Essential Captain Marvel, Vol. 2 by Mike Friedrich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book collects Issues 22-35, 37-46 of Captain Marvel, Iron Man #55 and Marvel Feature #12.

For those expecting to cruise through Captain Marvel's adventures consecutively, this book presents a bit of a problem because between Captain Marvel #21 and Captain Marvel #22, the book was off newstands for 2 years, and during the epic Kree-Skrull war story in Avengers 89-97, events effected the character dramatically and only a bit of it shown in a later issue in flashback.

This book uses two comics in which Thanos appeared but Captain Marvel didn't to pad this out to 500 pages, it would have been nice to have included a bit of the Kree-Skrull war instead, but I understand including 160 pages of Avengers could be challenging, but what they did instead is drop readers of the first book in with no clue that things had changed, even though Rick Jones and Marvell are linked.

The book has a couple outstanding periods. First is the Jim Starlin run on Captain Marvel which starts with him doing the art on issue 25 and continues through Issue 34 with him either writing or plotting in addition to penciling these issues. It's the first great Thanos arc with him driving to gain god-like powers by acquiring the cosmic cube.

This is a superb space opera. In many ways, it previews the events of Infinity Gauntlet that Starlin would write later only with the action around the cosmic cube and also with a much smaller cast of characters which makes the story feel a little more manageable and intimate.

There are some flaws. For example, one entire issue has a cosmetic entity giving Captain Marvel a lesson and challenging him to become a protector rather than a warrior. What this practically means for Captain Marvel? I honestly don't know, but he got some cool powers out of it.

Steve Englehart took over with Issue 37 with a short preview drawn for Issue 36 included. Issues 37-39 finds Captain Marvel battling the Lunatic legion, a team of supervillains based on the moon, with the full cooperation of the Watcher. What made one of the most noble and benign characters in the Marvel universe team up with evil? It's a good solid story.

The rest of the Englehart run, Rick and Captain Marvel can separate but find themselves ill at ease on Earth and return to the Stars together and end up on a mission for the Supreme Intelligence. Most of the story is just okay. There are goofy things such as an asteroid that functions like an old west mining town. It does come to a strong end in Issue 45 and Chris Claremont writes Issues 46 to clear the decks for a new writer.

Overall, despite my annoyance at the lack of setting up the new status quo established in the Kree-Skrull war (even a text note would have been helpful), this is still a good collection with some really great comic book stories along with some that are so so. The book also does a very good job exploring the nature of Rick and Marvell's relationship and covers a great deal of Marvell's unique history.



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