Ms. Marvel.
Death is the Doomsday Man!
The world's new super-heroine sensation in her deadliest battle yet!
Death is the Doomsday Man!
The world's new super-heroine sensation in her deadliest battle yet!
Stan Lee presents: Ms. Marvel!
The Lady's not for killing!
The Lady's not for killing!
Chris Claremont, Writer.
John Buscema, Artist.
Gerry Conway, plot.
Joe Sinnott, Inker.
John Costanza, Letterer.
Don Warfield, Colorist.
Archie Goodwin, Editor.
Cosmic Awareness.
As soon as the Destructor is defeated, Ms. Marvel gets a strong headache, but it suddenly disappears just instants before AIM agents burst from under the street to retrieve Professor Korman, since he knows too much about them to be allowed to be captured. Ms. Marvel hears Korman's name, but is unable to recall anything about him or the AIM agents despite having a feeling that she knows them from somewhere. The AIM agents successfully distract her by endangering innocents and flee with Professor Korman.
A frustrated Ms. Marvel flies away and randomly reaches the roof of the Daily Bugle, where she muses about her human and Kree nature. At that moment, the headache returns and she transforms into a very confused and equally migraine-ridden Carol Danvers. Carol ignores her co-workers and finally tells Mary Jane Watson that she is feeling awful and has a lot of work to do, so MJ stops using Carol's office as hangout.
At AIM's New York's headquarters, AIM agents use a Psycho-Conditioner to try bring Professor Korman's mind under their control as punishment for failing them. They also decide to stop the secret NASA flight by launching a rocket containing one of their more powerful assets to Cape Canaveral, one that even they fear and that may not be entirely under their control.
Carol is welcomed to Cape Canaveral by her friend, Astronaut Salia Petrie, who gets Carol to rest at her place for a night to recover from her headaches. Salia and Major David Adamson escort her to Kennedy Space Center, but Carol gets another migraine and gets away from them, becoming Ms. Marvel shortly after.
Ms. Marvel realizes she is near the place where she was "born", or where her memories began, but quickly turns her attention to her Seventh Sense visions of the rocket sent by AIM. She flies to outer space to stop the rocket, realizing her costume protects her from the environment and allows her to breathe. When she tries to come inside the rocket, a giant fist hits her and she almost is thrown away, but she destroys the rocket's engines, forcing her enemy to come out to battle her.
She recognizes her enemy, the Doomsday Man, a very dangerous robot created by an US scientist named Dr. Kronton and supposedly destroyed by the Silver Surfer. Their battle wrecks what is left of the rocket and both of them fall to the planet. Ms. Marvel is unable to escape the fall as the Doomsday Man grabs her scarf.
Ms. Marvel wakes up later, having survived atmospheric reentry. Her Seventh Sense lets her see images of a cave and she leaves the Doomsday Man behind to find what her visions try to tell her. The cave has remains of destroyed machinery, and she recognizes the place as it was before its destruction, when she was present during a battle and an explosion that changed her from what she was then into what she is now. Her memories are restored as she realizes she is Carol Danvers.
While she celebrates that she has a past to call her own, the Doomsday Man, now unable to stop NASA's launch, goes after her, as AIM programmed it to see Ms. Marvel as a target to be destroyed.
The Good and The Bad (and The Weird).
The Good. | |
|---|---|
 | The art. I suspect this will be a fixed comment as long as John Buscema and Joe Sinnott stay as the artistic team. The action looks fantastic thanks to them, and they make the calm moments look good, too. And they get extra points for every panel where they draw Jonah Jameson. |
| The pacing. This could have easily been a bad point instead, but it managed to stay as a good thing. The middle part of the story is a transition from what came before in Gerry Conway's first two issues and what is to come in Chris Claremont's. Mr. Conway gets the plot credit, but the break is so pronounced that I believe the last third of the plot was guided more by Mr. Claremont, as he may have had strong reasons to send Ms. Marvel to Cape Canaveral as soon as possible, while Mr. Conway's story was more rooted in New York. Noticeable as this break is, John Buscema's art and Chris Claremont's words make it work, with the middle part of the story as some type of calm before the storm, with big action right before and after. |
| The colors. They are still very far from what Marie Severin achieved in Ms. Marvel's first issue, but Don Warfield's colors here are a big improvement from his job on the last issue. He uses contrasting colors to make elements stand out more, and some subtle shading that makes the visuals more interesting. The shading on metallic surfaces deserves special mention, as it looks so much better than the solid colors he used before. The Psyche-Magnitron ruins look very nice with the different shades of green he used, and the lighting on Doomsday Man's first full appearance looks great with that background of... planets... seen from an extra-atmospheric orbit. |
| AIM. What's not to love about those yellow bee keepers? Thanks to them, we get to see all sorts of big technology used against Ms. Marvel, with drill vehicles coming out of New York's streets, or space rockets being launched from the Bronx. They do not let anything go to waste: they grab Professor Korman to use him for their own purposes, just as they must have done with Doomsday Man some time before and with the Scorpion just recently. Even though they are faceless bee keeper agents, we get to see how they work as a group and how some individuals react to the group's projects, with some visibly upset at having the Doomsday Man stored in their facilities. |
| Ms. Marvel's combat abilities. The Destructor may be a normal human being, but his armor helps him survive Ms. Marvel's punches, and his Tachyon Blast makes it difficult for her to get close to him. In a situation where she has to protect the bystanders from such a dangerous foe, she makes use of everything around her to surprise the Destructor, defend herself from his blasts and attack him from a distance. |
| Doomsday Man. We could ask ourselves how a human scientist could create a robot who is able to fight the Silver Surfer and, ultimately, survive. But we are better off accepting Doomsday Man's power and enjoying the epicness of its battles. The space battle in this issue was just the beginning, with more to come in the next issue. After this, Doomsday Man will forever be linked to Carol Danvers. |
The Bad. | |
 | Carol's clothes. Not even the perfect John Buscema can be perfect all the time. It seem he really likes Carol's clothing style, because he draws her in basically the same thing all the time. Last issue before she went to get dinner with MJ (in all fairness, getting a sleeveless version while they had dinner) and when she went to see Dr. Barnett, and in this issue when she got to the airport at Cape Canaveral and the following day when she goes to NASA's installations (in all fairness, the text about it being "the next morning" could have been added by Chris Claremont while the drawings actually depicted a single day). In both issues, the same style is worn by her in her memories of the battle between Yon-Rogg and Captain Marvel, too. |
| The change of writers. While getting Chris Claremont is something good for any book, the change was not completely seamless. Whatever AIM's Plan Beta One was we will never know, perhaps because the Scorpion turned out to be unable to defeat Ms. Marvel. And unable to climb down the statue where she left him after last issue's battle, as the complete lack of mentions about him in this issue would indicate. And then there's that thing with Mary Jane... |
The Weird. | |
 | Mary Jane Watson. Yes, she has behaved like a clingy little sister in Gerry Conway's attempt to make her Carol's best pal, but even she deserved a better send off. Instead, she is scolded by Carol and goes away, never to be seen again in this book. One can only wonder what she must have thought all those years before she met Carol again at Avengers Tower. |
The Endgame.
Even in this rushed change of the guard, we got a balance of story from Ms. Marvel's and Carol's lives, with events influenced by and affecting both of them.
In this issue we see Ms. Marvel showing nice heroic qualities and also doing amazing feats. She prefers to save lives than to capture villains, which happens to be something an Avenger should do on instinct. Likewise, she is able to go to outer space and survive in it under her own power (even surviving a fall all the way to the planet). These two things that seem natural to Ms. Marvel at this point in time will be tested in the future, when she is at her lowest point thanks to depression and alcoholism. And she will fail those tests then. It is a story for another day, but during the events of Live Kree or Die Carol neglects to protect innocent civilians to go after the Kree bad guys, and she is unable to reach space when she tries to fly all the way to the Moon. During that all-time low she refuses to call the Avengers for help so she can impress Captain America with her abilities, and in this issue we learn that Carol Danvers tends to do things without asking for help. Also in this issue we see her ignoring a non-immediate menace to innocents to follow a call from the site of the Kree Psyche-Magnitron. In a single, early issue we see just how heroic she is, but also how she has flaws that help define her character.
The final grade is:
6 Tracys, 2 Rogues and 1 Storyteller.
Next issue:
Death is the Doomsday Man!
And that's just where the book starts off -- wait'll you see the finish!
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