This is Just Wrong: The Return of Captain Marvel

Perhaps I can paraphrase our friends over at live journal:

Fuck you Marvel.

There, is that succinct enough? This image comes from a pulled preview that was saved and put up on Live Journal and Photobucket. This is the image that completes the evisceration of the Marvel Universe that began with Civil War screwing up the Fantastic Four.

Not just bringing back Mar-Vell, no, since Thanos has long since been resurrected I suppose that we should have expected this, but the manner of which its being done, the position that Mar-Vell supposedly now holds, which is commendant of the Negative Zone prison, is so, so, SO COMPLETELY not the man that he is that I cannot even think about it straight. It warps my head around like trying to figure out the beginning of an Escher drawing.

There is nothing here that makes any sense. I could be thinking Clone maybe, but I doubt that that will be the case. The most meaningful death in the Marvel Universe (since they long since messed up Jean's sacrifice in X-men #137) has been hedged around: Mar-Vell appearing as an apparition in Silver Surfer years ago, the alternate earth version from Earth X, his "son" Genis, and others that I've not followed completely, but the actual man himself has been left alone.

Tellingly it was a paucity of imagination that led to the death of Mar-Vell. After a fairly interesting run by Doug Moench and Pat Broderick in his own book, Mar-Vell his cancellation and character oblivion. Marvel honchos from that era, perhaps Shooter, (I don't know as I never asked) went to Starlin and said, "We don't know what to do with him." Jim apparently said, "Well, let me kill him." and there you go.

Mar-Vell, the way that Starlin, Englehart, and Moench wrote him, was one of the noblest characters in comics, the universal protector, someone who had made bad decisions in the past but lived with his regrets of being a soldier for the Kree and did the best that he could. His best was very, very good. Defeating Thanos, the Destroyer, standing up to Issac the mad computer and the Watcher, battling Megaton the Nuclear Man (heh heh), he was a hero in the classic Joesph Campbell mold: one that had come by his nobility the honest way: through real trial and error.

That Mar-Vell would never have been involved with the Pro-Registration forces in the Marvel Universe, much less get himself sucked in the Negative Zone ever, ever, EVER again. If you know anything at all about the character, the last place that he would be would be in the Negative Zone.

Perhaps it should be an even bigger deal that the Fantastic Four, lets say this again, THE FANTASTIC FOUR, the moral and physical cornerstone of the Marvel Universe, has been ripped apart with such incorrect characterization of Sue, Reed, and Ben that we shouldn't be shocked by anything anymore, but, yes, I am.

I am shocked.

This. Just. Sucks.