Whatever else you might say about the experience, reading CAPTAIN MARVEL for the past thirteen months has never been boring. Ever since the relaunch of the book last September as part of Marvel's lameduck "U Decide!" promotion, Peter David has taken the character in directions that most other comics writers would never think to go. Unless they're Ron Marz and writing GREEN LANTERN, perhaps. However, much like Marz's radical decision to make Hal Jordan a menace to society, David's reworking of the character raises several questions, not the least of which is: what is this guy? Is he still a hero? Is he more properly an antihero? Or can he now be called a villain?

For those of you not familiar with the series (all five of you), here's a brief recap of what's been happening: Genis, the son of the famed Mar-Vell, begins to have trouble with his cosmic awareness, the ability that allows him to sense danger on a universal level and to see the outcome of a given chain of events. He believes he finally has the quirky ability under control. When he's faced with the choice of deciding whether to save a planet from the Badoon or to save an alien girl being beaten to death by her boyfriend, he chooses the former, only to later "become aware" that the girl would have brought peace to the entire universe had she lived. Faced with the guilt, he does what any of us would have done: he goes mad. Mad, I tell you. After taking lessons from the Punisher on discipline(!), he sets out on a course that leads him to kill those who threaten the future, to dominate planets, to rejoin the Kree Army just long enough to change his clothes, and to give a notorious serial killer part of his powers. Oh, and he thinks he's a god, too. Then again, he did help Entropy destroy the entire universe and then helped rebuild it, so perhaps he is. Whew.

Of all the actions he's taken since his plunge into madness, the thing that really makes us wonder where Genis stands on the Heroic Orientation Chart these days is the killing. In the first issue, ostensibly before Genis goes nuts, he kills an alien monster posing as a drug dealer, simply because he has to get to his next stop in time. Even at that point, the heroic mask is beginning to slip - for, as we all know, heroes don't kill. Do they? In issue #11, Rick Jones discusses that very question with Lucy Harper, the widow of a policeman killed by the serial killer Coven. Coven's already survived his state-ordered execution, so he's free and ready to kill again. After Genis has given some of his powers to Coven (for reasons almost too complex to go into here - he's mad, you know), she comes to Rick to ask if he knows a superhero who'd be willing to get rid of Coven once and for all. When he says that the heroes he knows are not killers, she responds by saying, "I thought most heroes killed these days. I know they didn't used to, but..." Rick attempts to explain: "The point is, heroes have to stand for something if they're gonna be heroes, and super heroes need to stand for even more. Despite what...some...people have done, I believe that. Otherwise, morality, justice, the whole nine yards, goes right out of the window." This discussion gets interrupted by Coven pulling Lucy right out of the window, of course, but the point has been made: heroes don't kill. At least, not the ones who count for something. Only vigilantes like the Punisher kill - but doesn't he count as an antihero?

The concept of "antihero" is notoriously vague - the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines one only as "a protagonist or notable figure who is conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities." As all-encompassing as that definition is, the Punisher (and now Genis) certainly fits into that category. If we define "heroic qualities" as never being cruel, never being cowardly, and never killing - and believe me, I know there are more than that - then neither of them fits the "hero" niche except in not being cowardly. If anything, they're too bold. But in some form or another, the actions of the antihero contribute to the greater good. The Punisher kills only the bad guys. Genis kills only the bad guys - but the difference is, Genis kills them before they become bad guys, which means he's killing what are (for the moment) the good guys. In order to justify his actions, we have to consider the "Hitler as a child" dilemma - if we were sent back in time to the moment of Hitler's birth and presented with Hitler as a baby, knowing everything that he was responsible for, would we then kill that baby? Genis' answer nowadays appears to be "Hell, yes" - but does that make it right? And does putting the responsibility in someone else's hands - by showing a father what his son will grow up to be and letting the father kill the child based on that knowledge, as Genis does in the second issue - make it any more right?

That's the biggest problem with antiheroes: the less their actions partake in any "heroic qualities," the more they start looking like villains. Despite recent hopeful signs that Genis might indeed be rethinking the whole insanity thing, some of his actions have been the stuff of supervillainy. The dictionary is even less helpful in defining what a "villain" is, and I imagine most of us have our own personal definitions of what constitutes villainy, but let's try this: a villain is a character with a criminal disregard for the law, a selfish desire for power, and a careless disregard for the sanctity of life and the suffering of others. Run any of the Marvel villains through that filter, and most of them will pass. Problem is, doesn't Genis also now pass through that same filter? He has a criminal disregard for the law (he doesn't see how anyone's laws apply to him, being a God, so he has no problem breaking any and all of them); he already has the power of a God, so perhaps the desire for isn't there so much as the desire to use it; and if killing the temporarily-innocent doesn't constitute a careless disregard for life and the suffering of others, I don't know what does. So what keeps this guy from being a mere antihero and not passing over into the realm of the supervillain?

It's probably a bit precipitous for me to bring any of this up when issue #15, which may shift the entire paradigm of this discussion, is hitting the stands today - but seeing as Marvel's blurb for the issue states that he's threatening the Shi'ar and the Kree with total extermination, I somehow doubt it. There's still enough time for us to talk about it, so mail me your thoughts at comicscape@cinescape.com and let's see what you have to say about the new Captain Marvel, the definitions of antihero and villain, and whether he fits either of them.