Ms. Marvel is a powerful fighter with enormous superhuman strength, the power of flight and enhanced senses - including a complex “seventh sense”. She can smash through heavy stone walls, uproot and throw large trees within seconds, lift main battle tanks, throw cars around as if they were made of cardboard, etc. Ms. Marvel can reach orbital heights under her own power of flight, though early on such a feat required wearing her costume.

Ms. Marvel is also superhumanly durable. She can largely ignore conventional weaponry, and withstands superhuman blows without significant damage. Being unexpectedly hit across the face by a falling I-beam just dazed her for a short while. The amount of damage Ms. Marvel can take is quite surprising, though it is not entirely consistent and she becomes gradually more durable. Ms. Marvel is a very tenacious fighter and hates being knocked out - in game terms she tends to keep her Hero Points to soak damage. If she becomes angry or needs to save lives, she’ll use her Hero Points more offensively.

During this era, Ms. Marvel consistently underestimates her own power, and regularly discovers that she’s stronger and more durable than she thought. For instance she assumes that she’s not bulletproof (despite regularly withstanding attacks more powerful than any bullet) and that people known for their superhuman strength (such as Tiger Shark) are radically stronger than her (he wasn’t actually that much more powerful than her).

Her agility, reflexes and speed are likely superhuman, and she has been known to display a highly acrobatic fighting style reminiscent of Olympic-level gymnastics. On the other hand, she never displays a number of military skills one would expect from an elite cadet of the Kree Lar academy. In DC Heroes terms she might very well have Martial Artist, Military Science, Vehicles, and Weaponry - but she doesn’t use any of those during this era. On the gripping hand, after she integrates herself, she routinely uses Carol’s judo techniques as Ms. Marvel.

Listing what contributes to Ms. Marvel’s power is interesting :

• The energy from the Psyche-Magnitron
• Additional power drawn by the Psyche-Magnitron from Mar-Vell’s nega-bands
• Exceptional human genetics, including the enormous psionic potential inherent to all humans. The later was important in the late 1970s Marvel Universe
• These genetics were then reconstructed as a perfect blend of human and kree genetics
• Extensive human and Kree military knowledge, human knowledge of intelligence work, and Kree scientific knowledge (though the human and kree knowledges were separate for a while)
• And for a while a costume to enhance her abilities as they finished maturing

Big science, yodellayheehoo

At this stage, Ms. Marvel uses Kree science as one of her core skills. She builds advanced gadgets such as water-breathing potions, multi-shot flash-packs shooting flares intended to blind and scare off creatures living deep underwater, special nets capable of catching intangible beings such as the Vision, and specialised sensors. She also improvises a powerful EMP generator from a Con Ed power plant.

She’s not a full-on Gadgeteer, and prefers to use her advanced scientific skills only when a forceful approach has clearly failed. Still, she can come up with very useful, very advanced gadgets. Her scientific and engineering work is done in a sort of light trance where she doesn’t quite see the hours pass, and she once worked at a clearly superhuman speed. Ronan stated that Danvers had all the knowledge of a Fleet Captain, meaning that she knew how to build any Kree weapon up to and including the Universal Weapon.

While this aspect of the character soon faded, during the era covered by this writeup alien science is the ace up her sleeve.

A woman’s intuition

Ms. Marvel’s “seventh sense” is a danger sense (warning her, for instance, that somebody is about to shoot her in the back), but it also incorporates extra-sensory perception. She can sense that somebody or something is threatening people she knows - and this can be rather broad, as she has sensed dangers to New York City in general (perhaps somebody she knew was in the crowd being threatened ?). This is very convenient as a plot device. Ms. Marvel will know when an adventure is about to begin, where it is and what is going on - which threatens to put old men hiring adventurers in taverns out of work.

Somehow, she never senses the dangers that occur in other comic books set in New York City - except of course when she appears in a team-up event. Her danger sense sometimes inexplicably fail when convenient for the plot, as with many ESP powers in comics.

Ms. Marvel’s seventh sense allows her to clearly locate the source of a danger and get visions about the person or phenomenon, in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of the cosmic awareness of Captain Marvel. This also chiefly happens in order to move the story forward without wasting time on investigation, tracking stuff down, etc. Thus, how clear the seventh senses perceptions are can be very variable - from vague intuition, to clearly perceiving the danger through clairvoyance (fully visualising the opposition and where they are), to detailed dreams about likely events in her future, to sudden flashes of cryptic images. Later on, she becomes able to have precognitive vision flashes, sensing events that might be hours in the future. Her Seventh Sense is an important power in Ms. Marvel stories, though it largely failed to be absorbed by Rogue and is thus not well-known to later readers.

Beyond her seventh sense, Ms. Marvel has generally enhanced senses - in particular, when concentrating, she can see tiny details in the distance.

History

Carol Danvers, now with a year as a successful writer under her belt, took charge of and revitalised Woman magazine. At the same time, Ms. Marvel was becoming active as a mysterious heroine manifesting during Carol’s blackouts. It was loosely implied that Ms. Marvel started manifesting back during Carol’s time at Cape Canaveral, since the Destructor later tracked her first appearances there - perhaps those were relatively brief, sleepwalking-like manifestations allowing the Ms. Marvel personality and physical form to develop.

At this point, Danvers and Ms. Marvel had little knowledge of each other and were both perplexed by their recurrent blackouts ; Ms. Marvel assumed that she was some sort of amnesiac heroine, though it was distressingly unclear to her whether she was some sort of space alien or an Earth woman.

Ms. Marvel’s first depicted appearance was to foil a robbery in New York City - though there were undocumented appearances of Ms. Marvel for months before that. Mere hours after this robbery, the blonde battler leapt back into action to rescue the ungrateful J. Jonah Jameson, who had been kidnapped by the vengeful Scorpion.

Worried sick about her inexplicable blackouts and her inability to determine what was taking place during those spells, Danvers continued to consult with Dr. Barnett, a psychiatrist known for his mastery of regression hypnosis. Barnett assumed that Danvers was the victim of a delusion after she described, under hypnosis, her metamorphoses - but soon after that Danvers, having fainted under the stress of the regression, became Ms. Marvel and flew off to confront the Scorpion and the Destructor in a street battle.

At Woman, Carol was primarily assisted by associate editor Tracy Burke. Other journalists she regularly worked with included free lance photojournalist Frank Gianelli, reporter Sharon Cole and clumsy intern Tabitha Townshend. As an Easter Egg, real-world comics artist Marie Severin also worked at Woman.

This woman, this warrior

During a visit to Cape Canaveral to write an exclusive about a lady astronaut (and friend of hers) for Woman, Danvers sensed the arrival of an ICBM aimed at the Cape and flew beyond the atmosphere to intercept it. The payload of the missile was the incredibly powerful robot called the Doomsday Man, but Ms. Marvel managed to destroy the missile and force the indestructible robot to crash-land not far from the Cape.

As her foe climbed out of the crater, Ms. Marvel was irresistibly attracted toward the cave where the Psyche-Magnitron had exploded, and intuitively realised that she was Carol Danvers as well as Ms. Marvel. She was also exposed to further Psyche-Magnitron energy, though it would be a while before she realise that it had strengthened her.

After this new exposure Ms. Marvel destroyed the Doomsday Man robot, then returned to New York City to switch back to her Carol Danvers existence.

Days later, Carol fainted right in the street and experienced a premonition of grave danger involving a strange truck. Her psychiatrist explained to her that she somehow was the host for the super-heroine, and that this vision likely was a precognitive flash Ms. Marvel had. Investigating as Carol, she found the truck and was forced to change into Ms. Marvel. The heroine intercepted the vehicle, but discovered that the Vision was riding shotgun to protect the shipment. The two heroes eventually allied as the driver turned out to be a disguised robot, and Ms. Marvel’s precognitive flash was proved correct - the robot had been tasked with detonating the shipment, which would have killed millions.

This was followed by an encounter with Grotesk (again looking to destroy the world, this time by using a cavourite crystal), interrupted by an attempt by MODOK to kidnap Ms. Marvel in order to mass-produce duplicates of her costume. Unfortunately for MODOK, the costume had just been wrecked by Grotesk, ruining it as a source for copies.

In New York City, Carol accidentally ran into a fight between the Super-Skrull and the Torch and Spider-Man. Ms. Marvel flew in to help after the Torch had been knocked out, using Kree knowledge to defeat the Skrull. As she and Spider-Man fought the alien, Ms. Marvel realised that the Super-Skrull wanted to use another cavourite crystal to return to his galaxy - and used the crystal to trap him in warp-space.

The warrior and the witch-queen

While visiting her friend Salia Petrie at NASA as she prepared for a space shuttle mission, Carol had a vision of impending doom, with the cavourite crystal aboard the shuttle exploding. However, she also experienced a feeling a grave danger in nearby Saracen Cay, and Ms. Marvel forced the change to fly off to the Cay and meet this greater danger, leaving Petrie to her fate.

Ms. Marvel ended up intervening in a fight between the Elementals and Hecate (see their writeups.org entries) ; during the entire fight, the Carol consciousness fought against the Ms. Marvel consciousness since one wanted to rescue Salia and the other knew that stopping the Elementals was much more important. Ms. Marvel retained control, the Elementals were stopped, and Petrie and her crew died.

Furious, Danvers forced the change from Ms. Marvel into Carol, then decided that it was all Hecate’s fault. She started hitting Hecate with obviously superhuman power, but the Witch-Queen stopped her using some sort of influence power. Perhaps intending to make up for Petrie’s death, Hecate then ’fixed‘ something within Danvers, resulting in a much better integration between the two sides. Suspiciously enough, Carol seemed to also immediately accept that Petrie’s death had been a necessary sacrifice.

Danvers soon returned to the North-East to resume her career as a new, improved, integrated Ms. Marvel.

United

Carol now had the typical life as a super-heroine with a secret identity, leaping in action as Ms. Marvel as she stumbled upon super-villain attacks. She encountered Sapper and Golden-Blade when she came back to Boston, then rescued her father as he clashed with corrupt construction industrialist Maxwell Plumm, aka Steeplejack. Spending time with her father infuriated her, as she saw that he was still macho and chauvinistic ; furthermore Mrs. Danvers immediatly realised that Ms. Marvel was her daughter.

Back to New York City, Ms. Marvel clashed with Tiger Shark to rescue young Namorita, but he eluded her. She requested help from the Avengers and, after a short brawl with Beast, convinced the Scarlet Witch to let her use the Avengers’ engineering labs. Using Kree science, she built herself a tracker and a water-breathing serum to chase Tiger Shark. Burning every Hero Point she had, Ms. Marvel narrowly defeated Tiger Shark, but would have drowned had Namorita not rescued her in turn. After this case she developed a good relationship with the Avengers.

Ms. Marvel then clashed with an ex-CIA man named Ballard (whom she apparently knew from her time with the Agency), then an ally of Mystique. Ballard and Mystique’s goals and their employer were never quite clear - see Ballard’s entry on writeups.org for a discussion of same. Ms. Marvel was nearly killed by the powerful Centurion armament wielded by Ballard, but prevailed with the help of the Avengers. Early in the case, Ballard firebombed Danvers’ apartment, and she moved to a large studio in what may have been Greenwhich Village.

During the fight with Ballard, Ms. Marvel realised that he could detect her Kree costume, and ditched her clothing to improvise something the Centurion suit couldn’t track. This outfit included a black bodysuit, which would soon inspire a costume change - as she realised that keeping the scarf would be a bad idea.

After a precognitive flash Ms. Marvel soon allied with the Avengers, as they were hunting down Ultron. Ms. Marvel was here specifically to rescue the Scarlet Witch, whom she had foreseen falling into an awful trap. She was successfuly, swiftly rescuing the Avenger after the trap was triggered. She stuck around a bit after that, helping the Avengers defeat the Atlantean villain Tyrak and making a lighthearted flirting pass at Wonder Man. Ms. Marvel soon returned to help the Avengers when her seventh sense detected their upcoming clash with Korvac, and was among the small army of heroes who took down Korvac - as was Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell).

In the Summer of 1978, Ms. Marvel was attacked and kidnapped by the powerful Ronan the Accuser, who had been living on Earth with a small group of Kree. The Kree Supreme Intelligence had reawakened itself back on Kree-Lar, and ordered Ronan to bring him Ms. Marvel as he wanted to use her incredible merged genetics to turn her into the mother of a new kind of Kree. Captain Mar-Vell, having sensed Ronan’s return, intervened but was also captured.

With the two heroes under its thumb, the Supreme Intelligence attempted to break Ms. Marvel’s psyche but failed. After Captain Mar-Vell distracted Ronan, Ms. Marvel attacked and defeated the surprised Accuser, breaking her arm in the scuffle.

The encounter left Ms. Marvel wanting to affirm her humanity more, and to wear a costume different from the great Kree hero Captain Marvel.

Description

Ms. Marvel is taller, more broad-shouldered and more muscular than Carol is. She wears her hair in a bob whereas Carol sports a simple long cut, a feat of capillary transmutation that puzzled some for decades. Ms. Marvel seems to have less of a Boston accent than Carol - perhaps more like a generic East Coast accent, or even a Kree one. Once they fully integrate, Ms. Marvel has the exact same voice as Carol (or, at least, can talk exactly like Carol when needed).

Initially, Ms. Marvel wears a Captain Marvel-like costume that leaves her belly, diaphragm and most of her back exposed, with an itsy bitsy teeny weenie bikini bottom from the 1960s (comparable to modern volley-ball “boy shorts”) that looks like skin-tight thin leather.

The upper half of the costume later changes to cover the previously exposed areas, though her legs remain bare. This slight change in costume cut (in issue #9) was never explained.

Personality

(This section assumes the timeline discussed in the first writeup, and that the development of the Ms. Marvel persona took place as discussed in our “trellis” hypothesis above. This doesn’t change the facts or the effective characterisation - it just makes everything sounds much more coherent). 

As Carol Danvers

Carol is a 1970s liberated woman, in the process of regaining her assurance. Since things are finally looking up after several disastrous years, Carol is now upbeat, dynamic and warm, and she’s obviously smart and independent. However, this is, in a way, an act - though for the last year or so she has had a great life and her journey to find herself again was successful, it doesn’t really compare with her old life as an elite agent and pilot. Carol never mentions her youth, but she yearns for what her wounds made impossible - to be a superb fighter again, to fly again, to be strong and proud and to somehow erase all the damage rather than just work her way around her post-Lubyanka limitations.

As the editor of Woman Carol works hard, manages well and fights Jameson about every other day to prevent him from imposing his inept, dated vision of what a women’s magazine should be. Her need to be strong-headed, independent and to impose her personal vision despite social conventions and tradition are obviously coming back to the fore, whereas she had to largely suppress these feelings back with NASA.

Carol’s struggle to be her own woman and to affirm herself as a great something (a great writer and journalist, a great publisher, a great warrior, a great heroine…) reflects a greater societal context. Her ambition is not quite about herself - it’s about proving her socially conservative father wrong. It’s also about making it clear that a woman can win despite living in a society that still considers female as children. While the comic was a bit behind the times, Carol is in part a symbol of women’s lib, and her desire to be a badass and to be successful and admired should be interpreted in that light rather than as simple narcissism and egotism - at least at this stage. ”To be as competent and independent as any man” was far from quaint in the 1970s, and is a major goal of hers.

Danvers oscillates between being one of the boys (especially when she’s working and managing her staff) and being appropriately feminine (especially in her clothing and jewelry, and the decoration of her apartment). She’s assertive and sometimes downright aggressive, but almost never butch.

Though Claremont was already introducing soap opera-ish elements into his writing, Carol’s private and professional life were only superficially explored. Early on she has a romantic relationship with her psychiatrist (!) Dr. Barnett, but this is given so little screen time that it’s easy to forget about it - presumably to the APA’s relief. This relationship was apparently brief ; though they stayed good friends, Carol was planning to remain single after that. Freelance reporter Frank Gianelli had a longstanding interest in her and even stole a kiss, but Carol did not intend to follow up on that though she liked him.

Carol’s personality eventually merges with Ms. Marvel’s — see below.

Ms. Marvel

Ms. Marvel is a born warrior, heroine and protector - it is almost instinctively that she stops robberies, rescues kidnapping victims and the like. She is always in motion.

Though she never hesitates whilst in the field, outside of it there is a lot of confusion. Originally, she does not know her name, who she is, why she is here, or why she knows these places and people. She is struggling as her mind wants to refer to her both as an Earth woman and a Kree warrior. This only bothers her when there is nothing to fight or no catastrophe to stop, though - at which point she will soon fade into becoming Danvers again anyway. Eventually the issue recedes as she understands that she is Carol Danvers with something more.

Ms. Marvel is very proud and quite gung-ho - while she fights smartly, she obviously believes in the virtues of a hard charge and her right hook. She does not actually kill, but given how aggressive she can verbally and physically get in the heat of combat, observers can come to doubt that. This is especially true if one considers context and what was allowable for a super-heroine in the late 1970s - from this point of view, she definitely doesn’t fight with the kid gloves on. She’s quite competitive and vigourously fights to *win*. Eventually, Ms. Marvel realises that, while as a Kree warrior she would fight to kill, it is her Carol Danvers side that prevents her from doing so.

Ms. Marvel’s style is very much in the Kree tradition - fight like hell, battle gloriously, rejoice in taking risks, never back down, don’t go for stealth or low profile actions. She thus tends to resist and fret when Carol wants to use her spook training for infiltration and intelligence. The Kree are warriors, not thieves !

Ms. Marvel employs a lot of Kree exclamations and minor trash talk when she fights. Many of those are actually semi-obscure geek references of the 1970s (Astarte is a Phoenician goddess of love and war, calots are vaguely dog-like creatures in John Carter of Mars pulp adventures, the “Hala !” exclamation may be a wink toward the “Hera !” exclamation of Wonder Woman, etc.)

Ms. Marvel is smart, serious, focused and observant, but does not quite believe in subtlety unless more direct approaches have failed. In some ways she is a cross between a one-woman shock troops squad and a daring firefighter - rescuing innocents and protecting people is very important to her, and she will always choose to take some blows, lose a fight, flee, etc. if it’s necessary to save lives.

Ms. Marvel’s personality eventually merges with Carol’s — see below.

I sing the persona synthetic

It is unclear where the Ms. Marvel Kree personality came from. It might be a duplicate of Carol’s, but altered by extensive exposure to Kree history, values and military training. Interestingly, Ms. Marvel once vividly remembers a scene from her youth as Ms. Marvel - assaulting a fellow cadet in the Kree military after the blue-skinned racist makes a remark about her pink skin. Since in this scene she is improbably wearing her Ms. Marvel costume, this “memory” is probably a fabrication.

It is possible that those memories are “Kree-ified” versions of Carol Danvers’s Air Force/WAF memories - for instance an altercation about her gender which was ”translated“ as an altercation about her skin tone. It seems more likely, though, that those memories are either completely arbitrary or, more interestingly, are altered versions of memories of Kree war hero Captain Mar-Vell (who is pink-skinned and did run into issues of blue privilege and racism). There’s too little material to hazard a solid guess, but it would be curious if the Psyche-Magnitron had just made everything up.

Most of the “Ms. Marvel memories” are from the Imperial Academy of the Kree military, on Kree Lar, giving the impression that she’s a young warrior-in-training - probably the equivalent of a cadet.

Multiple Personalities New Order

At first, Ms. Marvel and Carol Danvers are two distinct persons. The Kree persona (“Ms. Marvel”) and the Carol persona are unaware of each other ; Carol cannot remember what Ms. Marvel does (she only knows that she blacks out, and that something happens whilst she’s unconscious), and while Ms. Marvel can to a degree access Carol’s memories (for instance to speak English) she does not understand where this knowledge comes from.

When she returns to Cape Canaveral, the Ms. Marvel half gains the knowledge that she is also Carol Danvers, and even starts referring to herself as “Carol” in her thought bubbles. This awareness remains one-way for most of the era covered here.

There is, however, a gradual process of Carol understanding what is going on and slowly gaining access to her Ms. Marvel side. In this unusual arrangement Ms. Marvel is the “better half” of Carol, the stronger, better and more decisive half, and she is protective of her weaker, more mundane Carol form and persona. Carol is of course creeped out by those unusual fainting spells that turn her into somebody else, and for some irrational reason feels that she cannot compete with her other self, whom she resents for being better than she is.

By Ms. Marvel v1 #07, Carol becomes able to witness Ms. Marvel and her actions as if she were a ghost floating behind Ms. Marvel. This experience makes her less afraid of her “other self”, and one incident that leaves Ms. Marvel in pain and nearly defeated curiously makes Carol more confident and more able to deal with her Ms. Marvel side. Carol previously felt completely outclassed by Ms. Marvel, as if she had to compete against a superhuman opponent, but after this incident she feels on a more equal footing, and closer to her other persona. It is possible that seeing her Ms. Marvel side tortured and interrogated helped Carol deal with traumatic memories from Lubyanka.

After this incident Carol becomes increasingly aware of Ms. Marvel, can remember what happens when she’s Ms. Marvel, and can change into Ms. Marvel of her own will. She can also try to force Ms. Marvel to become Carol, or resist when Ms. Marvel attempts to force the transformation, but these efforts are not normally successful.

At this point Carol and Ms. Marvel’s relationship is a bit like that of two sisters, and they can more or less communicate with each other and work together. They also know each other and trust each other, though Ms. Marvel is occasionally surprised by how rash and aggressive Carol is becoming. Both also seem aware on some level they are not really different persons ; for instance Ms. Marvel often refers to herself as “Carol” in her thought bubbles.

Fusioning

Once Ms. Marvel and Carol Danvers fully fusion with Hecate’s help, they become one person with the best qualities of both. Carol Danvers is now an assertive, determined woman and a brash fighter who likes action. Her main pursuit is to live her life as Carol and manage Woman, but now that she’s a super-heroine she keeps stumbling upon crises necessitating a super-heroic touch - and she turns her clothing into her Ms. Marvel in a flash, leaping into action.

Early on her brashness causes more problems than it solves, as she gets into unecessary fights by punching first and asking questions later. Even after she moderates her fires, Ms. Marvel is a woman of action - she’s certainly not dumb by any means, but prefers to do things rather sitting pondering mysteries. She’s not very good at standing still or staying in place, and enjoys attention.

DC Universe History

Paradoxically for a women’s lib heroine, Ms. Marvel was a female version of a better-established male hero. In the DCU, a more obvious approach to have this kind of heroine is to make her a young pre-Crisis Amazon who, after an accident involving the Purple Ray, is accidentally hurled into the man’s world with enhanced power but in a state of amnesia.

If you want to use Carol Danvers with her full past, perhaps she was kidnapped in Cape Canaveral by a scout sent by the warlords of Okaara so as to serve as a genetic template in an attempt to recreate the pre-apocalyptic form of the Okaaran - an experience interrupted by the Citadel, teleporting Danvers back to Earth in an incomplete state. As evidenced by the attitude of early Koriand’r and Komand’r, Okaaran training seems to produce values close to that of Ms. Marvel’s Kree side.

Or perhaps the experiment was led by the denizens of Tyrraz attempting to create a super-soldier using a Terran as a template.

The Thanagarians are also another clear potential as Kree substitutes in a DCU Ms. Marvel background - they have the attitude, and they even have Absorbascon technology which might play the role of the Psyche-Magnitron.

Ms. Marvel is oddly reminiscent of the pre-Crisis Supergirl in her early adventures, and could easily be the Supergirl or Power Girl of a parallel world - something trivial to do in the 52 Earths context. Beside, it’s hard to escape the parallel between Carol Danvers and Linda Danvers. The situation of Power Girl, with her retcons, false memories and losing boxing matches against continuity, is also loosely similar to the situation of Ms. Marvel.

Some have also postulated that if Julius Schwartz had been behind a Silver Age revamp of Wonder Woman (much like the Flash, Green Lantern, etc. were re-invented in a more sci-fiesque way for the new generation from their Golden Age versions), it may have looked very much like Ms. Marvel. Certain aspects of Ms. Marvel compete with Wonder Woman in the same way that Sergeant Fury (and his Howling Commandos) competed with Sergeant Rock.

Chris’ Blonde Amalgam Strategy

An approach I used in my own campaign, back when I was trying very hard to match the Post-Crisis DCU’s “one and only one Earth” policy, was to amalgamate Ms. Marvel with both Power Girl and Supergirl. This allowed me to wave away the problem of Captain Mar-Vell (did he exist in the DCU? What was his relationship with Shazam and Billy Batson? What was Eon’s relationship with the Guardians of the Universe, and how did the Green Lantern Corps relate to his title as Protector of the Universe? Etc.) by replacing him with Superman. One of my goals in this whole project is to maintain a DCU feel, that keeps both Supergirl’s Legion connection and Power Girl’s JSA connection, but that replaces the bland Linda Danvers and Karen Starr with the much more colorful Carol Danvers.

Using this approach, I started with a Kryptonian survivor named Kara. Her origin was pretty much that of Superman: The Animated Series’ Supergirl, meaning she was a teenager at the time of Krypton’s destruction but had been in suspended animation. She wasn’t necessarily Superman’s literal cousin, but when he found her, rescued her, and brought her to Earth, they “adopted” each other as the last survivors of their race. For a short time Kara lived with Martha and Jonathan Kent and (much against Clark’s overprotective impulses) was active as a teenaged heroine, Supergirl. Cheery, upbeat, and brave, Supergirl hadn’t been on Earth long enough to develop the full spectrum of Kryptonian powers. At the start of her career, her powers were at about the level of the MU Ms. Marvel.

She was also, initially, not careful enough about protecting her identity. She was seen too often in Smallville, and in an initial interview even shared her Kryptonian name. This led to her being moved out of Smallville and adopted by the Danvers family outside Boston, with the Wayne Foundation discreetly stepping in to give Kara, now called Carol (an alternate name close enough to her own to resonate and be familiar), a false background and ensure she found a good family. She stayed in touch with the Kents, including Clark of course, but discreetly.

Meanwhile, she was recruited into the Legion of Super-Heroes, and for a few years spent more time in the 30th century than in the 20th — though always returning to our time a few moments after she’d left, so that the gaps weren’t noticeable. One key feature of this timeline - I always had both Clark and Kara as Legion members, but - this being during the Giffen/Bierbaum Legion era - I had more or less switched their roles. Clark was the mostly-honorary member who only showed up for a few adventures, his memories carefully edited to keep from upsetting his 20th century destiny. Kara/Carol was the Legion mainstay who learned a lot from the LSH and also pulled their fat out of the fire almost all the time. Her powers continued to develop and soon reached full Kryptonian levels. She also became a mainstay of the Espionage Squad — as there’s nothing better than an intelligence operative with super-senses (gathering info without seeming to) and super-speed (acting faster than the eye can see) with the strength and invulnerability to extricate herself if her cover’s blown. She learned espionage tricks from Chameleon Boy, studied martial arts with Karate Kid, and became a great fighter, spy, and heroine. But she eventually decided to rededicate herself to living in her own time…partly b/c of not really reciprocating feelings for Brainy.

So Carol returns full time to the 20th Century. In between her long Legion stints she’s continued to go to school, breezing through high school in short order and graduating in record time from the Air Force Academy. Her experiences with the Espionage Squad make her a natural for Air Force Intelligence, and her experience with Legion Cruisers stands her in good stead as she becomes known as a crack pilot and agent. Here she meets and falls for Colonel Michael Rossi and has adventures alongside him with Wolverine. I’ll leave it to you to figure out details of the Lubyanka incident — obviously it takes place somewhat differently with a Kryptonian-powered Carol Danvers. Perhaps she was faking her weakness, or perhaps some traumatic event causes a temporary power loss. Or perhaps the Lubyanka incident revolved around investigating foreign attempts to harness superhumans, and Carol runs afoul of some ultra-powered foreign agent. I’ve also toyed with making Lubyanka fall after a modified “Crisis on Infinite Earths” scenario. What if Supergirl wasn’t killed by the Anti-Monitor, but her injuries caused a great reduction in her health and powers — much as Power Girl experienced in the Post-Crisis DCU during the Gray Man incident? At some point — whether it corresponds to Lubyanka, the Anti-Monitor, the Gray Man, or something else, Carol will be badly injured, her powers at least temporarily reduced, and she will adopt a new identity. In the process, spotty historical records mean that the Legion loses track of her, believing that Supergirl died heroically at a young age to save Superman.

At any rate, Supergirl’s now a full-time resident of the 20th century, has lots of cosmic-level experience against the likes of Darkseid, the Time Trapper, and the Fatal Five, and is a bit older than she should be. She asks to join the JLA. But Superman, over-protective as ever, blocks her — with most of his memories of the Legion consisting of a “super-hero club”, he’s not really aware that it’s a JLA+-level operation, and underrates her stories of what she’s accomplished. So he thinks she’s too young and inexperienced — and perhaps she’s already experienced the event reducing her power level — and he recommends that she join the JSA instead. At this time, the JSA is only semi-active, getting together with the JLA once a year or so, and giving some training to young, newbie or out-of-place heroes like the Huntress and the Star-Spangled Kid. Kara is furious with her cousin but his advice sways the JLA and JSA to go along with his plan.

Expressing her anger, she dumps her Supergirl costume and name. She’s an adult anyway, and her own person, not a sidekick to Superman. So she joins the JSA as Power Woman (or as Ms. Marvel, if you prefer), and has quite a chip on her shoulder for awhile. The old-timers in the JSA are apt, at first, to treat her like a novice, and her anger at Superman overflows into her treatment of them.  Over time, of course, she comes to see just how good and experienced these Golden Agers are…and she eventually decides she just might have come out ahead.

She loses her powers (but not her Kryptonian genetic potential) to Rogue — the way I rationalize this stuff is that Rogue’s powers allow her to steal the power to absorb and convert yellow sunlight, but that her hybrid human/kryptonian cells are only partially successful at mimicking Kryptonian powers…making Rogue about as powerful as she is in the MU, with Ms. Marvel level powers.  (Though possibly increasing in power and abilities very gradually.) Meanwhile, Kara’s lost her powers, but joins up with the X-Men, and gets transformed into Binary — her power to absorb energy from the sun being gone, but the capacity of her cells to process enormous energy allowing the Brood to hook her up to a white hole. Thus she’s once again at Kryptonian power-levels.

That’s about as far as that timeline went, I think. I’d probably have had her return to Earth and resume her Power Woman identity (or Ms. Marvel) identity as the white hole energies faded, finally joining the JLA — this corresponding to the Warbird/Busiek era and possibly the JLI era. I hope it can go without saying that in this timeline Carol never experiences any super-weird alien pregnancies, because…ick.

Of course, if you keep the Ms. Marvel moniker (instead of the Supergirl to Power Woman progression), then you’ll have to address the Marvel Family…