Wow, an apology. You really must be new here, the more acceptable etiquette is generally buckets of profanityCaptainComics wrote:I absolutely had to register and add my two cents for this particular topic. I am a huge comics fan and I have been for a long time. A lot of the information in this thread seems to be the kind of thing people pick up from Wikipedia, which is factually accurate but lacks nuance. Sorry if this makes me the "um, actually..." guy, especially for my first post here.
Seriously, thanks for your perspective.
You're right in that I am not part of the target market for today's comics, and I am therefore uninformed about these particular incarnations of the characters. But I did read a lot of Marvel way back when I was growing up and Devil Dinosaur still roamed the shelves, so I'm going to talk about similar character transitions back in those days, because I can't help but see parallels.
In the early 80s, Tony Stark lapsed into alcoholism and Jim Rhodes took over as Iron Man for several years, including the franchising of the West Coast Avengers and the original Secret Wars. Like most lengthy marvel runs, this certainly had some silly stories and off notes, but by and large it worked. However what worked better was Stark's recovery and return leading to first rivalry, then reconciliation and Rhodes eventually getting the now-iconinc War Machine Armor as his own.
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The 70s also saw the death of Mar-Vell and 1982 had Monica Rambaeu "accidentally" co-opt the name Captain Marvel. And while there was rather a lot of silliness in that era of the Avengers, the character by and large worked as a distinct identity with a somewhat different powerset than their previous character of that name.
And while I'm talking about Captain Marvel in the 70s, I also have to point to Carol Danvers. The original Ms. Marvel was both a blatant attempt to cash in on a big culture wars issue of the times and full of slop-hokey writing that's painful to reread. In the early issues, Carol transformed accidentally and couldn't even remember her superheroic adventures. That's sloppy and happened years before the big Rape issue and Claremont's attempts to retcon things so that kids would realize "Rape is Bad, mmmkay". Moving past that, she was sufficiently Claremonted that I can't even explain her transitions from Binary to Warbird to Ms. Marvel, and say only that her taking on the name of Captain Marvel as homage to Mar-Vell should probably have happened a decade or two earlier than it did.
And when Carol Danvers finally did that, it left the Ms. Marvel name free for Kamela Khan to take. And while everyone agrees the Kamela Khan's stories have been (at least mostly) awesome, it's interesting to note that a young female character taking up the superheroic mantle of an older female superheroine is really rare in comics. While my knowledge is incomplete, I cannot think of a single other case in Marvel Comics. For comparison: Sam Wilson is at least the fourth dude to become Captain America, while the Hulk and Spider-Man each have multiple official rule 63 variant characters in the main continuity. Heck, the Rule 63 version of The Thing was *also* briefly Ms. Marvel, so while it's apparently okay for multiple people of either gender to emulate accomplished male heroes, Ms. Marvel is the only female legacy worth emulating in marvel's main continuity.
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Moving on, there's another iconic 70s Marvel character who is took the name of a previous white character:
The white guy villain used the name first.
It's interesting to me that the villain is minor comics trivia while the hero is still going strong enough to get his own TV series next year. Especially when Power Man was a blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity Blaxploitation films that shifted into a pastiche of race/buddy flicks with the addition of Iron Fist - and was wonderfully hokey throughout the entire run.
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PS: There in addition to the other comics thread is also the other other thread about recasting Thor and Cap as different race / gender
