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themyskira · 5 years

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The Life of Captain Marvel - issue #3

Previously: Carol has spent the last nine months listening to early-2000s emo music while watching herself cry in the mirror, basically.

She let her brother get in a car accident, then made his brain injury all about her.

She found out something private about her parents’ relationship problems, and made that all about her as well.

She discovered an alien device among her father’s possessions, but she couldn't find a way to wring family drama out of that one, so she ignored it.

Now the alien device has enabled a Kree cyborg assassin to track her and her mother down, and it almost (but not quite) forces the two of them to have an actual conversation.

This is the issue where things really kick into high bullshit.

(No talk of family violence in this one, thankfully, but love interest Louis goes into some creepy, coercive Nice Guy territory.)

Dishwasher continues to be the shittiest stealth assassination unit ever. Having already conspicuously crash-landed, murdered two people and caused a gigantic explosion on a major highway, it has stolen a boat (so probs another murder in there as well) and is drawing further attention to itself by speeding so erratically around Harspwell Sound that it almost capsizes a smaller vessel.

But who could possibly see past this cunning disguise?

Carol, meanwhile, is apparently psychic. She thinks to herself,

I can’t get away from the feeling that something is wrong. I woke up in a panic this morning, reeling. For a split second, I couldn’t remember… What had happened? What terrible thing? Why was I spinning?

Because you’re trying to wake up from this nightmare of a comic?

She decides to let off some steam by running, which is apparently something that has always helped her clear her head.

This leads into a flashback of a SUPERNATURALLY FAST YOUNG CAROL OUTRUNNING A GODDAMNED TRUCK.

fuckin WHAT.

We will later find out that Carol, being half-Kree, was always naturally faster and stronger than the average human (though it wasn’t until the Psyche-Magnitron ‘jumpstarted’ her Kree powers that she got the full superpowered package).

That’s what we’re told. Except Margaret Stohl and flashback artist Marguerite Sauvage go so hilariously over-the-top in their portrayal of Carol as a child, so what we end up seeing is a newborn infant with such an iron grip that she causes her father GENUINE PAIN, and a fourteen-year-old girl who can OUTRUN MOTOR VEHICLES.

And yet, supposedly neither she nor anybody else around her twirled that there was anything out-of-the-ordinary about her??

In the present, Carol is snapped out of her reverie to discover that she is jogging mid-air.

Louis: Whatcha up to? Get it? Up to? Carol: Um… Calm down. Get it? Down?

So, we’ve all seen some version of this trope, right? The stressed-out super-person goes to the gym to take out some of their tension on a punching bag, only to unintentionally lash out with their full power and send the bag flying clean across the room, something like that.

What weirds me out about this iteration is that— jogging does not logically bleed into flying. They’re different forms of movement, presumably requiring the exertion of different muscles and associated with different physical sensations. It’s not so much ‘super-person unthinkingly hits the punching bag so hard they pulverise it’ as it is ‘super-person unthinkingly turns their punch into a cartwheel mid-swing’.

Carol and Louis talk. He suggests that “Maybe it’s time ta drop the Mystery of the Old Lettahs, Nancy Drew”.

WHAT MYSTERY. THERE IS NO MYSTERY.

I mean, no, it turns out there is a mystery because the letters were really written to Carol’s mother, who is a secret alien, but CAROL has no reason to know any of this as yet. As far as she’s concerned, the extent of the mystery was ‘ohshit dad had an affair? does mom know?? how will I tell her?? should I tell her??’ And then her mum was like, ‘yep I knew, ‘scool’. MYSTERY SOLVED. THE END.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, this family has a bucketload of issues to work through, but those letters don’t particularly factor into any of them.

Carol wonders what else she didn’t notice about her family.

“Were we normal, Louis? Did I even seem normal? Or… yanno… was there something funky about me too?”

You mean aside from the fact that you could run faster than a speeding pickup truck?

But of course this is Louis’s cue to confess that he’s had a crush on her since he first laid eyes on her… which he does by faintly negging her, because Louis is a turd.

“All those brains and you never figured that one out? You were the only thing I noticed, most days. … You’d hafta be stupid dense to miss that.”

Louis takes Carol’s hand and moves in for the kiss, just as Carol begins to hear a small but insistent beeping that sounds like a distress beacon. Louis handles it SUPER WELL.

Bear in mind, this scene is presented as humorous and cute.

[Louis goes in for the kiss] Carol: Wait— do you hear that? Louis: Shh. I’ve been picturing this since I was 14…

So straight away, Louis is viewing and treating Carol like an object — not an equal partner in this scene but a vehicle for his sexual fantasies. Carol is not enthusiastically consenting. She’s asking him to wait. She’s visibly distracted and concerned. His response is ‘shut up, you’re spoiling my boner’.

Carol: [leaning back from the kiss] …is that a car alarm? Some kinda distress beacon? Am I just freaking out because my childhood friend is, like, millimetres from planting one on me?? Louis: …but with less talking…

We are just going to zoom on past this atrocious dialogue because we do not have the time.

The important thing is, Carol is visibly uncomfortable and Louis does not care. Carol is making it clear that (a) she’s distracted and not in the moment, (b) she’s concerned someone might be in trouble and she may need to get her superhero on and (c) she’s panicking a little at the prospect of kissing Louis. This is the point where any decent person would back off and ask if she’s okay, if she wants this, if she wants to slow down, if she needs to go do the superhero thing.

Louis, who let me remind you is supposed to be a likeable love interest, again tells her to shut up with an aside that she’s less talkative in his sex fantasies.

Carol: [pulling right back in concern as the beeping grows more urgent] Hold that thought. Definitely not a car alarm. Louis: [visibly irritated now] …way less talking.

AND LOUIS TELLS HER TO SHUT UP AGAIN.

Carol: [flying into action] Something’s happening…! Louis: [kicking a stone sullenly] I know, I’m the guy tryna make it happen…! [sighs loudly]

Louis is a classic fucking Nice Guy.

He thinks that because of their recently-rekindled childhood friendship, because he’s listened to her troubles and offered a shoulder to cry on, because he’s finally managed to engineer this romantic moment alone — he’s therefore entitled to Carol’s love. So when Carol keeps pulling away from his increasingly pushy advances, she’s the one being unfair — he’s trying so hard to “make it happen” and she’s not giving him anything in return!

The fact that he’s whining about Carol not reciprocating literally as she leaps into superhero mode and flies to investigate a potential threat makes this particularly laughable, but there are no circumstances in which this behaviour is okay.

In every panel, Carol is sending clear signals that she wants to stop or slow down, and Louis responds by trying to pressure her into doing what he wants — first by shushing her, then by belittling her for talking too much, and finally by sulking and blaming her.

AGAIN. THIS IS THE MAIN ROMANTIC INTEREST IN THIS BOOK. CAROL IS SUPPOSED TO LIKE HIM. WE ARE SUPPOSED TO LIKE HIM.

WHAT THE F U C K

Carol traces the sound to the family home and realises that it’s coming from the garage. When she gets there, Marie — apparently the only other person who can hear the beeping, is in a frantic state. She’s found the source — the obviously extraterrestrial device Carol found, inadvertently activated and promptly forgot about back in issue 1 — and she’s super worked up about it.

“It shouldn’t be here! […] It wasn’t his. I don’t even know why he kept it… this piece of junk…”

Okay so first of all, you do know why he kept it, that is a lie. Next issue we’ll find out that the device is a beacon through which the Kree military could track and communicate with operatives like Mari-Ell/Marie. When Marie decided to desert the Kree military and commit to raising a family with Joe on Earth, she gave him the beacon as a gesture and they switched it off together.

Obviously he was going to keep it. He wouldn’t have been capable of destroying it and it’s clearly not something you can throw in the bin. Marie could have destroyed it and ensured that it could never be inadvertently switched on — say, by her dumbass daughter — and used to track them both down, but I guess incompetence runs in the family.

Carol asks who the obvious alien technology belonged to if it didn’t belong to Joe, and Marie screeches that “IT BELONGED TO HER!”

Of course, she needs to say that — she has to keep up the pretence that this is all about an imaginary mistress and not about her and Carol being aliens — because Stohl doesn’t want to give away the game yet. But the question is, why would she at this point?

Marie is a deserter and a fugitive from the Kree military. She knows that, were the Kree ever to track her down, she would be summarily executed for treason. She has just discovered that her beacon — the one surefire way the Kree have of locating her — has been activated and is now beeping insistently. Knowing how the military operates, she should know that the Vacuum Kleaner is on its way to kill her and her family, and that it almost certainly has a bead on her location.

(Seems pretty incompetent on the Kree’s part to have an alarm installed in the beacon to let the deserter know an assassin is coming, but as we’ve seen The Mopman Prophecies is a pretty terrible assassin.)

Priority one should be deactivating and/or destroying the beacon. Priority two should be getting her family secure and preparing Carol in particular for what’s about to go down. Because as deeply selfish as Marie has been to keep lying to her daughter for all these years, surely Marie is more invested in saving her children’s lives than she is in preserving this fiction she’s created.

Well… maybe not. Jury’s still out.

Because rather than doing any of those things, Marie seemingly doesn’t know what to do except freak out and continue to lie when questioned about the beacon.

Carol isn’t much better. She couldn’t see the beacon for the OBVIOUS ALIEN DEVICE that it is before, and even now as it’s beeping at a volume/frequency that is near-deafening to her and her mother and yet completely inaudible to everybody else in town, she still thinks it’s nothing more than a busted old TV remote.

No, the extent of Carol’s deductive reasoning is, ‘THING MAKE MOM SAD. THING BAD. THING GO AWAY NOW.’

Carol: [snatching the beacon] Here— Let’s just get rid of it! [hurls it into the bay several kilometres away]

So this is the point where Marie comes clean, right? She knows it’s only a matter of time before the Kree Khambermaid shows up at their door. She knows that even as they stand here, her children’s lives are in danger. She has to say something, if only to get them somewhere safe.

NOPE. SHE JUST FUCKS RIGHT OFF TO SULK AND TAKE HER FRUSTRATION OUT ON THE DISHES.

JJ asks what upset Marie, and Carol is a shitty liar.

“…nothing. Some broken remote I found in a box of old… um… just some stuff in your closet.”

Again, ZERO curiosity about this ultra-suspicious beeping that only she and her mother could hear.

JJ reveals that he knew about the letters, which kind of stands to reason — the box was in his wardrobe, and it was stored in a very visible, easily accessible spot. (Carol, of course, is taken completely by surprise.)

He adds that, after reading them, he recalled kind of a weird childhood memory.

It was during the summer; the three kids were spending the day on the boat with their uncle while their mother was out of town. They stopped briefly at shore to pick up some more bait, only to see their father canoodling with a mysterious blonde.

Steven: Hey— is that Pops?! What’s he doin’ all the way up there…? JJ: And who’s he doin’ it to?! Steven: Uh… I’ll tell ya when you’re my age. Beans, don’t look! Carol: Huh? [Joe and Marie start to levitate off the ground]

Things that are stupid about this:

Marie is a deserter from the Kree military. If the Kree Empire were alerted to her presence on Earth, they would send somebody to kill her and take her daughter away. Donning fancy alien clothes and flaunting her superpowers in full view of the harbour is idiotically reckless and endangers her entire family.

AN ALIEN HAS JUST LIFTED UP THEIR FATHER AND LEVITATED WITH HIM AND ALL THE KIDS CAN FOCUS ON IS THE FACT THAT THEY’RE KISSING AT THE SAME TIME.

AND LIKE. NOBODY EVER DISCUSSED THIS. JUST LIKE NOBODY EVER DISCUSSED THE FACT THAT THEIR SISTER COULD OUTRUN A FREIGHT TRAIN WITHOUT BREAKING A SWEAT. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS FAMILY.

oh and can we talk about the fact that Carol saw this. Carol, who dreams of visiting the stars. CAROL, whose childhood bedroom is wallpapered with NASA and Star Wars posters. C A R O L, who has craved flight since before she could walk.

CAROL SUSAN JANE DANVERS SAW A MYSTERIOUS ALIEN WOMAN FLYING WITH HER DAD AND THEN IMMEDIATELY FORGOT ABOUT IT ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.

Also, though it’s less important, the dialogue has gone askew here. Steven’s “I’ll tell ya when you’re my age” is clearly meant to brush off a question about the canoodling. But it was Steven who asked about the canoodling — the question from JJ that he’s responding to is ‘who’s the lady?’, which of course neither of the brothers knows.

So the exchange should either read,

JJ: Hey— is that Pops?! What’s he doin’ all the way up there…? And what’s she doin’ to him?! Steven: Uh… I’ll tell ya when you’re my age.

Or,

Steven: Hey— is that Pops?! Who’s the lady? JJ: And what’s she doin’ to him?! Steven: Uh… I’ll tell ya when you’re my age.

But also, it shouldn’t be either of those things, because what they really ought to be talking about is OMFG THOSE PEOPLE ARE FLYING.

“And I was right there? I— I really must have buried that memory.”

Really? We’re gonna do suppressed memories, now? That’s where you wanna go with this?

I mean, it’s possible it could have slipped her mind somewhere in between the two complete memory wipes she’s suffered over the course of her superhero career, but short of that, there is no earthly reason why Carol would not recall seeing an actual alien hovering in front of her face.

Carol goes to talk to Marie about the histrionics in the garage and they take a walk down to the pier together.

Carol: So… what was that device in Pops’ stuff? I tried to open it but couldn’t make heads or tails of the thing. Marie: Carol, it’s not just… that thing you found. It’s time I told you the truth… though I promised your father I never would.

Really, Carol? That’s the question you want to ask? Not ‘why was Dad canoodling with aliens?’ Not ‘why did Dad have an extraterrestrial device among his possessions?’ Not ‘how come you and I are the only ones who heard that thing?’

So, a few things happen at this point.

Having decided that with lives on the line, she can no longer avoid telling Carol the truth, Marie… continues to avoid telling the truth, procrastinating by talking vaguely around her relationship with Joe and her decision to keep the family together. Can’t take it too quickly, or she might actually reveal something of value before the Janitor arrives to kill them all.

But Room Service is taking its time, and Marie is running out of steam. If something doesn’t happen soon, she and her daughter might be forced to have a necessary and productive conversation!

It’s all on Carol now. Only she can save us from a devastating outbreak of basic competence!

Marie: Carol? Carol: [wheeze] I can’t— [wheeze] Marie: What is it? Are you okay? Carol: [swoons] Marie: Carol! Carol: [HYPERVENTILATES HER WAY FACE FIRST INTO A GODDAMN LAKE]

Okay, but who in the hell read this script and saw this artwork and didn’t think that everybody involved with this comic was about to make massive fools of themselves?

Wait, never mind, I just googled it, and the editor on this book is the same person who edited America. That... absolutely checks out.

There’s a page of Carol sinking dramatically through the water, unable to get her body to move, before Marie dives to her rescue. They both collapse on the dock, exhausted, just in time for the beeping to begin again.

In town, all hell is breaking loose. Turns out Carol’s ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach to the Kree beacon? Not a great plan. After being flung into the bay, the device wound up being scooped up in a fishing net and brought right back into town, which is where Tide Pod’s drone has located it. The drones are now exploding everything in sight.

Louis tries to slow it down by hurling some sick burns: “Hey you! Sir Splodesalot! … Hey! Baby Death Star Head!”

Carol arrives on the scene and asks if anybody is hurt, and Louis immediately starts whining that she didn’t show up sooner.

Carol: Louis! Everyone okay?! Louis: What’s the use of this place being the “summer home to a super hero” if you’re not gonna come when we’re being [attacked?]

He’s skating very close to having an actual point, because this entire situation is Marie and Carol’s fault. However, this is also the dude who, mere hours ago, lost his shit when Carol prioritised saving lives over a make-out session. You don’t get to demand she ignore a distress call one minute and then complain that she didn’t respond fast enough the next.

Also, you’re the ones who slapped Captain Marvel’s brand on your town and your donuts, not her. You fuckers are lucky the Avengers haven’t come after you for trademark infringement.

A cloud of drones descends on Main Street. They immediately go for Carol, so she takes to the sky with the plan of luring them away and exploding them high above the town.

But first, a quick detour to needlessly endanger her family and tackle her mother to the ground.

After destroying the drones, Carol returns in time for Clorox to arrive and—

what the hell man, why did you decide to nude up for this?!

And finally, the reveal we’ve all been dreading.

Marie/Mari-Ell: …she’s here for me. Carol: Ma?!?!

(Small detail, but dudes, let your letterer do their job. They’re not just your friggin typist. You want to emphasise Carol’s shocked exclamation, the letterer can do that by playing with fonts, sizing, colour and speech bubbles. You don’t need to vomit out interrobangs like a seven-year-old who’s just discovered punctuation.)

anyway yes this book is a nightmare.

#comics talk #the days of our lives of captain marvel

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