15 Captain Marvel comics you need to read before seeing the movie

Captain Marvel: Rise of Alpha Flight (Cover image via Marvel)

5. Captain Marvel Vol. 1: Rise of Alpha Flight

Though modern-day Captain Marvel has managed to elude some of the more cringe-worthy tropes of comic superheroes (she’s got a full-body supersuit, for one, with no oddly-placed cutouts or overly strange footwear choices), she can’t escape everything. Here, her particular problem is one familiar to Spider-Man: endless reboots.

You can’t really blame Danvers herself. It seems like the higher-ups at Marvel can’t help themselves, even if they’re keeping on the same great writer they had before, in the person of Kelly Sue DeConnick. Thankfully, however, the great majority of Captain Marvel’s recent reboots are actually fun and readable.

Readers also must tread carefully thanks to the inclusion of Alpha Flight, the famed superhero fighting team, except this may not be the Alpha Flight that you’re thinking about. The very first team of that name was a spin-off from the X-Men series, consisting of an assemblage of Canadian heroes like Northstar, Aurora, Snowbird, and, yes, a heavy named Sasquatch.

Captain Marvel’s Alpha Flight, however, is markedly different. They are now “Earth’s first line of cosmic defense” and include some familiar faces like Aurora and Sasquatch (whose real name is Walter Langkowski, by the way). Newer faces include Abigail Brand, who first appeared in 2004, and Wendy Kawasaki, a character introduced by Kelly Sue DeConnick in her run on Captain Marvel with illustrator Filipe Andrade.

This was really the next step for Captain Marvel’s character after DeConnick re-introduced her as a spacefaring badass. Carol worked more or less on her own for a while, but the new element of a team introduces some needed complications to her story.