Carol Danvers is all about Action: Ms. Marvel #4 – April, 1977
Ms. Marvel #4: "Death Is the Doomsday Man!"
Chris Claremont is now the writer of this comic and his first issue is action packed.
Unfortunately, the offensive remark of "this female fights back!" is now back on the cover.
The issue itself picks up right where the last one left off. The Doomsday Man decided to attack Ms. Marvel in the previous issue and now the issue opens with him attacking, as her seventh-sense fails to warn her of his attack. As he attacks her relentlessly, the Destructor, Professor Kerwin Korman, appears after he escaped from A.I.M and he swears vengeances on them and on Ms. Marvel.
We switch back to the Cape where Salia Petrie is worried about her friend, Danvers, who is missing. As she goes to complain to the General, she and Major Adamson are forced to volunteer to investigate the shock waves from Ms. Marvel's and Doomsday Man's fight. They are the only two qualified people, that makes no sense, but first to show up is first to get drafted.
Then we switch back to the intensive fight between Ms. Marvel and Doomsday Man. Ms. Marvel is taking a few hits and then she remembers that she is also Carol Danvers and has her knowledge.
Carol Danvers knew the creator of Doomsday Man, Dr. Kronton, and warned him that his robot is too indestructible. Dr. Kronton talks very disrespectfully to Danvers. She's the head of security not "my dear." And Danvers was right, she wondered what "if it went berserk?" and berserk it went, despite of Dr. Kronton design. However, Ms. Marvel realizes that Dr. Kronton must have taken Danvers's advice to heart and placed a fail-safe control.
She finds the fail-safe control with her sharp eyes at the back of the robot's head. Apparently she just got a new power, heightened senses. With some difficulty she manages to reach the fail-safe control, despite Doomsday Man's attack, and she manages to turn him off.
Unfortunately, she was so engrossed and so badly hurt and that her seventh-sense is too late to warn her about the Destructor coming for her. He manages to knock her out with his Tachyon beam. The Destructor came looking for weapons and finds the Pyche-Magnitron's power source storage unit, and like in a bad horror movie, despite Ms. Marvel's warning, he opens it. And the unit burns him. He goes mad with pain, but there is nothing Ms. Marvel can do in order to help him. As he goes mad he starts firing in all directions with his Tachyon beam and the cave starts to collapse.
As the cave collapses, Danvers/Ms. Marvel is exposed to the radiation from the Pyche-Magnitron for the second time. This will probably affect her powers down the line so remember this moment. The issue ends with Ms. Marvel buried under the rubble.
But not to worry as there is an epilogue. Salia and Major Adamson locate the source of the radiation and in it find the unconscious Danvers who wakes up as they pull her out. She mumbles what happened to Ms. Marvel and they take her away to the space center hospital. Major Adamson tells Salia as they fly away with Danvers that Danvers has a lot of explaining to do.
We then switch to a second epilogue which takes place three days later as Danvers is back at her job in New-York. She remembers how she managed to explain back at the Cape that she has no connection to the robot, but we don't get to hear her explanation as to why she was in that cave in first place. But at least she got her story for her magazine.
She calls it a "lousy trip." It's hard to tell what is lousy: having to lie to the Cape doctors or discovering that she is a super person.
As soon as she enters her office Mike the shrink calls. He tells her that he knows about Ms. Marvel and wants to talk to her about it, and "soon." The issue ends with her thinking to herself: "you know lady, I've got a feeling your troubles are just beginning!" preparing us for more action to come, and perhaps setting up Mike as a potential villain. He sure did not came across as friendly during this exchange.
In the fan mail section there is some interesting action. Two letters are very short (one is one sentence) and praise the issue. While the third is an accusation of the way Marvel treats its female characters, especially Sue Richards (not about being invisible, but about her behavior) and Claremont does his best to defend the company. He brings up Jean Grey and his Ms. Marvel because he knows how to write good female characters. As for the other characters, I'll leave that for you to judge. It's still a brave choice to tackle such a subject in this issue, and it is probably done to satisfy his female readers.
This issue of Ms. Marvel is very action packed. But we get a glimpse into how hard Danvers' life was as a head of security at the Cape, her opinion was taken into account, but she got no respect. We also see that she knows that she is Ms. Marvel, and she is not happy. But her troubles are just getting started. And Mike will be just a part of her worries.
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