Marvel Super-Heroes - Captain Marvel Attacks!

Marvel Super-Heroes, freshly converted to showcasing new heroes in addition to vintage reprints, continued the saga of "Marvel's Space-Born Super-Hero", the doughty but often confused Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell to his friends). After stumbling around the planet Earth for a teensy bit, he tries (under the hand of new writer Roy Thomas though Gene Colan still pencils with new man Paul Reinman on inks) to get his act together a bit. He takes his ray gun and makes wrist ray-gun out of it and adjusts his hip rockets so he looks like he's flying instead of playing leap frog. But that doesn't mean his troubles with his boss, the vile Colonel Yon-Rogg are over.

Mar-Vell needs to meet up with his comrades to get more breathing potion but Yon-Rogg plots to kill him and claim an accident but in a real accident the plane of Dr. Walter Lawson flies in the way and the ray meant for Mar-Vell gets him. That works out great for our good Captain since he takes Lawson's identity and uses it to investigate "The Cape", the local rocket base. (The utter lack of planning in this escapade is stunning really.) On the Cape he finds the lovely Carol Danvers, head of security who immediately and correctly suspects him of being up to no good, and Sentry #459. It was the supposed demise of the Sentry which triggered the recent Kree interest in Earth . But now Mar-Vell sees the robot is in the hands of the Earthmen. Unfortunately Yon-Rogg sees it too and activates the Sentry and as the story wraps Captain Marvel is about to do battle with what would seem to be his ally.

We would have to wait for the debut of Marvel's Space-Born Super-Hero Captain Marvel #1 to find out what happens. The art team is Gene "The Dean" Colan and newcomer Vince "The Prince" Colletta who will guide CM through his first several issues and writer on his own for the first time is Roy "The Boy" Thomas. In this first issue of a new comic the action is in progress as Cap is fighting Sentry #459, which has a grown a bit since it encountered the Fantastic Four. The two battle back and forth with the Sentry supremely confident that his indestructible nature will win out. But Captain Marvel (called that by a soldier for the first time in this issue) uses his understanding of Kree technology and the improvements he's made to his own equipment to eventually bring the Sentry down. He is thanked profusely the military and especially by Carol Danvers who got mixed up in the fight as pretty much a damsel in distress. As Cap flies off we are informed that his next nemesis will be the Super-Skrull. Yum yum.

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Marvel Super-Heroes - Captain Marvel Arrives!

Getting their mitts on the "Captain Marvel" name was quite the coup by the Marvel Bullpen back in the day. Fawcett's "Big Red Cheese" had been driven from the comics stands by a faltering market and a lawsuit from the boys at DC Comics and since that time the name was part of the lore of comics. Appropriated by Myron Fass for his notorious break-apart android in the previous year, the name was out there for Stan Lee to snag and snag it he did. But what to do with it? Well there was always the Kree, a mysterious gang of aliens which had been giving the Fantastic Four trouble in their magazine and Stan decided to introduce us to a hero from their ranks, a man of worthy character who was poised to become a hero.

"The Coming of Captain Marvel" in MSH #12 is a story told with as much speed as it was concocted. A spaceship descends to Earth and a man named "Mar-Vell" is saying farewell to the woman he loves, a medical officer named Una. His superior officer, Colonel Yon-Rogg is harassing him to be about his mission and we learn in short order that Yon-Rogg has designs on the lovely Una himself and that in all likelihood Captain Marv-Vell is being sent to his doom on an impossible mission. Out he pops onto the landscape of Earth and we learn that cannot breathe Earth's air or be without his helmet for more than an hour. He is stronger on Earth but it's suggested his uniform is somewhat responsible for that. And to complicate matters further he's surprised to find he's been dropped off in the middle of a United States military testing ground and a missile is just about to launch. The radiation from his uniform is enough to cause it to fail and also that same radiation leads troops right to him despite his mighty leaps to cover the territory. Only his "Universal Beam Blaster" can save the day when he uses black light to blind his pursuers and hops into the night and relative safety. He hitchhikes to an unnamed town and checks into a hotel under a variation of his real name "C. Marvel". Almost immediately he is frozen in a beam from his own spacecraft and Yon-Rogg beams down a wrist monitor through which Mar-Vell can be tracked and communicated with at any time and sure enough a message comes through from the Kree Imperial Minister of the Supreme Intelligence wishing him well reminding him he will die if he fails. With that the hour is up and our hero must don his helmet again to breathe as looks out onto the night sky and ponders his fate.

With artwork by Gene Colan and Frank Giacoia this one looks good enough, but does have a feel of having been done under a gun, but then that was almost the norm at Marvel. It's the story which always startles me a little. Stan was famous for giving his heroes weaknesses and that was a key to his storytelling, but with Captain Marvel it's almost like he gets a new weakness or limitation every other page, and as a spy he is a great big bust making mistake after mistake. Still and all he does wear a nifty uniform (I like it a lot even if most folks don't) and that counts for something. He gets another try-out in the next issue and that's up tomorrow.

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A New Beginning!

As this new year of 2020 (some say new decade) tumbles into view expect things at this "Other Dojo" to be at once the same and different than what went on at the other joint. I want to focus on reading more comics this coming year, instead of just collecting them in lovely bound volumes to tuck away for a "rainy day". That rain might never come, and I might not be there to enjoy it when it does, so it's time to get to proper work and tear into my collection which has now officially spilled out into two bedrooms just so I can more access the dad-blamed stuff. 

By the end of 2020 I will most likely be a retired person, one of the (gasp) elderly and someone with more free time if not more disposable income, so sitting in my personal real life dojo quietly reading comic books seems not such a bad way to spend the moons to come. There are hundreds if not thousands of comic books I yearn to read or read yet again.

So my New Year's Resolution (along with the obligatory eating healthier, losing more than a few pounds, and remembering to feed my dog) will be to read more comic books. So I hope to present more reviews of individual comic books. To that end look for (alongside my belated Super Friends rundowns) an issue by issue examination of a most significant comic book called Marvel Super-Heroes which debuted or showcased more than a few of my most favorite things. And also all month long I'll be showcasing the delightful presents I received over the holidays, a real trove.

So let this new blog also be a new beginning in many ways. Happy New Year amigos! 

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