Editing Marvel Comics (section)

===Captain Marvel===
No, '''not''' the guy from [[DC Comics]]. This complicated mess of characters all stems from the Marvel/DC rivalry. Basically, during the 60s, having acquired Captain Marvel from Fawcett Comics, DC actually lost the trademark rights to his name, having cancelled Captain Marvel comics themselves in the 50s. Wanting to get one over on their old nemesis, and feeling that "Captain Marvel" was a name tailor made for a superhero from ''their'' company, Marvel launched the first of several characters meant to challenge the name. Perhaps because of the constant legal wrangling for rights, these characters have a tendency to change their names alot.

Frankly, one could kind of call them cursed; none of them have really managed to stick that well into public consciousness. This entry is mostly here because there's one about the Captain Marvel of the DC Comics universe.

The story begins with '''Captain Mar-Vell'''; a military leader from the alien Kree race, a warlike race of aliens in the Marvel universe who look like Caucasian humans (save for the ruling minority, who're blue-skinned), but have superhuman strength, toughness, speed, agility and reflexes due to coming from a high-gravity planet, ala really old drafts of [[Superman]]. He debuted in "Marvel Super-Heroes" #12 (December, 1967), with a backstory that he was sent to Earth as part of a small unit charged with spying on Earth for tactical reasons. However, on the mission, his jealous commander, Colonel Yon-Rogg, goes crazy and tries to kill Mar-Vell so he can steal Mar-Vell's wife, Una. Fighting for his life, Mar-Vell is mistaken for a new human superhero battling an alien invasion; since Una got killed in the fight, and Mar-Vell is naturally kind of pissed off with the Kree military, he stays on earth and eventually defects to become a full-on protector of Earth, despite some weird complications, like spending time stuck in a dimensional limbo and linked to Rick Jones (the idiot teenager who got Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk), allowing one to return to Earth by sending the other into limbo, which was later revealed was done as a take on the Fawcett Marvel's whole "little kid who turns into an adult superhero" deal. Whilst big in the 70s, sadly, Mar-Vell was the first of the Marvels to suffer the curse of lackluster staying power; his comic was cancelled after 62 issues, running from May, 1968 to May, 1979. Three years later, in Marvel Graphic Novel #1, April 1982, the story "The Death of Captain Mar-Vell" was run, and Mar-Vell was permanently killed off with the reveal he had developed a fatal cancer after being exposed to nerve gas in one of his early adventures. Whilst originally he was just a "badass normal with some superscience gizmos" in terms of power set (barring the whole "being a heavyworlder makes his abilities greater than any human athlete" thing), he got ''repeatedly'' powered up over the course of his run, gaining legitimate superhuman strength (from 1 ton to 15 tons) and durability, the ability to absorb energy, "faux-telekinesis" caused by his ability to manipulate energy, flight without Kree anti-gravity tech, traveling in space, regeneration, photon energy blasts, and "Cosmic Awareness", aka "omniscience", which was defined as literally "the ability to know exactly what he needed to know at any moment".

Mar-Vell also had a female counterpart/sidekick called Ms. Marvel - read the Carol Danvers section.

Uneager to drop the Captain Marvel rites, Marvel scrambled to bring out a replacement, and did so with an entirely unrelated character who debuted in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 (1982). This was Monica Rambeau; an African-American lieutenant of the New Orleans Harbor Patrol who hit the superpower jackpot when an accident with an energy weapon exposed her to extradimensional energy that, instead of vaporizing her, gave her a plethora of energy-related powers. She can convert herself into any form of energy on the electromagnetic spectrum, absorb and manipulate energy, and travel at the speed of light while flying in her energy form. She called herself "Captain Marvel", the first to actually spell it that way, in honor of the newly deceased Captain Mar-Vell. When Genis-Vell (below) showed up, she agreed that it made more sense for him to be called "Captain Marvel", and took up the new name "Photon". Then Genis-Vell got greedy and declared ''he'' wanted to be called Photon, so she renamed herself Pulsar. She was kidnapped by beings from another dimension and spent some time trapped there, only to eventually escape to her own world, where nobody believed her story. She gave up the superhero names entirely during that period, but has recently taken up another new name; Spectrum.

In 1993, in the "Silver Surfer Annual" #6, Mar-Vell's clone/son Genis-Vell debuted. Initially, he called himself Legacy, but then he took up his dad's name as a superhero title, becoming the second Captain Marvel to be called Captain Marvel. Spent some time as both a hero and a villain, mostly due to being driven absolutely bug-fuck looney by a brief time with the literal power of omniscience. Genis appeared in "Captain Marvel" vol. 3 (1995-1996), vol. 4 (1999-2002), and vol. 5 (2002-2004). For a total of 66 issues, most of them written by Peter David. He then appeared as a member of the Thunderbolts. He was killed in "Thunderbolts" #100 (May, 2006).

In December, 2003, in Captain Marvel vol. 6 #16, Mar-Vell's female clone/daughter Phylla-Vell debuted as the third Captain Marvel and the fifth heir to Mar-Vell (told you this shit got confusing). She quickly changed her name to Quasar after acquiring that superhero's ultra-powerful Quantum Bands early on in the big Annihilation event of 2006. She then lost the Quantum Bands and was forced to become the Avatar of Oblivion to save her girlfriend, Moondragon of the Guardians of the Galaxy; she renamed herself Martyr then. She was eventually killed by Thanos.

There is also Khn'nr, a Skrull (shapechanging aliens at war with the Krees) who showed up during the first Civil War event having been both imbued with Mar-Vell's power ''and'' brainwashed into thinking he actually '''was''' Mar-Vell, which caused him to turn against the Skrulls and become an actual hero, but he died, and Noh-Varr, a Kree super soldier from another dimension, who first went by "Marvel Boy", then called himself Captain Marvel after being chosen by Khn'nr as his successor, then called himself Protector, and has finally dropped the code-names entirely as part of the Young Avengers.

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====Carol Danvers====
This is the current "Captain Marvel" of the Marvel Universe, and her story's long enough and twisty enough that it really warrants its own section. Hold onto your hat, because this shit gets '''complicated'''. 

In March 1968, in Marvel Super-Heroes #13, the character '''Carol Danvers''' was introduced as a supporting character to Mar-Vell; a female ex-Air Force officer who made it to the role of Chief of Security at NASA. She was originally basically Mar-Vell's Lois Lane, except that Mar-Vell himself felt he couldn't in all decency start up a relationship with her. During one of Mar-Vell's adventures, Carol was exposed to a Kree device called a "Psyche-Magnetron", which infused her with Kree DNA from Mar-Vell. As a result, she gained super-strength and super-toughness like Mar-Vell - initially, she couldn't fly but built gadgets into her costume that gave it anti-gravity levitation powers... then she got zapped by the Psyche-Magnetron ''again'', which destroyed the tech but gave her the ability to fly under her own powers. Initially, her powers were tied up with a split personality, which believed itself to be a Kree warrior-woman, and she called herself ''Ms. Marvel''. Eventually, the two personalities were united and Carol became Ms. Marvel in her own right, running around in a variation of Mar-Vell's costume that was the same color scheme, but reduced it to a belly-baring short shirt, a cape, panties, and thigh-high boots. 

Her first volume run as "Ms. Marvel" lasted for 23 issues (January, 1977-April, 1979), after which she mostly was reduced to team-up appearances and became a member of the Avengers. This was the start of her decline, and eventually the writers got sick of her there and wanted her out. This resulted in the infamous Avengers #200, where the writers attempted to write her out by having her hook up with a badass love interest (admittedly introduced out of nowhere) to retire with... except they did it by having Carol get brainwashed by this random guy the Avengers met on one of their dimension traveling adventures, who used this brainwashing to conceal that he'd implanted a rapidly-aging clone of himself into her womb. So Carol just randomly becomes pregnant one day, gives birth to a son, and then this son grows up into an adult over the course of the day, declares he's her soulmate, and whisks her off to his dimension, with Carol meekly going along with everything. And all the while, the Avengers aren't even the slightest bit concerned about any of this freaky-ass shit! Seriously, being an Avenger means you see some fucked-up shit, but this was just beyond the pale. Fans ''rioted'', and eventually Chris Claremont undid this whole thing by revealing that the creep's plan went wrong and he aged himself into dust, freeing Carol from his brainwashing and allowing her to get home and chew the Avengers out for not even considering that something weird was going on in Avengers Annual #10. Unfortunately, that also involved Carol being grabbed by newly introduced supervillain Rogue, who sucked out so much of Carol's life-force that she permanently stole Carol's powers (though, on the bright side, she did also quell a lot of the emotional pain Carol had gone through, and wound up with an angry copy of Carol's psyche stuck in her mind) and left her a normal human. 

As a result of this, Carol went and hooked up with the X-Men, mostly in the hopes that Charles Xavier could use his abilities as a telepath and trained psychiatrist to help her get over the traumas of super-science rape-baby and near death + permanent depowering. But of course nothing could be simple, and she somehow wound up traveling into space with the X-Men, during which time they were captured by the Brood. The Brood began experimenting on her, seeing if they could reactivate or even improve upon her Kree genes, and they simultaneously activated the "energy absorbing" genes she'd inherited from Mar-Vell ''and'' linked her up to a binary star. The result? Carol got a ''supercharged'' upgrade; her skin turned bright crimson, her hair turned into fire, and she gained not only way more strength and durability than she'd had as Ms. Marvel, but also interstellar-travel tier flight, energy blasts from her hands and eyes, regeneration, energy absorption that could be used to boost her powers further, and the ability to generate heat, light, radiation, and energies on the electromagnetic spectrum. She promptly thanked the Brood for this by blowing up their homeworld. She also gained a new costume, which was ironically much more sensible; a full-body leotard-like uniform patterned in alternating white and crimson. She called this incarnation of herself ''Binary''.

Binary's place amongst the X-Men would be short-lived. Returning to Earth, she found that Rogue, driven nearly mad by her copy of Carol's personality, had come to Xavier for help and been accepted onto the team. When Carol's rage refused to make Xavier rescind his offer of help to Rogue, Carol stormed off; she joined the Starjammers, a space pirate crew on good terms with the X-Men, and sailed off into the cosmos, becoming one of Marvel's cosmic heroes for a while.

In 2003, she returned to Earth, having lost her link to the binary star that made her Binary, but desperate to hide her dwindled strength. Having gained new abilities through her experience, such as shaping her energy projections into solid constructs and manipulating matter with her thoughts, she rejoined the Avengers, under the name ''Warbird'', sporting yet another new costume; a black limbless swimsuit with a yellow lightning bolt on the front, black thigh-high boots and elbow-length gloves, and a crimson sash around her waist. At least, she joined the Avengers for a time. Her despair at her reduced powers turned her into an alcoholic, and she was eventually forced to straighten out.

As an Avenger, Carol fought through most of the subsequent Big Marvel Events, and eventually she reclaimed the name ''Ms. Marvel'' for herself by taking it from ex-Thunderbolt and ex-Dark Avenger Moonstone. That lasted until the so-called Phoenix War in 2012, where she had an encounter with a temporarily revived Captain Mar-Vell that made her decide to truly embrace her role as his successor by calling herself ''Captain Marvel'' and taking up her latest costume; a modest one-piece bodysuit in Mar-Vell's colors.

Carol has had a... messy public relations history, especially since her big return in the early 2000s, and a sudden major promotion as "Marvel's foremost superheroine" from the 2010s. It's a '''very''' [[skub]]by topic, but the long and short of it is that Marvel seems to have decided to push her as their answer to [[DC Comics]] having Wonder Woman, and the writing... often hasn't been too good. One particular example is the retcon about Carol's powers; rather than the Psyche-Magnetron fusing her genes with Mar-Vell's, it actually activated dormant Kree genes she'd had all along, because her mom was actually a Kree soldier who had deserted on a mission to Earth long before the one that Mar-Vell undertook and settled down with a human husband. Now, in and of itself, this wasn't a ''bad'' retcon (arguments about possible disrespect to Mar-Vell aside), and of course the [[SJW]]s were eager to sing the praise about how this made Carol a more "female-centered" superheroine, but there was one glaring issue. The writers who made this retcon forgot to retcon out the fact that Carol grew up in a borderline abusive home where her misogynistic creep of a dad kept her mom meek and cowed and verbally harassed her all her life in favor of his two sons (who are Carol's purely human stepbrothers post-retcon)... which makes ''absolutely no fucking goddamned sense'' if her mom's a bullet-proof alien soldier from a sexually egalitarian society who's strong enough to rip off a human's head and then take a shit down his neck. 

Incidentally, that Ms. Marvel identity has had its share of owners too! 

The second Ms. Marvel was '''Sharon Ventura''', who first appeared in September 1985 in The Thing #27. She was a motorcycle stunt-woman who got super-strength and super-toughness from the Power Broker, an underground "fixer" of would-be superhumans with a roughly 50/50 hit rate of either giving them super powers or turning them into hideously deformed monsters. She used these powers to become a superhuman wrestler in the Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation, until she got a dose of cosmic radiation that turned her into the She-Thing. No, ''not'' like Jennifer Walters. She wasn't that lucky. Think Ben Grimm ''with boobs''. She joined the Fantastic Four in hopes of finding a cure, only to betray the team to Dr. Doom, acting as his spy on the team in exchange for being cured. When she turned on Doom, he reversed the cure, which made her mutate into something even ''uglier'' and drove her more than a little crazy in the process. She spent some time as a member of the Frightful Four, a revolving-door villain team of Fantastic Four haters, but eventually split from them, went to jail, and went straight, going back to the Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation, having gained the power to shapeshift between her original (but still superhumanly strong/tough) form and the form of the She-Thing.

The third Ms. Marvel was '''Karla Sofen''', aka long-time villain Moonstone, who agreed to pretend to be Ms. Marvel as part of Norman Osborn's Dark Avengers.
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====Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel)====
The fourth and final Ms. Marvel so far is '''Kamala Khan''', a Muslim American girl and a Neo-Inhuman with the ability to shapeshift her body in a way that combines Reed's "rubber man" and "sizeshifter" fashions. Inspired to become a superheroine by her admiration for Carol Danvers, she was elated when Carol gave her permission to use Carol's original moniker.

It should be added that Kamala is, while the subject of some degree of [[skub]], also one of the more popular new characters in Marvel; this is because she's very clearly her own character, a fangirl on her own, a fairly good attempt to write a modern teenager, she has a fairly interesting powerset, and her own book focuses on an interesting setting (namely, Marvel's New Jersey; if that sounds boring to you, you haven't considered what the suburbs of Marvel New York must be like). Appearances in things like Squareenix's Avengers game (where she was generally considered the best part of it), have only added to her popularity.
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