A Captain’s Chronicles
Retrieving an intelligence matrix unit that contained data of world-devourer Galan, AKA Galactus, destroying a planet, Mar-Vell lost the matrix while rescuing an endangered fellow soldier. Reprimanded over the loss, Mar-Vell was assigned to the Imperial starcruiser Pama, whose crew included many political dissidents, for a suicide mission to rescue or terminate the lost Grand Admiral Devros. There, Mar-Vell met the Pama’s commanding officer, Commander Zen-Pram and his No. 2, Colonel Yon-Rogg, as well as the ship’s main medic, Una.
Immediately attracted to each other, Mar-Vell and Una became close friends. Unknown to Mar-Vell, Yon-Rogg wanted Una for himself and hoped to eliminate his new romantic rival. The team encountered Devros, a Kree-Brood hybrid who wanted to turn Kree into hybrids like himself. Mar-Vell slew him and crippled his ship and rescued Yon-Rogg, who was credited with the mission’s success as highest-ranking surviving officer.
Mar-Vell and Una were reassigned to the starship Helion’s crew, commanded by Yon-Rogg, and tasked to study Earth to see if it posed a danger to the Kree Empire. Surreptitiously trying to eliminate his rival, Yon-Rogg ordered Mar-Vell to undergo a mission alone, instead of with the regulation landing party. Though the young Captain knew Yon-Rogg would not stop scheming to kill him, Mar-Vell swore to return to Una. When a small airplane inadvertently took a laser blast meant for him, Mar-Vell found, by seeming coincidence, that the dead pilot looked very similar to himself. Taking the dead man’s identity of Dr. Walter Lawson as his cover, Mar-Vell worked at Cape Canaveral military base to study their missile defense systems. There he met the Cape’s security chief, Carol Danvers, who immediately distrusted “Lawson” and started to closely investigate his background, but was attracted to Mar-Vell, not knowing then they were the same man.
When inert Kree Sentry 459 was secretly reactivated at the base by Yon-Rogg, Mar-Vell went public in his Kree uniform to defeat the Sentry. Dubbed “Captain Marvel” by soldiers mishearing his name, Mar-Vell defended himself and humanity from the Sentry and against such foes such as Kl’rt, AKA Super-Skrull, and the grotesquely mutated kidnapper Metazoid, as well as Yon-Rogg’s attempts to trick Mar-Vell into committing treason against the Empire. As Mar-Vell learned more about humanity, he began questioning where his true allegiance lay.
Investigating the real Lawson’s history, Captain Marvel discovered Lawson’s ties to the subversive Organization and battled Lawson’s giant robotic assassin Cyberex, which Lawson apparently built and programmed to kill himself as a test run. Danvers pursued her growing interest in Captain Marvel, which he neither encouraged nor discouraged, at least consciously, straining Mar-Vell’s relationship with his lover Una. When Ronan the Accuser ordered Mar-Vell to recruit the Organization as possible allies of the Kree, he instead destroyed them. Ronan ordered Mar-Vell executed for this, which Yon-Rogg gleefully arranged; however, the execution was interrupted by attacking Aakon warriors, who wished to avenge their commander’s death in an earlier conflict with Mar-Vell. Una, who had come to warn Mar-Vell of his punishment, was hit by a stray shot during the battle. Swearing vengeance on Yon-Rogg, Mar-Vell stole a rocket from Cape Canaveral, fleeing Earth and his fellow Kree. Despite his best efforts, Una died, and Mar-Vell interred her body on an asteroid near the planet Mars’ orbit. Yon-Rogg seized Mar-Vell’s rocket with a magnetic ray, sending it spinning out of control from the Sol system.
Months later, a half-starved Mar-Vell reached a mysterious planet and met the enigmatic Zo (secretly Zarek), who restored Mar-Vell’s health. In exchange for enough power to kill Yon-Rogg, Mar-Vell pledged himself to Zo’s service. Zo enhanced Mar-Vell’s strength and gave him the abilities to teleport and cast illusions. Returning to Earth, Mar-Vell found himself wanted by the authorities for the theft of the rocket. Angry that Mar-Vell had not yet killed Yon-Rogg, Zo ordered Mar-Vell to the Kree’s galaxy to fulfill their bargain. On Kree-Lar, Ronan accused Mar-Vell of creating a powerful magnetic generator to destroy the planet. Mar-Vell destroyed the generators, and both Kree were teleported to the Hall of Judgment, where the Supreme Intelligence revealed Zarek and Ronan as the true masterminds behind the generators, and exonerated Mar-Vell as merely their pawn. After the two villains were defeated, the Intelligence gave Mar-Vell a new uniform and briefly allowed him to keep his new strength and ability to travel space and hyperspace unaided.
On his way back to Earth, Mar-Vell was hurled into the Negative Zone, where the Intelligence secretly enabled him to contact Avengers sidekick Rick Jones telepathically, leading Jones to a hidden Kree base. There Marvel convinced Jones to don a pair of Nega-Bands; slamming them together allowed Jones and Mar-Vell to trade places as needed, with one of them in the Negative Zone and one of them in the positive universe. Mar-Vell then confronted Yon-Rogg, who had found the long-lost Kree Psyche-Magnitron device. During their fight, Yon-Rogg’s hostage Carol Danvers was accidentally irradiated by the overloading Psyche-Magnitron. Choosing to rescue Danvers, Mar-Vell left Yon-Rogg to die in the resulting explosion. Danvers survived the Magnitron blast which gave her half-Kree physiology and superhuman powers like Mar-Vell’s thus becoming Ms. Marvel.
After encountering Bruce Banner, AKA the Hulk, Mar-Vell eventually accessed the Fantastic Four’s Negative Zone portal, which successfully separated him from Jones; however, weeks in the Zone had left Mar-Vell overcharged with its radiation, and the Avengers and Jones rushed to find him before he inadvertently caused a chain reaction that could destroy Earth. Desperate to return to his own people and deprived of his Nega-Bands, Mar-Vell headed to Cape Canaveral to steal space transportation, but the Avengers captured him before he could succeed. His excess energy was drained, leaving Mar-Vell unconscious.
Meanwhile, back on Kree-Lar, Ronan overthrew the Supreme Intelligence and reactivated Sentry 459 before traveling to Earth. Ronan had the Sentry bring Mar-Vell to an Arctic citadel housing the “Plan Atavus” de-evolver machine intended to transform Earth, but the Avengers helped Mar-Vell destroy Plan Atavus while Ronan was summoned back to the Kree Empire to deal with another outburst of the perennial Kree-Skrull War. The Super-Skrull, disguised as Carol Danvers, took Mar-Vell prisoner and brought him to the Skrull homeworld along with Avengers members Pietro Maximoff, AKA Quicksilver, and Wanda Maximoff, AKA Scarlet Witch. Skrull Emperor Dorrek VII forced Mar-Vell to create an Omni-Wave device for use against his fellow Kree, or else he would kill the two Avengers. Mar-Vell secretly completed the device and used it to create an extended illusion of himself still building the Omni-Wave; this bought time for his fellow captives to recover, during which Mar-Vell and Skrull Princess Anelle secretly shared a romantic interlude.
Meanwhile, the deposed Supreme Intelligence secretly had Rick Jones brought to Kree-Lar, where it was still held captive. While the Intelligence helped Jones trigger his latent Destiny Force powers, Mar-Vell tried to use the Omni-Wave projector to contact the Avengers through Jones, whom he believed was still on Earth. The Intelligence showed Jones how to use his newfound psi powers to end the war by freezing every Kree and Skrull soldier in place. This fatally strained Rick, but Mar-Vell saved him by merging their life forces, binding them closer than before.
Mar-Vell remained inert inside Jones for weeks until an emotional outburst Jones had while arguing with Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, and it briefly freed his mind from its dormancy. Mar-Vell tried to warn Rick that their merger had destabilized his molecular structure, but Jones refused to listen. Eventually Jones found his way to Dr. Benjamin Savannah, whose photon-ray machine stabilized Jones’ structure and gave Mar-Vell new solar-absorbing powers. When Jules Carter, AKA Megaton the Nuclear Man, kidnapped Jones and brought him to the Arctic Kree base to drain him of Mar-Vell’s energies, Mar-Vell spotted another pair of Nega-Bands there. Jones put them on and switched out with Mar-Vell, who took the ready-to-detonate Megaton to the upper atmosphere where he could safely explode.
Seeking the Cosmic Cube in order to remake reality, the mad Titan Thanos teleported Mar-Vell to Saturn’s moon, Titan, where he forced him to switch with Jones and copied Jones’ memories into Titan’s supercomputer Integral Synaptic Anti-Anionic Computer (ISAAC). Thanos then sifted the memories to find the Cube. Freed with the help of Titan’s deposed leader Mentor and his son Eros, Mar-Vell returned to Earth to warn the Avengers. During a subsequent attack by Thanos ally Basil Sandhurst, AKA Controller, Mar-Vell was taken on a spiritual journey by the cosmic entity Eon to prepare him for a new role as Protector of the Universe. Choosing the ways of the protector over those of the warrior, Mar-Vell received Cosmic Awareness powers from Eon and returned to Avengers Mansion, helping the team destroy the Cube and defeat Thanos.
Meanwhile, the exiled Zarek and five like-minded Blue Kree formed the Lunatic Legion to further their Blue racial pride agenda. Their self-exploding agent Robert Hunter, AKA Nitro, stole a canister of the nerve gas Compound 13 and clashed with Mar-Vell, who defeated him. Exposed to the gas during the battle, Mar-Vell was knocked out. The Nega-Bands automatically switched Mar-Vell back to the Negative Zone, where he stayed in stasis while Jones was taken to a Chicago hospital for observation. During this time, the unconscious Mar-Vell was imprisoned by Negative Zone ruler Annihilus; to save Mar-Vell, Jones discovered how to use his mind to enter Mar-Vell’s body and move it to safety.
Once back in the positive universe, Mar-Vell traveled to the Moon in search of the Lunatic Legion, destroying robotic Lunatic Legion agent Nimrod the Hunter along the way. Mar-Vell then faced both the Legion and lunar-based cosmic observer Uatu the Watcher, who envied Mar-Vell’s universal role. Despite Uatu and other obstacles, Mar-Vell defeated the entire Legion, thanks in part to switching places with Rick Jones at a crucial moment.
After a harrowing encounter with the interstellar parasite Starleech that had taken over medic Una’s body (reanimated earlier by Eon), Mar-Vell and Jones traveled to Hala to warn the Supreme Intelligence of the Lunatic Legion’s plans against it. Instead, they were ambushed by the Legion with the Intelligence’s blessing. The Intelligence then revealed much of its meddling in Mar-Vell’s life up to that point and revealed its intentions to absorb Jones’ mind into its collective for use in the coming War of Three Galaxies. To wear them down, the Intelligence sent the two to the far reaches of the Kree Empire, where they encountered crazy alien cowboys, the Stranger, Drax the Destroyer, life-killing robotic Null-trons, and a journey through an Infinity Gem (specifically, the Mind gem).
The Intelligence then allowed the duo to return to Hala, where it intended to use the rare Millennia Bloom flower to reshape them into the ultimate weapon for its personal use. However, Mar-Vell had Jones trigger a solar flare from the spaceship Star of Vengance, forcing the Intelligence to overload itself to protect Hala from the deadly radiation. Mar-Vell finally ended his bond with Jones by sending the Super-Adaptoid into the Negative Zone in Jones’ place. Alerted by dissenting Kree scientists Minn-Erva, AKA Doctor Minerva, and Falzon of the Kree Science Council’s plan to trigger the War, starting with the Skrull Empire, Mar-Vell and Inhuman King Blackagar Boltagon, AKA Black Bolt, traveled to Hala, where they exposed the main proponent of the War as a Skrull agent.
After helping Adam Warlock and the Avengers stop the reborn Thanos’ quest to give his paramour Death a gift of stellar genocide, Mar-Vell aided the Avengers against the cosmic threat of Michael Korvac. Mar-Vell moved to Denver, Colorado, where he briefly worked at the Colorado Observatory, fought the energy drainer Deathgrip, and accepted his destiny as a “danger magnet.”
While wandering the streets of Denver, Captain Marvel was attacked by a vengeful Drax the Destroyer, who wrongfully believed him to have killed Thanos and thus deprived Drax of his reason for existence. Their battle was interrupted by ISAAC, who claimed Titan was under attack by Thanos’ followers. Once there, the two quickly learned that Thanos had set a delayed fail-safe program in ISAAC and found themselves fighting traps set by the evil ISAAC’s godlike creations. After defeating the Earth controller Lord Gaea and his minions, Drax and Mar-Vell fell victim to the drugged wine of faunish Dionysus, who preferred partying to killing, and had the two heroes taken to Paradise, where they faced beast-mistress Elysius. Groggy, Captain Marvel told her that her Paradise was false if it was nothing more than a killing ground; when Elysius demanded a reason not to kill Mar-Vell, he provided one by allowing her pet griffins to see the cosmic calm he possessed. Seeing her killer griffins thus tamed, Elysius decided to trust her beasts’ instincts and chose to join Mar-Vell and Drax in stopping ISAAC.
Freeing the other Titans, Mar-Vell faced off against the reality manipulator Chaos, who trapped Mar-Vell in a spatial abyss with his “brother” Tartarus. Mar-Vell quickly defeated the tentacled creature but was unable to escape the abyss until Drax and Elysius destroyed Chaos. Finally disabling ISAAC, Captain Marvel and Drax quickly returned to Earth to stop the electric-powered Stellarax from destroying Washington, D.C. while conquering the Earth.
Returning to Titan, Mar-Vell and Drax faced off against ISAAC-Prime (ISAAC animating a physical form), alongside his re-empowered servants Chaos, Lord Gaea, and Stellarax. At ISAAC-Prime’s mercy, Captain Marvel used his powers to link minds with ISAAC-Prime and forced it to finally experience the joys and hells of life as organics know it; the experience purged Thanos’ programming from ISAAC and it returned to its former purpose of running Titan’s life support machines.
Mar-Vell returned with his new lover Elysius to Earth, where Eon enigmatically instructed him to help humanity gain their destiny as heralds of a galactic golden age, and to remain true to himself and his destiny as Guardian of Earth and Protector of the Universe. Later semiretired from heroics, Mar-Vell and Elysius returned to Titan. Soon after, however, Mar-Vell learned that Compound 13 had given him cancer, and that he only had months to live. Despite the scientific efforts of Reed Richards, AKA Mister Fantastic, Dr. Stephen Strange, AKA Doctor Strange, Hank McCoy, AKA Beast, and Thor Odinson, AKA Thor, none could cure Mar-Vell’s particular form of cancer. Many Earth heroes and others gathered at a dying Mar-Vell’s bedside to await the end, including his friend Starfox, whom he made promise to take care of Elysius after his death. The spirit of Thanos also visited a comatose Mar-Vell and allowed him one last fight before entering Death’s realm.
After his death, a lonely Elysius used Mar-Vell’s genetic material to conceive a son, Genis, and later a daughter, Phyla—the family they long discussed but never had. Meanwhile, Princess Anelle’s long-ago liaison with Mar-Vell had also produced a child, raised on Earth as the supposedly human Teddy Altman, who only recently learned of his true parentage.
Though Mar-Vell has not always been left to rest. His spirit was visited by the Silver Surfer during a journey through Death’s realm and Mar-Vell’s ghost has also been forced to serve in the Legion of the Unliving under both En Dwi Gast, AKA Grandmaster and Eric Williams, AKA Grim Reaper. Thanos resurrected Mar-Vell briefly to talk him out of using the Reality Gem to force Death to love him. In a bid for godhood, Negative Zone ruler Lord Syphonn stole Mar-Vell's corpse, but failed and the body returned to its grave.
A recent experiment in the Negative Zone by Robert Reynolds, AKA Sentry, Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, and Mister Fantastic, created an evident space/time anomaly that seemingly drew Captain Marvel from what they assumed to be Earth-616’s past. Iron Man made Mar-Vell the unofficial warden of the Initiative’s Negative Zone prison 42, partly to keep his return as quiet as possible and to keep an eye on his well-being, not suspecting this Mar-Vell was actually an escaped Skrull sleeper agent not yet awakened to his true nature.
Upon his return to Earth with a bit of amnesia and sans Cosmic Awareness, he inadvertently revealed his return to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Starr Steel heiress Julia Starr starts up a Church of Hala dedicated to their Savior Mar-Vell with her at the head of it as Mother Starr. He soon discovered his true self as a sleeper Skrull agent but decided to dedicate his life to bringing peace to the world and joins Starr on a mission in Sudan. While there, a bomb from an unknown party killed Starr and Iron Man, believing Mar-Vell to be out of control sent Ms. Marvel to send him back to the Negative Zone.
S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Heather Sante confronted him, and he informed her that he is truly Mar-Vell despite his body’s origins and that Khn’nr’s mind was seemingly dead inside of him. While Iron Man later announced to the world his belief that the supposedly resurrected Captain Mar-Vell was actually a time traveler who had since returned to his own time, Mar-Vell chose to remain hidden on Earth as its sworn protector against the coming invasion of the Skrulls.
