When YA novelist Margaret Stohl was hired to write The Mighty Captain Marvel in 2016, she was given the unenviable task of repairing a sense of goodwill toward a character recently tarnished by the events of Civil War II.
For those unfamiliar, Civil War II centered on a somewhat out-of-character conflict between Team Captain Marvel and Team Iron Man; Carol’s team had gotten their hands on a fresh new precognitive Inhuman named Ulysses and decided to cosplay Minority Report. Tony felt – correctly – that using unverifiable precognition as the basis for the arrest and incarceration of criminals yet to be was not only irresponsible, it was also immoral.
As a result, Carol put Tony into a coma. To be fair, it wasn’t even Tony’s first coma of the era, but all the same it left readers – and several characters – leery of Carol Danvers.
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Stohl’s book doesn’t come right out and address these traumatic events. In fact, with a new #1, The Mighty Captain Marvel attempts to break fresh readers away from any undue baggage. In the first issue we’re told that Carol and Jessica Drew aren’t speaking, but the ‘why’ of their feud is never provided.
The book isn’t fully successful in its fresh start – there’s the unclear purpose of Alpha Flight, the earth defense satellite that was staffed (for whatever reason) by Puck and Sasquatch, for example – but Stohl makes a real effort to ground Carol and provide an honest emotional center and narrative focus for her. That narrative is rudely hijacked by Secret Empire, which takes four frustrating issues out of Stohl’s brief 15-issue run – effectively halting any progress and weakening the ongoing narrative.
Luckily, Stohl was given a much more secluded venue to tell a Carol story in The Life of Captain Marvel, a 2018 miniseries that does more emotional heavy lifting than the whole of her run on the main title.
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Life certainly feels more like a novelist’s approach to a character. Rooted more directly in Carol’s emotional space than superhero action, the book sees her return to her family’s summer house in Maine to process her lingering grief and trauma surrounding her drunk, abusive father. Human drama fuels the story . . . up until a Kree assassin clone does.
Illustrated by the late Carlos Pacheco, Life dwells cozily in a small-town haze as Carol takes a leave of absence from the Avengers to help her mother take care of her comatose brother (uh-oh, another coma); the discovery of secret love letters from her father to an unknown woman leaves Carol reevaluating that rocky childhood.
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The story makes some compelling but hard-to-believe revelations concerning Carol’s origins, revealing that her hard-worn mother was, in fact, a renegade Kree warrior. Carol’s powers were given to her by the Psyche-Magnitron, they were only awakened.
Regardless of the hard-to-swallow aspects (why would this Kree warrior stand by while her husband abused their children?), The Life of Captain Marvel succeeds where The Mighty Captain Marvel failed: it made Carol much more human, much more loveable. It didn’t forgive her Tony Stark-coma sins, but it made them easier to ignore.
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