Comic Book Questions Answered – where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

Recently, I wrote about why Captain Mar-Vell, the Kree hero who was known as Captain Marvel in the 1960s and 1970s, changed his costume. That led to a question on Twitter from reader Ste Pearson, about why Mar-Vell's hair color changed.

It's funny, looking back at Captain Marvel's development as a character, there were just SO many red flags when Stan Lee, Gene Colan and Frank Giacoia introduced the character in Marvel Suepr-Heroes #12 in 1967...

First off, the mostly white and green color scheme was always a strange one for a superhero. As you might have noticed over the years, there aren't a ton of superheroes with predominantly green costumes. It doesn't translate well. There's a reason why it is often a color used for villains rather than heroes.

Secondly, he was the Kree equivalent of a typical Marvel superhero, age-wise, so he was around 30 years old (in the equivalent in Kree terms) and yet they gave him white hair! Yes, he's supposed to be an alien, so they wanted to distinguish him, but that was probably not the best idea because, of course, when you got a guy running around with white hair, he's going to read as older than he actually is.

However, for whatever reason, the white hair survived a really long time, even when he got his new costume, the white hair stuck around...

Even when Jim Starlin famously took over the character (only eight issues after the famous Roy Thomas/Gil Kane revamp, but those eight issues took about three years to come out, with the book briefly canceled twice in the middle of all of that), the hair remained white...

It's actually really interesting to look at those early Starlin stories in that sense, because the blond version of Captain Marvel is so associated with Jim Starlin and yet it actually took until his FIFTH issue on the series, well after he had already introduced the Thanos storyline into the book, that the blond hair came about.

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Now, obviously, the "real life" reason was the precise thing that you would think, someone at Marvel (perhaps even Starlin) said, "Hey, this guy really shouldn't have white hair. He's not old and yet he looks old because of the hair"). That reminds me of how Rogue was introduced with white streaks in her hair and despite specifically being labeled as a teenager, artists drew her as looking old because she had white streaks in her hair! Well, SOME artists, that is.

In Captain Marvel #29 (by Starlin and Al Milgrom), Captain Marvel is captured by the cosmic being known as Eon, who tells Captain Marvel that "Captain Marvel, the warrior, must be destroyed!"

Being a cosmic being, of course, Eon couldn't just be cool about it and explain that he was saying that Captain Marvel had to stop being a warrior and start learning to think as, if not a pacifist, at least not someone who only thinks about life in terms of warfare. It's like, come on, dude, be cool.

Eventually, Captain Marvel agrees that his approach has been the wrong one and so he becomes Eon's new champion and is given new powers (and a slightly new costume) and, of course, blond hair...

How he KNOWS his hair has changed is that he now has cosmic awareness!

Pretty clever way to write a hair color change in there, huh?

Starlin is a clever dude.

Thanks for the question, Ste! If anyone else has a question about comics, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com (you CAN tweet me, as well, at Brian_Cronin, but I'd prefer e-mail. It is easier to keep track of e-mailed questions than tweeted ones).