Race + Comics: Three Characters Of Color Who (Probably) Won’t Benefit From The Avengers’ Success
Courtesy Marvel Comics
Monica is perhaps still best known for being the second character to take on the name Captain Marvel (in Marvel canon, anyway), and for being written to not only appear in the Avengers comic book in the 1980s, but become the team leader.
As we’ve mentioned before on Racialicious, the key words there are “being written to ____.” Because ever since her run with the Avengers, not only have Monica’s appearances dwindled to a few miniseries, but she’s been written to give up her superhero name twice to the original Captain’s son, Genis-Vell, leading to Monica getting rebranded from Captain Marvel to Photon to Pulsar, with less emphasis on her along the way.
That doesn’t figure to change with the news that there will be a new Captain Marvel series, where Carol Danvers, the character formerly known as Ms. Marvel, will get the benefit of not only the Captain Marvel brand, but a new costume, and Marvel’s promotional muscle behind her. In other words, the Danvers character is being positioned to be all but a cinch for inclusion in the next round of Marvel films.
This isn’t a knock on the new Marvel’s creative team, writer Kelly Sue DeCormick and artist Dexter Soy. But Marvel editor Steve Wacker did shed some light on the company’s thought process in this piece by Comics Alliance’s Laura Hudson, where he told Hudson he “has been trying to get this name change since my first day editing the book about five years ago, so this has been a long time coming.”
Think about that for a second. Wacker had been working on raising the Danvers character’s profile for five years. All the while, Carol has been written to be a part of at least one Avengers team, on top of getting her own solo series. Has anybody given such consideration to an audience for Rambeau, even as she was part of the cult hit miniseries Nextwave?
Apparently not, because ever since Nextwave, Rambeau has only been written as a supporting players in miniseries like Marvel Divas, Heralds, and Young Allies, none of which was promoted as a major event by Marvel. Why could that be?
Oh, right. Silly me.
Aside: I feel it’s absolutely necessary to point out that while the Avengers film is good for what it is, but none of it would have been possible without the efforts of Jack Kirby, who co-created many of the characters featured in it and won’t see a dime of the box-office take. CA’s David Brothers has an excellent column detailing how little Kirby received for his contributions to Marvel Comics:
For most artists, the form was a one-page contract. For Kirby, it was four pages. You can read the form here on The Comics Journal site, and get a good background on the fight for Kirby’s artwork by Michael Dean here. Marvel offered to return eighty-eight pages to Jack Kirby. Kirby’s regular schedule for in the ’70s was fifteen pages a week, depending on how much outside animation work he was doing. But even then, he’d worked for Marvel for years, generating thousands of pages of work. There is a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon between what Kirby was legally owed and what Marvel offered. Marvel’s offer was an insult, at best.
In exchange for those 88 pages, Kirby would have to give up several rights. Here’s an incomplete list of Marvel’s requests:
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