Here’s How Captain Marvel Got Her Powers (Movies & Comics)

Captain Marvel is currently among the most popular superheroes. She rose to prominence due to her inclusion in the MCU, where she stood out among the most powerful superheroes that managed to fight Thanos on equal ground. One of the reasons why Captain Marvel is so popular is because she has cosmic powers of drastic proportions, she is essentially a cosmic bomb, and there’s really no telling what the limit to her abilities is. But, despite all of this, we know that Danvers was born as a human. In honor of this, we decided to revisit her origin story. Now let’s see how Captain Marvels got her powers both in the comics and in the MCU. 

In the comics, Captain Marvel was always a Kree/Human Hybrid, but her powers activated when she was exposed to a Psyche-Magnitron explosion that activated her latent Kree DNA. She gained her cosmic powers after she was experimented upon by the Brood. In the MCU, Captain Marvel got her cosmic powers when she was exposed to the Tesseract’s powers following the explosion, and she gained her superhuman attributes after the blood transfusion with Yon-Rogg that essentially turned her into a Human/Kree Hybrid. 

Now that we’ve given you a brief overview of Captain Marvel’s origin, it’s time to analyze it in more detail. The story of how Carol Danvers got her powers is similar both in the comics and in the MCU. Still, there are some differences. If you want to know more about them, stay with us and keep reading!

How did Captain Marvel get her powers in the MCU? 

The origin story of Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, was essentially shown in the ‘Captain Marvel’ movie. The movie takes place in 1995, but we are given an insight into Danvers’ past life, and we know that she was born and raised a human and faced struggles that normal mortals in that time faced. 

However, Carol was always adventurous in nature, and life brought her to the military, where she aspired to be the greatest army pilot of all time. She made plenty of friends along the way, but the fact that she got superpowers was almost entirely accidental.

We know that Carol Danvers was working under Wendy Lawson, who was undercover Kree the whole time. Wendy, aka Mar-Vell, was developing the so-called Light-speed Engine to transport the Skrull refugees far away from the Kree aggression when she learned of the fact that the Kree-Skrull war was almost entirely the fault of her own people. 

Mar-Vell was soon discovered by the Kree, most notably Yon-Rogg, who wanted to get his hands on the latest Mar-Vell’s project, the Light-Speed engine, which was powered by the Tesseract, aka the Space Stone. One day while Mar-Vell and Danvers were testing the engine, they were attacked by Yon-Rogg and Minn-Erva, and Danvers was forced to crash land the aircraft. Mar-Vell was badly injured in the ordeal and was forced to reveal her true nature when Danvers noticed that her blood was blue. 

Before ultimately dying, Mar-Vell instructed Danvers to shoot at the engine and destroy it with any means necessary since this piece of technology cannot fall into the wrong hands.

To stop Yon-Rogg from claiming the engine, Danvers shot at the engine and triggered an extremely powerful Tesseract explosion that imbued every piece of Danvers’ being with cosmic energy. Danvers survived the initial explosion, and the readings Yon-Rogg and Minn-Erva confirmed that she was now powered by the Tesseract and held vast powers.

However, due to a sudden energy surge that bathed her DNA Carol Danvers passed away. This is basically how Captain Marvel got her cosmic powers, but the other part of her powers are related to her DNA, and this is a separate story. 

Yon-Rogg and Minn-Erva figured that Danvers was potentially too powerful to be left in the crater dead, they decided to transport her to Hala, the capital of the Kree empire and did some experiments on her.

She was ultimately revived after receiving the blood transfusion from Yon-Rogg himself, which granted Captain Marvel her Kree DNA and essentially made her Kree/Human Hybrid with vast physical powers and cosmic powers granted to her by the Tesseract.

How did Captain Marvel get her powers in the comics? 

In the comics, Carol Danvers was always a Kree/Human Hybrid because her mother was a Kree undercover operative sent to Earth to produce a powerful hybrid offspring. Carol’s mother eventually succeeds in her mission but cuts ties with the Kree and goes MIA as far as they are concerned. This, in turn, made Danvers’ father extremely paranoid that the Kree would eventually look for them, and he became extremely abusive toward his children and his wife. 

Just like in the MCU, Danvers eventually joined the military as a successful pilot, and she started working with Mar-Vell. He was male in the comics, and the two developed a romantic relationship of tumultuous nature. 

Yon-Rogg and Mar-Vell were enemies in the comics as well, and Danvers found herself in the crossfire. Yon-Rogg kidnapped Danvers and wanted to use her against Mar-Vell, and although he initially came to save Danvers, an unstable piece of Kree technology called Psyche-Magnitron machine exploded, and the following explosion affected Danvers’ Kree DNA, activating her latent powers.

So, Captain Marvel got her powers when she was pushed into the Psyche-Magnitron, which caused it to detonate. Mix this with Mar-Vell’s Nega-Bands, Danvers’ latent Kree physiology manifested, and from that day onward, she started transforming into a Kree warrior, one of the most powerful of her kind. 

Captain Marvel had only vastly enhanced physiology as the result of her Kree heritage, but that was about to change when she came across The Brood. The Brood are a spacefaring insectoid species that seek hosts to infest with their spawn, representing a specialized race adapted for reproduction and consumption of resources. 

This also makes them quite skilled “scientists,” and they have long been fascinated by Danvers, who was neither human nor Kree but manifested genetics superior to both races. 

The Brood heavily experimented upon Danvers. She managed to hold against this torture with grace and her mental fortitude. But, the resulting experiments transformed Danvers into something else, a nearly cosmic being of great powers. 

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