesy of Marvel Comics)
But as the ’70s feminist movement grew, so too did Danvers’s role as a character. Her history was retconned (a.k.a. retroactively changed) so that after an accidental encounter with a Kree machine, her DNA was somehow altered, turning her into a human-Kree hybrid. Danvers emerged with powers including superhuman strength, durability and flight. Cue the superhero theme song.
Batwoman
From Batman’s love interest to LGBTQ icon
Batwoman, a.k.a. Katherine Kane, was introduced in 1956 as a love interest primarily to combat claims that Batman was gay. She was nixed from the comics universe in 1964 but revived in 2006. And this time, she definitely had no interest in Batman.
The modern Batwoman is a lesbian, one of the highest-profile gay superheroes currently around, and also of Jewish descent. She has since starred in her own self-titled comic series and made her live-action debut in The CW’s Arrowverse, where she is played by Ruby Rose. Her planned TV series will be the first live-action superhero show with an LGBTQ lead.
(Comic cover courtesy of DC Entertainment)
Taking flight as Ms. Marvel, but with some not-so-feminist lows
Carol Danvers debuted in her own series as the superhero Ms. Marvel in 1977. The hero was meant to be explicitly feminist. Her name — Ms. instead of Miss — was a tribute to Gloria Steinem and “Ms.” magazine.
Gerry Conway, Ms. Marvel’s creator and first writer, also said they wanted to reach out to female readers with the superheroine. “There were definite attempts to create this kind of feminist role model,” Conway said in an interview with Polygon.
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Left: Ms. Marvel makes her solo debut in 1977. The first issue also featured a guest appearance from Spider-Man. Right: Ms. Marvel takes out a group of bank robbers. (Marvel Comics)
But despite her origins, Ms. Marvel wasn’t always a great example of female empowerment. When Danvers first gained her powers, she never consciously chose to become Ms. Marvel. Instead, she would black out and a second, split personality would emerge. Danvers would awaken with no memories. In other words, she was a bystander in her own heroic story.
The nadir of Ms. Marvel’s story, however, came in the ’80s. “Avengers No. 200” included a storyline where Danvers was kidnapped by a man named Marcus, taken to an alternate dimension, and then brainwashed and impregnated. Yet the story had the brainwashed Danvers later declare her sympathy for Marcus and decide to stay with him in his dimension. The Avengers, the team Danvers was part of at the time, simply let her go without addressing the sexual assault.
Birds of Prey
The trope of “fridging” female characters
Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn will star in 2020’s “Birds of Prey,” which will feature the first all-female superhero team to headline a movie. But the classic lineup — Black Canary, Huntress and Batgirl/Oracle — is also notable for something else: Like Carol Danvers, all three were assaulted in prior comics.
This is not an issue with Birds of Prey itself, but rather an example of how commonly female characters are “fridged,” a trope where a woman is injured, killed or sexually assaulted to further a male character’s storyline.
The upcoming “Birds of Prey” is looking to move in a better direction. The movie’s director, Cathy Yan, noted the strong themes of female empowerment in the script. The film’s full title also suggests that Harley Quinn will finally end her relationship with the Joker, which many have argued is abusive.
(Comic cover courtesy of DC Entertainment)
Ms. Marvel’s rise in prominence to become a leader
After the troubling 1980 assault, former Ms. Marvel writer Chris Claremont returned to the series. Claremont had harshly rebuked the storyline before.
“How callous! How cruel! How unfeeling!” he said in a quoted interview in “The X-Men Companion II.”
Claremont quickly had Danvers return and condemn the Avengers for letting her remain with her rapist. It wasn’t until the 2000s, however, that she began playing significant roles in major storylines.
In the 2006-2007 “Civil War” between Captain America and Iron Man, she was a principal player on Iron Man’s side, advocating for the Superhuman Registration Act. The storyline led to her becoming the leader of the Mighty Avengers for a time in 2007.
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Left: Ms. Marvel leads the Mighty Avengers. Right: Ms. Marvel fights in issue 25 of her 2006 solo series, which featured the hero battling on the front lines of the Secret Invasion against the Skrulls. (Marvel Comics)
2008 also saw Ms. Marvel play a primary role in “Secret Invasion,” a storyline that focused on the Skrull invasion of Earth. The Skrulls were alien shapeshifters who had secretly replaced many Marvel superheroes prior to their invasion, causing a crisis of trust between heroes. The aliens will probably be the primary antagonists of the movie.
Storm and Jean Grey
The enduring power of the X-Men’s women
The X-Men have had a wide roster of female superheroes, but Storm and Jean Grey stand out as two of the most prominent and influential.
Storm debuted in 1975 as one of comics’ first black superheroes. The descendent of Kenyan royalty and at one point worshipped as a literal goddess, Storm is not only one of the most powerful mutants on Earth but also one of the most enduring characters in the X-Men’s long history.
Jean Grey’s most recent movie depiction will hit theaters in June and focus on her “Dark Phoenix” saga. The story is probably the X-Men’s most singularly defining event, cementing Jean’s legacy as not only one of the most powerful entities to ever exist in the universe, but also as one of the most tragic.
(Comic covers courtesy of Marvel Comics)
Becoming Captain Marvel, the most powerful Avenger
After years as Ms. Marvel and rising in popularity, Carol Danvers took on the mantle of Captain Marvel in the 2012 “Captain Marvel” series, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick.
As Captain Marvel, Danvers ditched the skimpy leotard and suited up in a new, more practical uniform, designed by comics artist Jamie McKelvie, that better reflected her military background.
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Carol Danvers’s iteration of Captain Marvel featured a new costume designed by Jamie McKelvie, who was inspired by Air Force jumpsuits. (Marvel Comics)
DeConnick focused on ironing out Danvers’s messy, retconned history, bringing more depth to her time in the Air Force and her childhood dreams of space exploration.
“When we talk about [Captain Marvel], we say: Everything about her wants to go up. Head up. Heart up. Chest up. Chin up. Everything faces towards the sky,” DeConnick told The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs.
And in a pivotal issue involving time travel, Danvers was given a choice. She could prevent her past self from gaining powers and continue life as a civilian or allow history to unfold as it once did. The story finally gave Danvers something her origin story had been missing: agency.
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Carol Danvers decides to take on the Captain Marvel mantle after the death of Mar-Vell in 2012’s “Captain Marvel,” issue 1. (Marvel Comics)
Both the series and the costume redesign exploded in popularity. By late 2014, just two years after DeConnick’s series debuted, “Captain Marvel” was announced as Marvel’s first, female-led superhero film. Then, in 2018, Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, said that Captain Marvel would be the most powerful hero the MCU has ever seen.
Fifty years after her debut as a love interest, Carol Danvers now sits at the top of the MCU superhero food chain.
Wonder Woman
The star of DC’s movie universe
When Wonder Woman burst onto movie screens in 2017, she breathed new life into the flagging DC Extended Universe. Though there had been female-led superhero films before — “Catwoman” and “Elektra” spring to mind — none of them garnered both the critical and box-office love that “Wonder Woman” did.
But Wonder Woman had her ups and downs, too. She was one of the first members of the Justice League, but she was also its secretary. She was a hero, but she once gave up her powers just to remain near Steve Trevor, her love interest. Wonder Woman’s legacy, like those of many superheroines, is a complicated combination of both empowerment and limitation.
(Comic cover courtesy of DC Entertainment)
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Shelly Tan
Shelly Tan is a graphics reporter and illustrator specializing in pop culture. She designs and develops interactive graphics.
