Captain Marvel #3: Do you know the way to the Negative Zone?

Alyssa Wong and Jan Bazaldua continue their run on Captain Marvel, and it’s a bit of a doozy! Yuna Yang broke into Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Santorum, where she battles a giant purple dragon with white hair (it’s clearly Clea folks), we get one step closer to finding out who’s behind the Darkforce energy vampire, the Omen! Joining the team this issue is artist Ruari Coleman! So without further delay let’s get into the review!

I’m a super big member of the Carol Corps. I’ve got a collection going all the way back to her first solo, all the way back in 1977, and have followed her through the years, watching her get brutalized in the Avengers (we all know about the issue where she’s raped, and forced to go to Limbo with her rapist/child Marcus), as well as her transformation into Binary, where she joined the Starjammers. Unfortunately from this point she’d only make sporadic appearances, until rejoining the Avengers when Kurt Busiek and the late, great George Perez would return the team to greatness in the late 90’s, and she’d be reborn as Warbird. 

After a few years she’d return to her role as Ms. Marvel, where she’d enjoyed great success with the Brian Reed solo book, until Marvel decided to put all of their marketing behind Carol as Captain Marvel, making her the publishing face of their superhero universe. This promotion would be a big point of contention between her fans, and it was most certainly messy. Some disliked the name change, the costume, but it’s been over a decade, and Kamala has successfully made the name of Ms. Marvel, and the iconography that came with the title all her own. 

She’d have several series since her promotion to Captain Marvel, apart of several teams of Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and head of a revamped Alpha Flight serving as a galactic peacekeeping force, with none really catching on until 2019, when Kelly Thompson and Carmen Carnero would launch her into her most recently cancelled series (that I wrote a very touching 1500 word goodbye to earlier this year), just to be relaunched with rising star writer Alyssa Wong and Stormbreaking artist Jan Bazaldua, and the team is just getting started.

Wong’s story introduces Yuna Yang, a female sidekick in the vein of Rick Jones, where the two women are bound to each other through the Nega Bands that were stolen from Genis Vell. It’s a situation that’s very familiar with Captain Marvel fans, dating all the way back to the 60’s, where Roy Thomas and Gil Kane would bond Mar-Vell and Jones through the bands. The same would happen to Jones and Genis-Vell, Mar’s clone’s son, 20 years later during the Avengers Forever maxi, by Busiek and the late, great Carlos Pacheco. The two would enjoy two solo series in the early 2000’s by comics legend, Peter David, and a whole plethora of amazing artists, who’d chart Genis’s adventures, that would eventually end a few years later, with Genis ending up dead, only to return earlier this year in the War of the Marvels storyline.  

The thing that gets muddy is why the need for Carol having this part of the Marvel mythology, after having her powers being internally generated, making the bands moot. Top that off with Yuna Yang, who is still trying to find her place in the universe. She certainly has potential to become a fan favorite, given the time and space to develop a sense of who she is, and why suddenly Carol now is in possession of the Nega Bands, and why they switch places in and out of the Negative Zone. Why hasn’t that really plagued this group? Why all of a sudden? Also, what’s the Omen’s plot? Who is her master? Sure, we realize who the Omen is, but who is it that’s her master? I’m all for a mystery, but some of these questions need to have a satisfying ending, or I fear this series could go the way of the pre-Thompson run.