Monica Rambeau has rarely been a celebrated character in the Marvel Universe, with a surprisingly small amount of appearances. Sure, she had a long stint in the Avengers, and she was one of the Battleworld-stranded heroes in the original Secret Wars, but she quickly fell out of usage somewhere in the early 1990s, without landing any more than a few one-shot specials of her own.
Debuting in 1982 – the same year Jim Starlin killed off Mar-Vell in The Death of Captain Marvel – cynical readers could read her creation by Roger Stern and John Romita, Jr. as another gambit in the lingering Marvel/DC battle for ownership of the name and title of Captain Marvel. Even worse, more problematic readers of the Reagan Years might have written her off as an act of affirmative action – while the term “woke” wouldn’t be painfully ubiquitous for another thirty years, the unwholesome and racist element has long existed in American culture, let alone comic books. One can only imagine the vitriolic articles in lost fanzines and heated debates in the then-nascent comic shop scene.
Monica has survived, in the canon of Marvel Comics and in the hearts and minds of fans, not simply in the way that all Marvel characters linger to be occasionally refreshed by nostalgic creators. She survived because she silently and unassumingly rules.
A character born from almost meaningless circumstance (as with Carol Danvers five years earlier, a super-science machine explodes), she developed a surprising depth quickly and steadily. She became the leader of the Avengers, and while other Avengers in the 1980s had their exploits published in their own solo titles (or, as with Hawkeye, in a book simply titled Solo Avengers), Monica had nowhere else to turn; her parents and one-time career as a New Orleans boat-cop were established alongside the major Avengers stories of the time.
Captain Marvel: The Saga of Monica Rambeau doesn’t manage to capture her ubiquity in the team. As with several of The Saga of. . . volumes featuring long-existing characters, this book suffers an inconsistent spread of narrative, rarely following any specific stories and instead presenting an origin (with several origin-retelling flashbacks) and a hectic smattering of snapshots throughout the forty-plus years of her existence. It isn’t a Complete Collection or an Epic Collection – this is no complete chronology of the character.
As such – and like the recent Kang book – it is instead a sort of wide sampler of Monica moments, haphazard and a bit unruly. Some of the later creative ambivalence surrounding the character shines through as creators attempt to polish and reestablish her. She is depowered, repowered, and her new powers are completely forgotten. She pops into a different dimension with Spider-Man, and she is seduced – for reasons – by Vlad Dracula in sixteenth-century France. It’s hard to track her character’s trajectory, the rising and abrupt falling action of her popularity.
The Saga of Monica Rambeau isn’t meant – and cannot be – a chronology. It’s meant to give new readers a peek into what must feel like comic book pre-history, and it’s to remind older but forgetful fans of the affection and inspiration the character instills in even her smallest moments. In that way, it’s not just successful but essential. Until a Complete or Epic arrives, The Saga of Monica Rambeau can proudly stand on the shelf next to her recent Photon series to be as definitive a Moncia library as currently possible.
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