Gene Colan - Captain Marvel 3 Page 16

Never mind what they all say, the Green and White version of Captain Marvel has always looked cooler than cool to me! And he's very likely to remain that way!

Yes, I know all about his convoluted genesis. It's true that being born out of the necessity to counteract a possible scheme by a competitive editor does not look like a great impulse for thrilling stories.

Yes, I also know that Gene Colan thought very little of the character, especially his costume that, to him, looked like what a fifth-rate imitator could have done when trying to rip-off Iron Man's armor.

Yes, I know that Roy Thomas has now freely admitted that his very own Green and White color selection for the good Captain's Space Suit was a catastrophic mistake...

Still, when he burst on the scene with the first in-depth look into the mysterious Krees that had been standing in the shadows of the FF or the Inhumans, I was hooked by the adventures of Captain Marvel!...

And I don't care about all the so-called mistakes, the scripts supposedly written during sleep or the art drawn with the feet and considerable reluctance, this is a bona-fide Silver Age series with all the right ingredients in place!

We have it all on this page: the classic Soap Opera situation with Captain Marvel (under the guise of deceased bad guy Walter Lawson) mixes with a full-of-suspicions head of security (Carol Danvers, soon-to-be Ms Marvel, soon-to-be Binary, soon-to-be Captain Marvel... Yes, I know!) under the watchful, but benevolent eyes of General Briggs. But, soon, action calls and our hero quickly dons his costume before soaring into space...

I mean, how could you go wrong with that?

An entangled situation, mixed priorities, a hero doomed to be scorned on two worlds, good surefire villains (The Sentry, The Super-Skrull, The Sub-Mariner) and, above all truly fantastic art by Gene Colan (check that last panel!), this spells Greatness all over!

And, just as if it was not enough, this very page is one of the handful where Roy Thomas has added his own artistic contribution! This issue of Captain Marvel has the distinction of sporting half a dozen pages where some panels are enhanced by Zipatone which has been applied by Roy Thomas himself. Apparently, he decided that once was enough and never repeated the experience, but this extra touch makes for an quirky additional curio that, I feel, fits in very nicely with the overall behind-the-scenes over-complicated story of Marvel's Captain Marvel...