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

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.

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.

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.

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.