Before Captain Marvel was Captain Marvel, someone else was Captain Marvel. And that someone else was a dude. Someone else was Captain Marvel before him, too.

The nominatively deterministic history of Captain Marvel—Carol Danvers, Earth pilot with alien superpowers, hero of a Marvel movie coming out in March—in fact is also the history of women superheroes and how comic books have changed over their 80 years.

So armor up; let's get to it.

A Mar-vellous Origin

When Marvel Comics introduced Carol Danvers in 1968, she was a supporting character in the publisher’s book Captain Marvel, which was about an alien soldier named Mar-Vell (yeah, I know) who protects the Earth with what's essentially an augmented Superman powerset—flight, durability, strength, and so on.

Another wrinkle: this Captain Marvel isn’t DC Comics' Captain Marvel, who also had an augmented Superman powerset but was actually a plucky orphan named Billy Batson gifted with magic powers by a wizard. When Billy said the word “Shazam!”—an acronym for the abilities of Samson, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, Mercury, and yes, I know—he was transformed into a strapping, red-besuited monster fighter. Created just a year after Superman by CC Beck and Bill Parker for Fawcett Comics, that Captain Marvel couldn’t defeat the lawsuit that DC launched in the 1950s, claiming infringement on Superman. DC eventually absorbed Fawcett and the Marvel family into mainline Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman continuity, but eventual legal trouble with Marvel Comics resulted, decades later, in the character being known only as Shazam, which had been the name of the Wizard. (See: Frankenstein.) DC Entertainment's Shazam movie comes out in April, and as far as I know he’ll be the only superhero who can’t say his own name without losing his powers.

(Also, what happens to Billy's body when Shazam lightning-bolts into the picture is the subject of some dispute. Is it Billy’s 13-year-old brain in the new body, as the upcoming movie seems to suggest? Does the replaced body go dormant in some alternate universe? That’s what the writer Alan Moore eventually suggested in his grim 1980s take on the character, Miracleman, itself based on a more direct British ripoff of Captain Marvel called Marvelman, which was changed in the US for, again, legal reasons. And, and, at one point Marvel's Captain Marvel had the same problem, sharing space with a teenager; the two switched places between our universe and the alternate Negative Zone. Tired yet? Good.)

Back to Carol Danvers! She got killed in a Captain Marvel fight, but only comic-book killed, because she came back in the 1970s. It turned out her exposure to the energies of an alien machine called the Pysche-Magnetron gave her the same powers as Captain Marvel … so she put on a gratuitously revealing version of his costume (super-men get body suits and armor; super-women all too often get bikinis) and took the name Ms. Marvel. Which opens up a whole other conversation.

They'll Be Miss-ing You

The naming of women superheroes is, as TS Eliot kind of said, a serious matter. For years, decades even, women superheroes were often gender-swapped versions of existing male characters. And patriarchy didn’t stop there. Did Superman have a Superwoman? No! (Well, yes, but it’s complicated.) He had Supergirl. And so too we had Batgirl, Hawkgirl, Miss Arrowette, Miss Martian, Mary Marvel, Spider-Girl, She-Hulk, She-Thing … the naming was uncreative at best, infantilizing at worst. (A major exception: Catwoman, Batman’s forever foe and romantic partner. She started out as the Cat and then got needlessly specific.)

Now, before Batgirl there was a Batwoman, created as a foil and love interest for Batman (and to show that there was nothing untoward going on between Batman and Robin). But she was too equal, and eventually the publisher wrote her out, recapitulating the biblical myth of Lilith, Adam’s all-too-equal wife in the Garden of Eden before he complained to God and had her kicked out in favor of Eve, who was nominally more compliant until the whole apple thing. Like Lilith—who was cursed with infertility and forced to haunt the night collecting semen spilled during masturbation, becoming mother to the seductive sex demons the incubi and succubi (and grandmother, then, to all the vampires)—Batwoman, too, has a more interesting side story. Not that interesting, but interesting. Nowadays she’s a former soldier, a lesbian, kicking a lot of ass, and wearing arguably the best costume in comics today. She’s scheduled to show up in the Arrowverse of DC-based television shows on the CW this season, potentially in advance of her own show.