Sunday 31 December 2017

Captain Marvel #17. How to become a better man, in just three easy steps.

Captain Marvel #17
It's New Year's Eve and we all know what happens on New Year's Eve.

I spend all evening complaining about fireworks going off and then complaining when they're over.

Some people are never pleased.

But another thing happens on this night.

And that's that we make all kinds of promises to become better people.

Needless to say, we all have the good sense to not get anywhere near keeping those promises but such a state of affairs does mean it's an ideal time to look at a man who did indeed once manage to become a better man.

And that man is Captain Marvel because, less than twenty issues after his comic was launched, the hero created purely for legal reasons was drastically reinvented in an attempt to make him more viable. And issue #17 is where the bulk of that reinvention occurred.

What happens is this.

Captain Marvel #17, Rick Jones and an alien cave
Rick Jones is keeping up the habit of a lifetime by roaming around feeling sorry for himself because no super-heroes want anything to do with him. The Hulk tried to bump him off the last time they met and now Captain America has given him the brush-off.

Admittedly, it's not really Captain America. It's the Red Skull pretending to be Captain America but Richard isn't aware of that and so does what anyone would in his position. He hitches a lift to the middle of nowhere and then follows a glowing copy of Cap into a cavern clearly created by aliens, before putting some strange-looking bands on his wrists.

I have to confess that, personally, I wouldn't do any of those things, as all of those things are clearly stupid things to do.

Fortunately, Rick Jones isn't made of what I'm made of. He's made of one hundred percent stupid. This is a boy who once drove his car into a nuclear testing site, just as a bomb was about to go off, and then sat there playing his mouth organ. For him, chasing glowing figures into alien caves and sticking ominous things on his wrists is just another day at the office.

Captain Marvel #17, Rick Jones swaps bodies
So it is that, no sooner has he banged the bracelets together, for no good reason, than he's swapped places with Captain Marvel who instantly finds himself under attack by the villainous Yon-Rogg who tries to blow him up with a robot duplicate of Carol Danvers before fleeing in his spaceship.

All that drama done with, Rick is returned to this world, from the Negative Zone and stalks off, declaring that he's going to hunt Yon-Rogg down and give him a good slapping.

It's all a very strange thing. Obviously, given that his early adventures were not exactly stellar, it made sense to reinvent Mar-Vell by giving him a new costume and powers, such as enhanced strength and the power of flight but it's a bit hard to see in what way the strip benefits from our hero having to keep swapping  places with Rick Jones every time there's trouble.

Obviously, writer Roy Thomas did it as an homage to the Original Captain Marvel and his constant place-swapping with Billy Batson but it still doesn't change the fact that it's effectively turned the comic's star into Rick Jones's sidekick, a fate that surely no hero deserves. The Captain being stuck alone in the middle of nowhere for half of every issue also severely limits his possibilities for character development.

Captain Marvel #17, Rick Jones is on a quest
At least the one saving grace is that Rick doesn't sing in this issue. It is weird how you can hate Rick Jones's singing, despite never having actually heard him do it.

Personally, I would have thought the obvious way to improve Captain Marvel would have been to have left him pretty much as he was, but with the new costume and the souped-up powers and then let him have adventures in outer space, rather than on Earth.

It does always seem strange to me that Stan Lee launched two comics in the late 1960s that featured space-born heroes - Captain Marvel and the Silver Surfer - and then had them both mostly limited to operating on Earth. You can't help feeling their potential wasn't really being fully exploited and, given his normal shrewdness as an editor, it does seem a strange blind spot on Lee's part.

The story itself is fairly straightforward, its first half there to set up Jones' meeting with Marvel and its second being there to give the Kree captain a chance to discover what new powers he has. As a result, it's lively but a bit insubstantial. On the art front, it's stylishly drawn by Gil Kane although it's not, I think, his very best work.

While merging Marvel with Jones never really made sense from a story-telling standpoint, I suppose it did at least make the finale of the Kree/Skrull War possible, so at least some good came out of it.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the futility of self-improvement. You might have more noble ideas. Either way, have a Happy New Year and don't run into any caves. You never know what might be lurking in them.

26 comments:

Dougie said...

I just re-read the story this morning in the 1978 MWOM annual. Mar-Vell emotes like all Kane heroes, sinewy but tormented. I think the Rick merger was an attempt to make an alien soldier a bit more identifiable. Stan's griping messiah the Surfer wrung his shiny hands for months to no avail. Rick gave Marv a link to humanity.

Steve W. said...

It was the 1978 MWOM annual that I used when writing this review. Who'd have thought it would prove so popular forty years after publication?

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Bah! If the green Marvell had continued with Colan he'd have become a cult classic. Instead Don Heck, et. al. just tormented the heck out of us...

What is MWOM?

And to this day, I can't help but imagine if Dr. Wertham had got his mental meat hooks on Rick Jones... being passed around from super hero to super hero... Any time Rick made an appearance it seemed I was in for a headache trying to understand his role in the Marvel Universe.

Happy New Year!

Timothy Field said...

Another one here for being familiar with this story from the 1978 MWOM annual. Amazing how some of these images are so burnt into my brain.

Timothy Field said...

Just spent £12 on eBay getting a copy of MWOM 1978. You sods.

Steve W. said...

Charlie, MWOM is Mighty World of Marvel, Marvel UK's flagship comic.

Timothy, that's weird. When I was looking at the annual, earlier, I was thinking, "This book looks brand new. I wonder what I'd get on eBay for it?"

Timothy Field said...

Happy to make your January more financially liquid

TC said...

AFAIR, the only issue of Mar-Vell's self-titled comic that I had was #21, where he fought the Hulk. It had a flashback that retold how Rick Jones got mixed up with CM.

I was in a comic shop once, and a customer was looking at the cover of What If #12 ("What if Rick Jones had become the Hulk?") He asked, "Who is Rick Jones?" The manager shrugged and said, "Everybody's sidekick."

Christopher Nevell said...

As a new Marvel UK reader in 1973, aged 8, I used to think that MWOM was a totally separate comic from The Mighty World of Marvel. SMCW was another one that never turned up at the newsagents!

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Happy New Year all! I am laughing at that remark above from TC... "Everybody's sidekick!" Too funny!

Is Rick Jones still alive in the Marvel Universe? He didn't go the way of Hulk's other sidekick Jim Wilson or anything else tragic?

Steve W. said...

It's true, Christopher, what with MWOM, SMCW, RFO, FFF, KOF, FOOM, etc, there were definitely far too many acronyms associated with Marvel for anyone to keep up with.

As for Rick Jones, Charlie, I don't have a clue if he's still alive but I have faith that, if he isn't, he won't stay dead forever.

TC, personally, I refuse to answer my doorbell, in case it's Rick trying to become my sidekick. I've already had five neighbours turn him away.

Charlie Horse 47 said...

I just took the dog for a very short walk into the woods b/c it's absurdly cold outside.


Anyhow, I found two bracelets with hieroglyphics on them laying in the snow. (Well, I don't know what the scribbling is. I just know it's not words.) I was thinking of putting them on and banging them together? Or, perhaps put them on our pet Dachshund and bang them together.

Any advice? Anyone?

Steve W. said...

I would definitely bang them together. It's hard to see that anything bad could happen as a result.

Killdumpster said...

I was a big fan of Mar-Cell in the 70's during Kane/Starlin, was heartbroken when the "death novel" came out and really bummed out over "Carl" Danvers.

Killdumpster said...

Meant "Mar-Vell"

Charlie Horse 47 said...

I'm thinking it over Steve. But I'm not feeling very adventurous.

I think I'll put the bracelets on the pooch and see if she morphs into Lockjaw or Dragon Man (oh wait - DM is an android) or Darkoth (oh wait - Darkoth is a cyborg).

Is Lockjaw still alive in the Marvel Universe?

Comicsfan said...

This was a delightful review as usual, with some very good observations--particularly concerning "space-born" heroes who are limited to Earth adventures. The Surfer indeed later left the Earth behind, and many of his stories in outer space weren't half-bad (though I couldn't say the same for Star-Lord in his earlier tales), so it's not clear why Lee wasn't willing to explore such stories. I suppose he might have been thinking in a promotional sense--i.e., that having CM and the Surfer confined to Earth would help to sell the reader on other Marvel characters. (It might also explain why Thor was returned to Earth periodically.)

"This is a boy who once drove his car into a nuclear testing site, just as a bomb was about to go off, and then sat there playing his mouth organ. For him, chasing glowing figures into alien caves and sticking ominous things on his wrists is just another day at the office." I think I stood up and applauded at this.

Steve W. said...

Thanks, Comicsfan. And thanks to you also, Killdumpster, for your comments.

Charlie, I don't have a clue if Lockjaw is still alive. Didn't they at one point decree that he's not a dog? That he's just a normal Inhuman who just happens to look like a dog? If so, I'm not convinced that was a good idea.

Anonymous said...

I too hated Rick Jones singing, Steve.
It was the most annoying thing about him, with the possible exception of the end of the Kree/Skrull war.

Charlies, the last time I paid enough attention to Marvel superhero comics to follow a complete storyline - which was quite a while ago now that I think about it - they had a (then) new Mar-Vell, the Kree captain's genetically engineered son or something like that. Rick Jones turned up in an Avengers run where the shocking plot development was that - ktang! - he started alternating bodies with Mar-Vell in the Negative Zone.
With creative developments like that, I expect if Rick is currently around he's either the new Bucky or hanging out with the Hulk.

Happy new year true believers.

-sean

Steve W. said...

Happy New Year to you too, Sean.

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Hi Sean,

Merry New Years!

Nothing about the Marvel Universe would surprise me after some exchanges I had with Tony Isabella a good 10 years ago or so. We were writing about how comics had changed and he said (paraphrasing) "Changed? For Norman Osborne to have had an illicit relationship with Gwen Stacy and then have her give birth to his twins is more than change!"

I thought he was joking and said that was about the silliest thing I ever heard, short of wandering into an atomic bomb test site to smoke a cigar or an alien cave, lol.

Joe S. Walker said...

Charlie Horse 47, I presume you never saw the Spider-Man story in which Aunt May and Mary Jane put on old Iron Man suits and go to Latveria to battle Doctor Doom.

I read a lot of the Sixties Captain Marvels not long ago. They had that rambling, incoherent quality which is common among lower-tier late silver age Marvels - a mixture of the character not really being up to sustaining his own book, a casting around for changes to get things going again*, and the whole thing being written as an endless serial (with frequent changes of writer/artist from issue to issue).

*Introducing Rick Jones as a surrogate Billy Batson was not an inspiration. I'd use a harsher word than "homage" for what Roy Thomas was doing.

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Steve - so now that I am all revved up about CM, how did this work. Rick would have to bang his bracelets together and then what exactly?

Rick would become CM?

CM would co-exist with Rick on our earth?

CM would come to earth and Rick go the the Negative Zone? But then under what circumstance when would they swap locations so Rick comes back to earth and CM goes back to the Zone?

I honestly never read these red/blue CMs and the first time I saw the red Marvel was in Avengers 91 from 1971 which is 2 years after CM 17.

Thanks for any insights!

Steve W. said...

When Rick banged his bracelets together, he'd be transported into the Negative Zone until Cap banged his own bracelets and took Rick's place in the Negative Zone.

Needless to say, this was often bad news for Rick, as it wasn't unknown for Annihilus to show up when Rick was in the Zone, and try to kill him.

Charlie Horse 47 said...

So why the heck would CM or Rick bang his bracelets to go back to the Negative Zone? I mean, once you were out of the NZ, would you not prefer to stay on earth and leave the other person in the NZ?

Surely a fierce and important Kree Captain like CM could justify leaving Rick in the NZ for ever so that CM could battle Skrulls and what not in the real universe?

B.t.w. how did CM end up in the NZ? Do you know off hand?

And, why the hell would Rick keep banging bracelets to let CM out of the NZ? Would Rick be confronted by an earthly menace and (like Underdog?) say, "This looks like a job for CM!"

hey - do you have email? Cheers!

Steve W. said...

What would usually happen is that a bad guy would show up, Rick would try to tackle him, convinced that his, "Avengers training," would ensure victory. He'd fail miserably and decide he had no choice but to summon Captain Marvel.

If I remember correctly, Marvel could only stay in this dimension for an hour or two and would then disappear back into the Negative Zone, usually at a highly inconvenient moment, meaning Rick would suddenly find himself having to face the deadly enemy himself.

I can't remember how Marvel ended up in the Negative Zone in the first place. I think it had something to do with the Kree Supreme Intelligence.

I do indeed have email and the address can be found in the site's right-hand sidebar.