Captain Marvel: Dark Tempest is a confusing book.
On the surface, it’s a standard Captain Marvel tale: Carol Danvers is beset by a new villain with bizarre cosmic power, and then she deals with that villain. It incorporates other Carol standards: it transports Carol to a new and novel location, it provides Carol with a group of kids to protect, and it even brings back an old villain with a slightly new take (double points here for making it the legacy villain, Nitro).
Marvel Comics
The book does all of these standard Danvers so deftly that it almost epitomizes the sorts of Captain Marvel you’d get under series heavyweights Kelly Thompson or Kelly Sue DcConnick. It streamlines those things and writes them out small, making Dark Tempest a sort of densely packed Captain Marvel treat, a super saturated Mega Warheads-style candy to pop in your mouth and get a thrill from.
What’s more, it manages to succinctly insert insights into Carol’s character that sometimes get overlooked: she is nearly twenty years sober (in real-world time), and so some normie pals offer her up a nice shot glass of water so that she can cheers with them in a bit of celebration, for instance. These normies are salt-soaked fishermen, normal shmoes who have no business being friends with the most powerful woman in the Avengers, and that, too, reads as perfectly Carol: a hero who endeavors to remain humble. She thrills at small folk, at their small problems (she saves a crewless ship that has become unmoored in a storm), to anchor herself in the face of cosmic grandiosity. It makes heroes of the common man.
She follows those small problems by consulting Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and then punching a black hole. The book puts her on display so perfectly that we see such incredible extremes in the same issue, a few pages apart, just before she goes and hangs out with her BFF, Jessica Drew (another Carol checkbox ticked: quippy BFF time).
All of this is to say that Dark Tempest feels almost quintessentially Captain Marvel, perhaps even masterfully so.
Marvel Comics
What makes the book confusing is its somewhat garbled attempt to infuse the book with an underlying thematic message. Or, rather, messages, a sort of assault of vague societal concerns that don’t land, never resolve, and fail to resonate with one another.
The first issue of Dark Tempest ends in the sort of interior-monologue generational debate that has been raging since the term “Boomer” was weaponized by disenfranchised youth. A handful of kids—the very kids that Carol must protect for the remainder of the series—are presented as the sort of nihilistic thugs imagined by Baby Boomers who deeply misunderstand the young. They hate “breeders”, they are angry that Boomers destroyed the planet (and doomed them to a meaningless future), and they talk back.
How do you do, fellow kids?
Marvel Comics
It profoundly misunderstands very legitimate concerns of the Millennial and Gen Z generations, who are suffering extreme ecological, economic, and political damages laid out by a subsect of opportunistic members of older generations.
That’s not all: the book throws in a bevy of other concerns, philosophies, and metaphors, all of them as half-considered as generational debate: the villains are, for reasons never quite established or resolved, motivated by an anti-technology rhetoric (one that, occasionally, the Nihilistic Teens share). There are concerns about toxic waste, adherence to the idea of “alphas”, a general worry about misinformation, and a brief stab at the problems of consent. Robotic free will is suddenly considered, late in the series, for just a moment; everywhere is an unanchored anxiety over AI, post-humanity, and the legitimacy of trauma related to generational wealth disparity.
Dark Tempest is packed with disjointed anxieties that cannot be resolved – in the books five issues or the world at large. It’s a word salad of worry and misdirected vitriol, underlying what feels like a generally adept superhero story. For those with a keen ear for subtext, the book is a cacophony of sour notes.
It’s a frustrating experience. It’s hard to reconcile the great heroics of Captain Marvel with the patent misunderstanding of very real concerns.
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