Day Seventy-Three: Genis Was A Friend Of Mine
Today we're looking at Captain Marvel. Not the goofy DC Shazam one, who can't use his own name on the front of any of his comics even though he's been around since the Cretaceous Period. Not the floppy-haired Marvel Comics one who died of cancer and who has recently returned, seemingly as a bit of a pathetic-o. Nor am I talking about the black female one who was in the Avengers for a bit and has since changed her codename more often than many Avengers readers change their underpants. Nor even the lesbian one who has now decided that being Captain Marvel was about as exclusive as being Paris Hilton's boyfriend and has now decided to buy into the Quasar franchise instead. Nope, we're looking at the partying, drinking, cranky, immature, completely crazy dead one, Genis-Vell.
Back in 1993, nobody was really that bothered about Captain Marvel. He was the dead superhero, great, big wowee. He wasn't the subject of any grand schemes or fan campaigns designed to bring him back into the land of the living. Cosmic heroes, though, were having a bit of a minor renaissance, largely due to the very popular crossover event Infinity Gauntlet, which had seen Marvel's heroes, led by Adam Warlock, go up against the mad Titan Thanos. In the aftermath of that, Marvel held an event across all of their annuals for 1993, each of which had to introduce a new character. Some of these were far from inspired (Thor fights... Flame! Namor battles... the Assassin!) but some weren't bad ideas (amputee heroes Annex and Wildstreak and hellbound loser Charon) and some were just mental (Captain America teams up with the Battling Bantam, the boxer who dresses like a rooster!). In terms of long-term significance to the Marvel Universe, though, only a few of the characters introduced have had lasting effects, or indeed made more than one or two token appearances afte their debuts. The X-Cutioner became a minor recurring villain for the X-Men and Nate Grey, as did Bloodwraith for the Avengers. X-Treme (gotta love the name) was rumoured to be the third Summers brother for a while, and of course the Silver Surfer annual gave us Genis-Vell aka Legacy, the vat-grown artificial son of Captain Marvel.
After a starring role in Avengers Forever, he graduated to his own title, which ran for a total of sixty issues over two volumes under the auspice of Peter David. His sales were never very high, though, although he benefited briefly from Marvel's ill-advised "U-Decide" stunt (where David, Joe Quesada and publisher Bill Jemas each launched a book, and the one with the highest sales after six months would continue as an ongoing, effectively challenging the Captain Marvel readership to do a bit of evangelism in order to save their book - they needn't have worried, though, as Quesada's was horribly late and Jemas's was just horrible). Following that, he wound up in the pages of Nicieza's New Thunderbolts, before being unceremoniously offed in recent months.
The fact that Genis is now gone, while his rather dull father is back on the scene, is a galling one. Genis was an atypical hero - he didn't agonise over the fact that he wasn't experienced, and when it was pointed out to him that he was, he would generally take a strop. His cosmic awareness even drove him crazy, and he spent a year and a half of his regular series completely nuts and with a god complex. This was perhaps dragged out too long, but it was never predictable, and it was interesting to see the book turn from a cosmic superhero story where Genis and buddy Rick Jones would try to stop villains like the Magus or whoever into a game of cat and mouse between Rick and the by-now murderous Genis-Vell. Genis was a true original as far as Marvel heroes went - he wasn't just flawed, he was monumentally screwed up, and his road to being the hero he could have been was cut short by lack of sales followed by editorial edict and our old friend misplaced nostalgia.
It's not all doom and gloom, I suppose. Death is never final in the Marvel Universe, as we've seen so often over the past few years, and Nicieza left a get-out clause for Genis in the fact that his death was so ridiculously over-engineered that all that would be necessary to reverse it would be for some doohickey of Reed Richards's to overload and pull the disparate exploded energies of Genis back together in the comics equivalent of a wave of a hand and a magic word. Here's hoping he returns to retake the name back from whichever of the list of candidates is using his name at the time - after all, it's his legacy.
