Captain Marvel Shares Superman’s Forgotten Weakness
Warning: this article contains spoilers for Captain Marvel #24
In the world of superheroes, very few characters from either DC or Marvel Comics divide share the rarefied air of beings as powerful as Superman. But Carol Danvers’ Captain Marvel is one of those beings. What’s more interesting is the two have qualities in common, for example both of their power sets—in the comics at least—stem from alien genetics. Superman is supercharged from the interaction of Earth’s yellow sun with his Kryptonian physiology and Captain Marvel’s incredible abilities are born from her Kree-infused DNA. Oddly enough, her Kree name is Car-Ell, as seen in Margaret Stohl’s The Life of Captain Marvel series, and Superman’s Kryptonian name is Kal-El. The two were destined to be considered side by side, it seems. And now there's another similarity to add to the list.
In the latest issue of writer Kelly Thompson’s run on Captain Marvel, illustrated by Lee Garbett, readers discover that both Danvers and Kal-El have one more thing in common. It would appear that in both the DC Comics Universe and the Marvel Comics Universe, earth/alien hybrid champions whose powers are born of the cosmos share a weakness to supernatural forces, specifically: magic.
In the case of Superman, the character was just too powerful and readers soon grew tired of Kryptonite being brandished every time The Man of Steel needed to be slowed down or temporarily taken out of commission. When the Justice League was formed in 1960, creatives like writer Gardner Fox over at DC Comics had to find alternative ways to get Superman out of the way for the book’s other—newer or less popular—characters to shine. Otherwise, with Superman being as powerful as he is, every story would end with him saving the day. With Captain Marvel, this newest chink in her armor is revealed in the pages of Captain Marvel #24, in which the character has been transported to the post-apocalyptic world of Earth in the year 2052.
There she is joined by other surviving superheroes to contend with the despotic ruler of New Atlantis: Ove—who also happens to be the child of Namor and Enchantress, an incredibly powerful sorceress of Asgard. Though Captain Marvel and her team put up a good fight, she is quickly subdued by Enchantress’ magic. Sorcery it appears, as Enchantress points out, is a bit too “tricky” for the Marvel powerhouse and “Not something [she] can use a photon blast on,” a grim reality Danvers even admits to herself.
Is it just a coincidence then that two god-like powerful heroes, like Captain Marvel and Superman, share a fragility for the arcane? Not really. From a storytelling perspective, magic is by far the most convenient trope to use because it’s so abstract and flexible, the rules governing it are purposely opaque, and there is no shortage of magic-users in either comic book universe. There are deep magical and mythological traditions for writers to draw on, and from a literary standpoint the supernatural ages better than the pseudo-scientific. It’s also a pleasing juxtaposition to have space adventurers capable of withstanding the harshness of interstellar space be brought down by incantations and old forms of power that existed before humanity even understood what lay beyond the starry sky.
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