The forgotten history of Captain Marvel

After 10 years and 20 films, Marvel Studios has finally unveiled the trailer for Captain Marvel, its first movie starring a woman as the sole lead. It's a film that feels both wildly anticipated and immensely overdue after the small mountain of Marvel blockbusters with men in the lead role. But Captain Marvel is a special hero in the studio's canon, one with an unusual real-life story and a massive debt to the woman who helped tell it.

But first, Captain Marvel herself. Created in 1968 by Gene Colan and Roy Thomas, Captain Marvel was first known as Carol Danvers, an Air Force officer who would eventually gain superpowers and assume a number of superhuman identities. A complicated character with a convoluted history, Danvers was largely used as a supporting player in Marvel comics, despite arguably being one of its most powerful characters and one of the few female characters with a consistent presence in the books since her inception.

That all changed in 2012, when writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Dexter Soy relaunched the Captain Marvel series. In their version, Danvers inherited the title of Captain Marvel, donned a new, full-body costume (designed by artist Jamie McKelvie in perhaps the most iconic reinvention of a character's visual identity since Spider-Man put on a black suit), and shouted a rallying cry taken from the pages of the very first issue: Higher, further, faster, more.