Marvel Just Added Another Twist To Captain Marvel’s Origin Story

Carol Danvers has had as many interpretations of how she became a superhero as she’s had superhero mantles themselves — but the first trailer for her solo movie was not the only new take on it we got this week. Her latest comic series just made us question everything we thought we knew about her origins.

The Life of Captain Marvel has been promising from the get-go to dive deep into, well, the life of Captain Marvel, teasing a major revelation about Carol’s endlessly complex comic origins.

But so far, its reveals have been more of the personal variety, as Carol finds herself heading home to Maine to deal with anxieties over her father — only for even more family drama to arise. But Life of Captain Marvel #3 — by Margaret Stohl, Carlos Pacheco, Rafael Fonteriz, Marcio Menyz, Marguerite Sauvage, and Clayton Cowles — might have finally given us a hint of what that game-changing revelation is, and it really might alter Carol’s history as we know it forever.

One of the underlying plot threads of Life of Captain Marvel — which has primarily focused on Carol learning that her deceased father had a long-term affair, something her mother kept hidden from her for years — has been the arrival of a Kree soldier, brought by the inadvertent activation of a mysterious device found among Carol’s dad’s belongings.

We’ve been lead to assume that the Kree is just here for the device, but a revelation from Carol’s brother Joe complicates things as to why Carol’s dad had a Kree device in the first place:

Mr. Danvers wasn’t just having an affair. He was having an affair with an alien! But that’s not the only complication Carol faces when the Kree and its drones start causing havoc in town. The warrior eventually tracks down Carol’s house, and as she suits up to defend her mother and brother, Ma Danvers throws the actual wrench in the works of this issue. The Kree soldier isn’t there for the device. They’re there for her.

Because she’s Kree too — which is a huge twist on why Carol became a superhero in the first place.

Although it’s been shifted around a few times in the comics, there’s always been at least one consistency about how Carol became imbued with the powers of the original Captain Marvel, Mar-Vell — it was an accident.

Caught by a blast from a Kree weapon known as the psyche magnitron, Carol’s human DNA was fused with Kree DNA (Mar-Vell’s, specifically), transforming her into a superhero. But now, that doesn’t seem like it was actually the case.

If her mother was Kree all along, then Carol’s always been a Human-Kree hybrid. She would always have developed superpowers — it’s just that maybe the encounter with the psyche-magnitron gave what was already within Carol a genetic kickstart. But being superhuman, becoming the hero she is now, was it all down to fate, rather than happenstance in the wake of a random accident?

There’s clearly much more to Carol’s story that we’ve yet to find out. There are still two issues of The Life of Captain Marvel left, but it seems like the life of Captain Marvel’s mum has become just as interesting as Carol’s herself.