In the U-Decide competition, Captain Marvel is the clear winner by any sane standard. It jumped up about 70 spots from the bottom of Diamond's sales charts to closer to the top, it has a strong story and art and it actually came out on time, which puts it one foot ahead of Jema's Marville. David has created in this issue a jumping-on point that references previous continuity, but which is a clear jumping-on point for new readers, taking Marvel's powers and personality into a whole new area and downplaying the in-jokey Rick Jones stuff that so many fans loved but which probably kept new readers away from the book. Throw in Chris Cross working in a "painted pencils" style with Chris Sotomayor, which could use some tinkering but looks gorgeous in places, and you have a reinvigorated book with plenty of hype behind it.
Captain Marvel, for those who came in late, has what can be called pretty generic powers. Flight, super strength, toughness, energy blasts, he's your average cookie-cutter super-hero. What he has that sets him apart is cosmic awareness, a mind-boggling and vaguely defined ability that puts him in tune with the universe, sort of Spider-Man's "Spidey Sense" mixed with Daredevil's "Radar Sense" and given a big boost in range (like, throughout the cosmos.) In this story arc, David seems like he's getting ready to explore what that kind of knowledge and awareness would do to someone, and how it might affect their sanity.
In David's mind, this kind of awareness and responsibility is beginning to make Genis (a.k.a. Captain Marvel) a bit cold and perhaps even psychotic. Watching the slow build, with Rick Jones helpless inside his head to make any change, is fascinating. At the same time, it lets David comment on a couple social issues, including the realities of drugs on the street and a very gripping sequence about suicide bombers in Israel. And the choice that Marvel is forced to make in the end, while just this side of over-the-top, is an effective depiction of a worst-case scenario for someone with cosmic awareness.
Just as David has taken the story in a new direction, Chris Cross has used this opportunity to spice up his artwork. I'm wary of the painted pencils style, and even with a colorist as talented as Chris Sotomayor, this issue has ample reasons why. Some of the sequences, such as Rick Jones's Tai Chi workout or Marvel's first encounter with the dead alien are hard to read and sketchy. The rest, though, are gorgeous, including a fully-realized look at the suicide bombing, some spectacular landscapes and use of cosmic power and an impressively detailed look at the alien races of the Marvel Universe. I suspect that once the kinks are worked out, as they had to be with X-Treme X-Men, this book will look uniformly fantastic.
Captain Marvel had been losing my interest, quite honestly, and I'm still not crazy about the changes in the Rick and Marlo relationship, which was a big part of my interest in the book. However, David is taking the more commercially viable step of making Genis an interesting lead character rather than a guest-star in his own book, and I must confess that I can't wait to see what happens next.
