Monica Rambeau

In a world with both Marvel and DC there are thousands upon thousands of superheroes, very few of those get long running solo series. Many get short spotlights or mini-series. And of those few, even fewer are women. Of the thousands of heroes, the ones that are women number somewhere in the hundreds. Of the solo titles granted the number of women led titles are in the double digits and most of those are limited engagements. Well we are granted with another limited series from Marvel and quite frankly this one is long overdue. Before we get to Photon let's talk about the incredible woman it centers around, Monica Rambeau.

Monica made her first appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 in 1982. She quickly joined the Avengers, even eventually becoming their leader but definitely becoming a fixture in Stern’s 5 year run of the iconic team. So why exactly did it take so long for such a well used character to be granted her own solo series? Yes, it's true that some characters simply aren’t and were never fleshed out enough to warrant their own series but quite frankly that's a cop-out. Solo series are where you should be doing the fleshing out. If you truly can’t find a way to take a character that's been stable in comics for 5 years as part of a team and find a way to create an individual story around her, maybe you just aren’t a good writer. Real writers can create stories for anyone, around established canon. So either the writers of Marvel are telling on themselves, and they aren’t original or creative enough to be telling these stories. Or they simply don’t actually care about these characters enough to write for them.

Monica was the second Captain Marvel, and the first woman to hold the title. She was the first to make Captain Marvel a legacy title (that alone should have been enough for a solo series right off the bat but here we are). Monica joins a long list of women that sacrificed themselves for “the greater good” and ultimately leads to her losing her powers that she of course has to “earn” back for absolutely no reason.

So for those of you that don’t know Monica’s powers consist of being able to physically transform herself into any form of energy on the electromagnetic spectrum (the main reason Spectrum is the best superhero name for her but I guess we’re going with Photon for some reason). The journey from Captain Marvel to Spectrum was a long one and she held many aliases over her appearances. After Captain Marvel she took up the names Photon, Pulsar, Daystar, Sceptre, Lady of Light, Monica Marvel, Sun Goddess and finally Spectrum.

After losing and regaining her powers Monica retires from the Avengers and places herself as a reservist, coming off the bench only when the team was in great need. It wasn’t until after Monica, Genis and Starfox teamed up against the controller that Monica went through her first name change. Genis was the reason for her next name change as well, when he simply adopted the name Photon and she decided she liked Pulsar better anyway.

Despite many name changes and even team changes, Monica Rambeau has maintained her status among the Avengers for decades and had finally been granted her own solo series. Unfortunately they went with the name Photon (which is beyond lame) but I look forward to seeing what the writers finally came up with for her. As far as we know the series will only have 5 issues (we will get into that later) but they will be written by award winning Eve L. Ewing.