Ahead of Captain Marvel's big-screen debut next March, Marvel Entertainment has made a significant change in the comic book history of the character — one that gives her a brand-new, movie-friendly origin story.

The fourth issue of the Life of Captain Marvel series, by Margaret Stohl, Carlos Pacheco and Erica D'Urso, reveals that Carol Danvers did not actually gain superpowers through exposure to an alien device known as the Psyche-Magnetron in an accident related to Marvel's first, male, Captain Marvel as shown in 1977's Ms. Marvel No. 2 — an origin story that had gone unchallenged for the past 40 years to this point.

Instead, the comic established that Carol's mother is, in fact, a member of the alien race the Kree, making Carol a Kree-human hybrid from birth as opposed to the result of an accident related to a male hero. The Psyche-Magnetron, instead of altering Carol's DNA, "activated" Carol's inherent superpowers, her mother explains, making them in her words, "not borrowed. Not a gift. Not an accident" — a purposeful shift that befits the company's repositioning of the character as a model of female empowerment.