Review by Win Wiacek

Introduced in 1968, Marvel’s original Captain Marvel was a white male as were most of their characters then. He was the result of an audacious trademark swoop trading on a character with pedigree owned by, but then not used by DC. Marvel publishing Captain Marvel made sense.

Stan Lee and Gene Colan were responsible for introducing Captain Mar-Vell, piggybacking Lee and Jack Kirby’s introduction of the alien Kree race in Fantastic Four, where their colonising intentions were thwarted. Mar-Vell represented a different tactic. He assumed the identity of a military consultant to infiltrate a military base under the supervision of Security Chief Carol Danvers, intending to learn everything about us. His relationship with commanding officer Yon-Rogg, though, was far from harmonious.

Complications arising from this premise occupy much of this first Essential Captain Marvel, and while Colan’s art is sublime over the first few chapters, and looks very good in black and white, the feature changed hands and direction too often. Highlights are few until the final quarter, but include Tom Sutton’s boldly experimental art on a mind-expanding story.

Just what a skilled writer Archie Goodwin was is apparent from a single issue in which he makes sense of what had come before, some achievement in itself, in the first ‘everything you know is wrong’ story in Marvel’s history. He supplies a grand resolution and provides a solid context for the total revamp of the character to come, and credit to artist Don Heck for the new red and blue costume, admittedly not apparent in black and white.

So, to the good… Captain Marvel as we know him only really appears in the final five issues reprinted here when Roy Thomas and Gil Kane totally retool the character. Harkening back to the 1940s Captain Marvel, Thomas bonds the Kree warrior with professional sidekick Rick Jones, the voice of his generation. Just like Billy Batson, the boy who switched places with a mighty adult hero by shouting “Shazam” when danger loomed, Captain Marvel is now trapped in the Negative Zone until summoned by Jones. As thrilling, and as revolutionary as the idea of a comic written from the viewpoint of teenager was, better still is the phenomenally kinetic artwork of Gil Kane whose mesmeric staging of the perfect human form in motion rewrote the book on superhero illustration with this series (sample page). Kane stuns over the final five issues reprinted here, and when fill-in art is needed, nine pages drawn by John Buscema are supplied.

Ending the main series with a Hulk encounter, this gloriously economical black and white tome still has a few goodies to offer. First is Thomas and Colan’s spoof strip, funny or painful depending on your attitude, but followed by sixteen of Colan’s pencilled pages and sketches that are the answer to every wannabe artist’s dreams.

This is not Marvel’s best character, and much of the material here is poor. However, the good stuff is great. The content is available in colour spread over Marvel Masterworks Captain Marvel Volume 1 and Volume 2, and Jim Starlin takes Captain Marvel in a different direction in Essential Vol. 2.