Marvel Super Heroes #12-13 |
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Marvel thought enough of the Mar-vell/Sentry battle to parody it in an issue of Not Brand Ecch(drawn by Colan).
Myron Fass, the sleaziest of sleazy publishers, didn't have the copyright. He just plain felt like doing it and hoped nobody would notice. Being a former 1950s Atlas artist, you'd think he woulda known better...
Posted by: Mark Drummond | January 5, 2013 6:43 PM
Dave Cockrum has a letter in #13.
Posted by: Mark Drummond | June 29, 2013 3:55 PM
Wow...nothing phallic AT ALL about that opening splash page, with Mar-Vell's legs spread wide and the rocket ship flying out from his crotch area. The caption of "The Coming of Captain Marvel" is just the icing on the cake...
Posted by: Dermie | October 21, 2013 1:06 AM
Heh, the opening splash felt more like something out of 50s pulp novels or Flash Gordon honestly. But now that you mention it...
Posted by: Ataru320 | October 21, 2013 8:55 AM
Admission: while it may feel repetitive that Mar-Vell is fighting the Kree Sentry again, I think it helped streamline things all the easier with the "Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes" rendition, which more or less merge that story with the F4's first encounter with the Kree. (it also kept Mar-Vell blue and offered an easier explanation behind Carol becoming Captain Marvel herself...)
Posted by: Ataru320 | December 21, 2015 4:48 PM
What Fass and then Marvel grabbed wasn't the copyright, but the trademark. DC licensed the original Captain Marvel from Fawcett when it revived him in the 70s. (It owns him now.) There's more on this at http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2012/02/10/comic-book-legends-revealed-353/2/ .
Posted by: Luke Blanchard | December 21, 2015 6:15 PM
Dialogue in Captain Marvel #3 indicates that the first appearance of "Captain Marvel" at the Cape and his battles with the Sentry (in MSH #13/CM #1) and the Super-Skrull (CM #2) take place on the same night. This is after Bridges called Lawson (Mar-Vell) to tell him about the rampaging Sentry in MSH #13 and before "Lawson" (actually the Super-Skrull) finally returned to the base in CM #3. Plus, there's the fact that Mar-Vell's suitcase is equipped with that nuclear bomb that will detonate two hours after anyone tampers with it, so CM #2-3 takes place less than two hours after CM #1. Also, Mar-Vell's breathing potion only lasts for one hour.
On the other hand, the Skrull emperor (in the fifth quadrant of the Andromeda Galaxy) is able to view images of Mar-Vell and the Sentry which he had defeated, then summon the Super-Skrull to the palace imperial and send him on a mission to Earth -- ALL in the time that it takes Mar-Vell to return to his hotel room! I guess the Super-Skrull's ship can travel the two million light-years between galaxies VERY quickly.
Posted by: Don Campbell | June 2, 2016 12:31 AM
@Don Campbell - It always drives me nuts when sci-fi and comic book writers misuse the word quadrant to describe an area of outer space. Quad is short for quadruple, which means consisting of four parts. So there are *four* regions in a quadrant, which means the line "the fifth quadrant of the Andromeda Galaxy" is total nonsense. What writers really should be using is "sector" to describe an area of outer space. You can divide something into as many sectors as you want. Of course, as you point out, writers also often forget just how freaking big our own Milky Way Galaxy is, much less the utterly immense distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, and often have characters zipping back & forth between them in a matter of hours. So I'm not too surprised that they also misuse a term like quadrant with such frequency.
Anyway, that concludes my quad rant :)
Posted by: Ben Herman | June 2, 2016 8:56 AM
Thanks Don. I already had #2-3 relatively close to this entry and concurrency could explain the other issues in between, but i've now moved that entry to follow this one directly. As you say, we'll have to assume that the Skrulls have faster-than-light tech.
Posted by: fnord12 | June 2, 2016 9:22 AM
Something I just now noticed about the cover to MSH #12: why is that guy in the background shinnying up that drainpipe?
Posted by: Mark Drummond | June 10, 2016 11:39 PM
When the original art to MSH#13 was printed in Essential Captain Marvel #1, it showed that Carol Danvers was originally called "Miss Johnson".
Posted by: Mark Drummond | June 11, 2016 2:19 PM
The whole back story of the name Captain Marvel is as convoluted as any comic storyline ever was. The beginning of this series was weak but still strong enough to get the series going. The best thing is the introduction of Carol Danvers (whom I've wondered if she was modeled on Linda Danvers). I agree that Colan wasn't as suited to this series as he was Daredevil.
Posted by: Bobby Sisemore | November 13, 2016 10:22 PM
Back Issue #93 revealed that Stan Lee didn't want to write this character at all and only did so because Goodman ordered it; and that Roy Thomas suggested the green & white costume(which he immediately regretted).
Posted by: Mark Drummond | January 16, 2017 2:10 PM
The Captain Marvel series is the strangest out of all of Marvel's Sixties series for several reasons, and I always wondered how Stan & Co. decided to create this property when they already had a perfectly acceptable cosmic hero in the Silver Surfer. Seeing now that this series was dictated by Goodman makes a lot more sense. You can tell that nobody's heart was in it at this time.
Posted by: Jonathon | October 4, 2017 11:40 AM
Mark drummond, that shinnying troll on the drain pipe was the '60's artist rendition of a photo bomber
Posted by: Mernyferny | November 6, 2017 4:39 AM
The ''take a wild Cosmic Kirby or Starlin concept and humanize the Hell out of it'' thing was also seen recently in Jason Aaron's Thanos Rising comic.
Posted by: CaptainMar-Vell92 | December 8, 2017 5:27 AM
I respectfully disagree about Gene Colan's art here. I think it works very well for the Captain Marvel stories precisely because it doesn't look like typical SF comic art. The way he draws, which is both realistic and shadowy, along with the washed colouring, gives the action the feel of a black and white SF film or a TV series like The Invaders. Colan's art often went against type and worked for me for that very reason.
Posted by: The Small Lebowski | December 31, 2017 4:11 PM
According to Yancy Street Gazette #19(6/68), Myron Fass did file a lawsuit against Martin Goodman over Captain Marvel. It ended with Fass selling the rights to the name for $4500 because Fass' version was selling horribly.
Posted by: Mark Drummond | January 18, 2018 7:54 PM
I bought 3 of the Fass Captain Marvels off the stands. It was juvenile, I was 10, and it amused my friends and me in that "so bad it's good" sort of way. It predated Captain Mar-Vell by about a year, so when Marvel's Captain Marvel comic hit the stands, we greeted it with even more inappropriate laughter and bad jokes. We already knew about the Shazam! Captain Marvel, because we watched Gomer Pyle, and I had a black and white magazine with some stills from the old Tom Tyler Captain Marvel serials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Marvel_(M._F._Enterprises)
Posted by: Holt | January 18, 2018 9:17 PM
Without the mask and with the silver hair, Captain Marvel resembles the actor Jeff Chandler, best known for his Oscar-nominated performance in the 1950 Universal western "Broken Arrow".With the heimet/mask and green-and-white motif, he resembles Sparty, the mascot for the Michigan State Spartans.
Posted by: Brian Coffey | March 19, 2018 11:57 PM