Captain Marvel’s iconic red, blue and gold costume is on full display in the new trailer for her upcoming stand-alone Marvel Cinematic Universe debut, which finds Carol Danvers searching for her origins, fighting intergalactic battles against the Skrulls, and preparing the universe for whatever the heck is happening in Avengers 4. But we also get a glimpse of her pre-hero threads: a green suit that with a blink-on/blink-off mohawk helmet.
The flight-suit inspired look, and the accompanying mohawk that has the internet buzzing over Brie Larson’s on-screen translation, might not exist at all if not for a dumb bet that writer Kelly Sue DeConnick made with artist Jamie McKelvie.
You see, when Carol Danvers became Captain Marvel in the comics, it wasn’t her first time as a superhero. She’d already been doing the saving the world gig for years, under a few different names — but mostly as Ms. Marvel. Her Ms. Marvel outfit was basically a swimsuit, thigh-high boots and a sash, not really the look the new series was going for.
DeConnick is the writer who forged Carol’s relaunch as Captain Marvel, which drove the character to a new prominence among Marvel fans and likely inspired a lot of the movie. She told Polygon that getting the right costume design was not an easy process, because Carol and the Captain Marvel name just didn’t have the cachet they do now.
Basically, there wasn’t a lot of money to spend on “pre-production.”
“So [editor Steve Wacker] sent some designs that were done in-house and I did not love them. And I was like, ‘Can we get Jamie McKelvie to do this?’ And he was like, ‘No, we don’t have the budget for it.’”
McKelvie (The Wicked + The Divine, Young Avengers) is a comics artist whose work is characterized not just by his draftsmanship but by a keen eye for contemporary fashion and design, an important tool in defining a character for the audience even when they’re not in a superhero costume. At the time, he was also a regular contributor to Project Rooftop, a blog created by comics industry folks as “a catalyst to improve costume design in the industry.”
So there were very good reasons for DeConnick to want him to design for Carol.
“I like to say I’m good at taking no for an answer, but I’m really not,” DeConnick told Polygon. “And so I kinda kept pushing for it. And Steve was like, ‘No. But you know ... if Jamie were to do a redesign ... just on his own, and you were to happen to come upon it and send it to me ... I might be able to get Marvel to pay for it.’
“And so I called Jamie and was like, ‘All right, I want you to make a bet with me. I bet if you do a Carol Danvers redesign for Captain Marvel that Marvel will buy the design from you. And if I win this bet, then I get a redesign and you get paid. And if I lose this bet, I will pay for the redesign.’”
DeConnick said she still has no idea whether McKelvie would have actually taken her up on that money, but her plan was to pay for it out of pocket if necessary. She admits that the whole thing didn’t make a lot of sense.
“My husband would have murdered me, because you don’t front money for billion-dollar companies. I mean, I would have murdered me, that’s nonsense.”
Fortunately for DeConnick, she won the bet: McKelvie published his redesign and Wacker convinced Marvel editors to buy it.
“It was extraordinary,” she said, “because he’s probably the best designer working — as far as the look of contemporary hero costumes goes ... He knocked it out of the park.”
McKelvie’s flight-suit inspired look used the classic Captain Marvel’s colors and emblem, topping it all off with a collapsible helmet that sweeps Carol’s hair up into a badass pseudo-mohawk (which we briefly saw in action in the first trailer for Captain Marvel). It even had a sash, in homage to her classic Ms. Marvel look.
Carol’s new costume struck such a chord that there was already fanart of her in it before Captain Marvel #1 (written by Kelly Sue DeConnick and drawn by Dexter Soy) hit shelves. Choice pieces of art were even featured in the issue. Fans of the new Captain Marvel — largely, but not exclusively, women — knitted hats, got tattoos and spread their love of comics in the name of the Carol Corps.
And, eight months later, Marvel executives had a script for a Carol Danvers movie on their desks.
Comments
If you’re going to screenshot the trailer, why would you pick a scene that doesn’t show the mohawk part of the mohawk costume?
By just6979 on 09.18.18 3:05pm
I feel like more needs to be said about this, because that’s a fast turnaround.
By Full_of_Spiders on 09.18.18 5:09pm
Yes and no. This was during the peak period of Marvel comics commissioning series as a sort of test chamber for movie ideas (Guardians had a similar trajectory) and they had several writers banging out scripts for secondary properties to work the ideas through to get to production. It’s both possible that the comic reboot was commissioned because Marvel wanted the property to be more portable to the movie screen and that this script was almost totally reworked before they started shooting it.
By dkaszor on 09.18.18 5:31pm
^^ right. this is kinda presented as a blind metric. A script is pretty easy to come by. there’s no clear indicator that it, a spec script circa april-ish 2013, would be anything close to resembling what’s coming out in march.
it might be, though!
By StarSlug on 09.18.18 5:56pm
That’s a very good comment, and also kinda what I was implying: that script would have been basically one arc into the comic series. They definitely gave Carol her comics revamp and push with a clear eye toward making her the "bigger" character she is today, but they wouldn’t actually have had any of that material on which to actually base the script, which I find very interesting.
(It’s also worth noting that for all the hubbub about "When’s Marvel going to give us our female-led superhero movie?!" they’ve been working on Captain Marvel in some form since 2009, and in earnest since Avengers went big.)
By Full_of_Spiders on 09.19.18 11:33am
I can’t immediately think Batman when I see that screenshot. Actually, the super-saturated effects at the end really remind me of DCEU too. And the "bring in an OP character to save the day" fallback (for A4, not this). I’m both excited for this movie and very wary.
By rogueContinuum on 09.18.18 9:03pm
I hope A4 has a cold open of Captain Marvel severing Thanos’s hand with a beam of light.
By Alcaste on 12.04.18 8:26am
Thankfully, they went with long-hair-styled-into-a-mohawk, which is what McKelvie’s redesign was supposed to be. Far too many artists since then confused it with an actual mohawk, quite irritatingly reinforcing the "strong woman=butch lesbian mohawk haircut" stereotype. It even affects the writing. In recent years Carol Danvers rarely feel like Carol Danvers anymore, but the stereotypical "strong, stern woman who takes no shit".
By Irving Lee on 09.19.18 2:01am
I am also of the opinion that a woman does not need to be masculine to be "strong."
So, a woman can’t be beautiful and strong? She can’t be feminine and strong? This just stems from our need to see everything in opposing dualities.
Democrats, Republicans.
Sega, Nintendo.
Marvel, DC.
Toyota, Honda.
Sony, Sharp.
Masculine woman = strong, Feminine woman = there for the male gaze.
Screw everything. Everything sucks. There sure as hell can be strong women who don’t look like men or act like men. That’s how I feel at least.
By RoyalBlues on 12.04.18 12:05pm
Ouch I can imagine that helmet taking some caught hair out when it turns on and off.
By Jetset_67 on 12.04.18 11:03am
I like the concept drawing so much more than the screenshot though….
By Biology4Me on 12.04.18 11:27am
Yeah… the concept looks real hair Vs. some broom being turned into a mohawk.
By WayneJetSki on 12.04.18 1:48pm
it’s like Marvel partnered with Hot Topic
By nos.is.lame on 12.04.18 11:56am
I can’t wait for this movie. I’m glad Monica Rombaeu is in the movie, and I hope she time-travels to the present-day MCU whenever Carol does. And I hope they have a whole friendly rivalry.
I do have problems with the writing though. From what we have seen so far, it’s just a hair on the side of overly expository. Remember; show us. Don’t tell us.
Still hyped, allthough it has gone down a bit.
By RoyalBlues on 12.04.18 12:12pm
But people keep saying ‘no more origin stories’ so they keep having to make an origin story that isn’t really (but it pretty much is) so they have to get all infodumpy with the stuff that came before or else they’d end up just making a standard origin story.
By krimhorn on 12.04.18 4:14pm
Say what you want about her old costume, at least it wasn’t another Superman Red blue yellow knockoff like the original Captain Marvel design and this design, that is basically that old design on a woman.
I like this costume best BTW, but it’s really just a modified Superman suit.
By JOhn1010101 on 12.04.18 2:33pm
Until you said that, I did not have that in my mind. But yeah, it is. And in some iterations, Dubz wears those colors too right? There is something about primary colors that makes for a good color scheme.
Even our favorite plumber wears it lol.
By RoyalBlues on 12.04.18 7:40pm
It makes me think of the Alan Moore comic Supreme (Superman knock off) and how Supreme has white hair, and a white and red outfit and it’s Wonder Woman knock off Glory also had white hair, and a red and white outfit even though they didn’t have a common history and ancestry. It’s really jaring when you are not used to it. Wonder Woman and Superman have the exact same color scheme even though they are not even tangentially related as heros or origin.
At least Captain Marvel is blond.
By JOhn1010101 on 12.05.18 3:42pm