The following contains major spoilers for Captain Marvel #40, available now from Marvel Comics.
Throughout Carol Danvers’ decades-long career as a costumed superhero, she has faced down and overcome some of the most impossible challenges the Marvel Universe has to offer. Unfortunately, she has always been woefully out of her element when it comes to dealing with the mysteries of the Mystic Arts. Worse still, those same supernatural forces are the exact same ones that have come to plague Captain Marvel today. As bad as things might seem, Carol still has one person in her corner who is determined to see her through this, and the Scarlet Witch just gave her the best help she could have asked for by exposing the one truth that ties all magic together.
After being brought to trial for the crime of stripping Ove, the maniacal future son of Amora and Namor, of his magic, Carol Danvers found herself living out an unexpectedly fantastical nightmare. As it turns out, this scenario for her to live through time and time again is the means by which she will be judged by the likes of Agatha Harkness and the Scarlet Witch. Thankfully, Wanda is still firmly on Carol’s side, and in the pages of Captain Marvel #40 (by Kelly Thompson, Alvaro Lopez, Juan Frigeri, Jordie Bellaire, and VC’s Clayton Cowles) she decides to tip the scales ever so slightly in her friend’s favor with a subtle reminder of things she already knows. More specifically, that magic is really just a test of will.
When Carol’s memories wash over her from within the high fantasy dream state she has been thrust into, they bring her back to a day on the poolside with Wanda. There Wanda explained that all magic of every possible form is simply a matter of willpower. Though intricate symbols and rituals all have their place, the true test of any sorcerer’s strength is being able to bend the rest of the universe to their whims. While this does afford Carol the chance to break free from her mystic imprisonment, it also comes with some particularly worrying implications for the future of the Marvel Universe.
Carol is hardly what anyone would call a Master of the Mystic Arts, yet Wanda’s advice still lends her the ability to shake free from the metaphysical shackles that had once chained her. As someone who openly disdains magic, it is more than a little shocking that Captain Marvel so easily bent it to her own will without any real knowledge of the process. This confirms the concerns Agatha and her fellow sorcerers had previously expressed, particularly those regarding Carol being too powerful for her own or anyone else’s good. Then again, none of this should really surprise Agatha, as she is one of the few people with an innate understanding of just how fickle the rules of magic can be.
Agatha has both set in stone and subsequently broken the precedents behind the magic in the Marvel Universe. While the version of her that fans know best has a long history of mentoring people like the Scarlet Witch, her future self from the world of Old Man Logan was single-handedly responsible for granting Baron Mordo immutable invulnerability. She has also led the students of Strange Academy in their mystical education at times, offering the kinds of insight that can only be afforded by someone so fully immersed in the Mystic Arts. All of Agatha’s experiences have culminated in her absolutely deserved reputation as a force to be reckoned with, and now Carol Danvers threatens to dwarf all of it with little more than her incredible confidence.
If there genuinely is nothing else to commanding magic, then the concerns Agatha already had about Captain Marvel will be entirely validated. There truly aren’t many other people in the Marvel Universe as strong of mind and will as Carol, and she very well might be the only one of them who knows the deepest secret of magic. As hard as it is to imagine Captain Marvel ever stepping into the role of a Master of the Mystic Arts, it is more than obvious that she is done letting any of them push her around.
