‘Captain Marvel Vol. 7: The Last of the Marvels’ looks at Mar-Vell and Carol’s legacies

If Captain Marvel continues to look forward even as it examines the past, then the character is in safe hands.

April 13, 2022

Marvel’s got a Mar-Vell problem.

For a character now 40 years in his grave, the original Captain Marvel—once a cornerstone character in the burgeoning Marvel Cosmic universe—has been reduced from characterhood into a sort of shorthand for heroism. One of the few characters for whom death is a (mostly) permanent state, newer readers don’t have a direct connection to him; hell, his death occurred in the final years of the Bronze Age of comics. That was two full ages ago. Arbitrary as that may be.

Listen to the latest episode of our weekly comics podcast!

Captain Marvel Vol. 7: The Last of the Marvels — New threads, he’s dead.
Marvel Comics

What contemporary readers (readers who began reading in 1983 on) know Mar-Vell for is his many, many legacy characters, popular or not. Those who took up his mantle or symbology and went about, being heroic. It’s a diverse list of characters, whether they were directly spawned from Mar-Vell or simply given the name so that Marvel could maintain the copyright over Fawcett/DC’s Shazam! Captain Marvel.

None of them, of course, is more important than current (and most badass) Captain Marvel, a woman whose powers came directly from Mar-Vell’s hijinks—and one who has her own legacy character in Ms. Marvel, a teenager so far removed from the original hero (and Carol’s Kree origins) that it seems like her television show might very well be incorporating Kree artifacts to tie her more completely to her namesake (of course, don’t hold me to that supposition when it inevitably proves to completely false).

In Kelly Thompson, Takeshi Miyazawa, and Dergio Dávila’s The Last of the Marvels, the Mar-Vell legacy characters are brought together in an attempt to unify parts long disparate. Whether that’s in order to try to account for just so, so many Marvels or if it’s just part of Thompson’s ongoing mission to provide the women of Marvel with delightful, charismatic supporting casts isn’t clear, but either is admirable.

Thompson has been working with Carol for nearly a decade (if you count one of the Battleworld Carols, at least), and her handling of the character has always smacked of an aspirational hero with genuine misgivings of herself in that role. Thompson likes to write Carol intimately, not as, say, Kamala sees her, but as Carol sees herself. This series has seen her grapple with both major influences of her past, as in an early battle and reconciliation with Rogue, and with new villains more deeply tied to her Kree (and therefore, kinda, before lineage retcon) Mar-Vell heritage.

That makes this presentation of Carol—the one whose friendship with Jessica Drew is as deeply ingrained into her makeup as her spacefaring adventures; the one who invites Kamala Khan to poker night; the one more personable than militaristic—an interesting central character to pull together the Mar-Vell legacy characters, whether this unifying moment lasts or not. Through this Carol’s reconciliation of herself as a hero and as a person, readers might be able to suss out the question of the larger legacy and begin to make sense of no less than six Marvels and the long-dead hero who inspired them.

Putting aside the dead white dude (from space), Carol’s own confusing history needs to be explored and made more present, and the team accomplishes this by beginning and exploration of Binary, one of Carol’s old monikers now spun off into her own character. Reportedly created by Chris Claremont in reaction to Carol’s famous, horrible mistreatment in Avengers #200, Carol was powered up and sent out to be a space pirate—it’s this Binary-era, energy-blasting powerset Carol’s best known for now, despite being continually depowered to her flight-and-punching baseline.

If, as in The Last of the Marvels, Thompson and Co continue to poke and prod at the near-forgotten but nonetheless foundational aspects of Carol Danvers, while also maintaining their own upward flight into stronger personal relationships, new conflicts, and compelling twists, then the character is in safe hands. Which, I think we can all agree, is the most important part of Mar-Vell’s legacy.