Carol Danvers: The First Female Superhero to Headline a Major Film Franchise

The first female superhero to headline a major film franchise, Carol Danvers is nigh invulnerable and imbued with cosmic power from her half human-half Kree DNA. Flying through the stars as Captain Marvel, she has become an inspiration for women everywhere. Yet her illustrious comic book history is rich with moments of struggle.

In this article, I examine the ways that Marvel’s relaunch of Carol Danvers in 2012 – with writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Jamie McKelvie – engaged with feminist theories of temporality and gender. Through the device of time travel, this story reframes Danvers’s origin and establishes her as a hero who can transcend time and space. It does so in part by demonstrating how her own history is a source of her strength, allowing her to confront and overcome the challenges of her past.

While the first incarnation of Captain Marvel, a male alien named Mar-Vell, fought in intergalactic war between the Kree and the Skrulls, his successor was Air Force pilot and NASA security chief Carol Danvers. Her Vers persona grew out of her relationship with Mar-Vell and a shared bond over the destruction of her home planet, but she ultimately rejected this identity to honor the memory of her dead mentor, becoming a solo hero as Captain Marvel.

This version of the character, who would play a key role in Marvel’s epic ’70s stories including the Kree-Skrull War, only lasted five issues. But it left a lasting mark on the genre and established a template for future reinventions of established heroes.