I wanted to feel the pain of Rick Jones and an all-star cast of Marvel heroes, but having never really seen ol’ Marv in action, I struggled to feel the loss with them. It’s…weird.Įven with those for context, I felt about as emotional as I might watching the sad sack patient of the week on Grey’s Anatomy flatline while an earnest ballad by The Fray crescendos in the background for the 714th time in its one billion-episode run. In addition to Starlin’s titular (heh heh…I said “titular”) tale, this collection contains Captain Marvel’s first appearance (a typical Stan Lee joint, though heavier on the repetitive exposition and ham-handed character development than Stan’s much more stellar work on Spidey, Doc Strange, X-Men, etc.) and a couple of other stories, including the one that exposed Marvel to the radiation that ultimately caused his cancer.
Why not remove the nega bands, then? Well, dummy, because those are the only thing keeping him alive, and the moment they come off, he’s deader than Rebecca Black’s pop idol aspirations.
Starlin’s rationale is that the nega bands that give Marvel his miraculous powers and have for so long kept the cancer at bay, combined with his Kree physiology, thwart all scientific and magical attempts to cure the disease. Michael Straczynski handled the story beautifully.) So, when they attempted to show the raw emotion the heroes felt that day, a day that they failed and could do nothing but mourn alongside the rest of the country, it felt odd, though J. Then again despite heroes’ best efforts, it seems like there’s a 9/11-level event happening in New York every month in Marvel U, somewhat blunting the emotional impact of each event. (I recall a similarly uncomfortable question arising when Marvel, with its heart squarely in the right place, tried to wrestle with 9/11, because superheroes stopping bad things from happening in New York is a daily occurrence in the Marvel U, so it seemed strange that they couldn’t stop a couple of non-superpowered fanatics from crashing planes into buildings, or at least have contained the damage. To Starlin’s credit, rather than sidestepping or glossing over it, he drives straight at the obvious question of why the greatest minds on the planet-whose genius seems to surpass even that of our own Einsteins and Hawkings-aided by futuristic alien technology, no less, can’t figure out a way to cure Marvel or, at the very least buy him more time. (One note: this is NOT the Carol Danvers Captain Marvel of more recent fame this is the original Captain Marvel, a Kree defector who chose to save Earth rather than helping his people destroy it.)Īll comics require a willing suspension of disbelief, but never more so than when they address real-world issues. And I’m sure it would have been a powerful, emotional story…if I had ever really read Captain Marvel comics. This is intended to be a powerful, emotional story, one that pays homage to a falling (and ultimately fallen) hero, one felled not by villainous laser blasts or mighty fist blows, but, rather, and unusually for comics, the ravages of cancer. To quote the inimitable Cheech Marin in Ghostbusters 2 when he witnessed the ghost of the Titanic (and its dead passengers) arrive in New York, “Well…better late than never.” I’ve been on something of a Starlin kick lately, consuming a bunch of his mid-80s Batman work, and it occurred to me that though I’ve been meaning to read it for literally decades, I’ve never gotten around to The Death of Captain Marvel. I’ve been on something of a Starlin kick lately, consuming a bunch of his mid-80s Batman work, and it occurred to me that though I’ve been meaning to read it f As far as I’m concerned, Jim Starlin never has to pay for a drink again for architecting what was, for my money, the first really great (and still one of the all-time best) crossover event comics in Infinity Gauntlet, a story from which the moderately fiscally successful Avengers cinematic franchise has mined more than a few plot nuggets. As far as I’m concerned, Jim Starlin never has to pay for a drink again for architecting what was, for my money, the first really great (and still one of the all-time best) crossover event comics in Infinity Gauntlet, a story from which the moderately fiscally successful Avengers cinematic franchise has mined more than a few plot nuggets.