Captain Marvel Movie's Starforce, Explained

Marvel Studios is kicking its promotion of Captain Marvel into high gear with an extensive article at Entertainment Weekly detailing the plot of the upcoming film. One of the major revelations is that Brie Larson's Carol Danvers will be part of a special military group known as Starforce, led by Jude Law's Mar-Vell.

The film will be set in the 1990s, so Starforce will have a few members on it that we have already seen in previous films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Lee Pace's Ronan the Accuser and Djimon Hounsou as Korath the Pursuer). It is fitting for Starforce to appear in that particular time period because that is when Starforce first appeared in the comics.

Starforce owes it origins to the early years of the All-New, All-Different X-Men by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum. Early on in that run, Professor X kept getting visions from some sort of alien being. It turned out that it was Lilandra, a member of the Royal Family of the Shi'ar Empire. She needed help stopping her insane older brother, D'ken, now the Emperor of the Shi'ar. Xavier lent her the aide of the X-Men and they had to take on the defenders of the vast Shi'ar Empire, the super-human group known as the Shi'ar Imperial Guard.

The reason that the Shi'ar Imperial Guard matter so much is that it established the conceit that major alien empires have superhuman teams working on their behalf. Therefore, when Avengers editor Mark Gruenwald and writer Bob Harras (who was also the editor of the X-Men titles, which gave Avengers access to the Shi'ar Empire) began to plot out the 1992 crossover event that became known as "Operation: Galactic Storm," they knew that they wanted to have a counterpart to the Shi'ar Imperial Guard since "Galactic Storm" was, in effect, a war between the Kree and the Shi'ar. It was a sequel, of sorts, of the classic Avengers story, "The Kree/Skrull War." The war between the alien empires began to affect Earth due to both empires using interstellar transportation devices known as "Stargates" that drew upon Earth's sun for power. Such usages threatened to destabilize the sun and that, naturally, posed a grave danger to the Earth. Thus, the Avengers decided to go into space to see if they could possibly find a peaceful resolution to this war.

While the Kree had actually predated the Shi'ar by more than a decade, they had never had a team of characters before. They typically just had solo villains like Ronan the Accuser, the Fantastic Four villain who was the first super-powered Kree being that Earth heroes faced off against. The closest we saw to a "team" of Kree characters was when we first met the Kree Captain Mar-Vell, who was part of a Kree crew that was meant to determine whether Earth was a threat to the Kree Empire. Mar-Vell broke from his original crew and decided to become a protector of Earth.

Over the years, then, in the pages of Captain Marvel's ongoing series, as well as the spin-off series Ms. Marvel (starring Mar-Vell's friend, Carol Danvers, who gained Kree powers like Mar-Vell - she later took the name Captain Marvel in honor of Mar-Vell after he passed away), he had to fight against a number of Kree villains to protect his adopted planet. Occasionally, new Kree villains would appear in other titles, like Thor and the Inhumans. Mark Gruenwald had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Marvel Universe, so even before "Operation: Galactic Storm," he had begun to bring back some old Captain Marvel Kree villains in his own cosmic series, Quasar, starring Wendell Vaughn as Mar-Vell's successor as the protector of Earth.

Finally, in Avengers #346 (by Bob Harras, Steve Epting and Tom Palmer), when a squad of Avengers traveled to the Kree homeworld to plead with the Kree to end their war, the Avengers were forced to face off against the Kree Starforce, who were tricked by the Kree Supreme Intelligence into believing that the Avengers were there to kill the Joint Emperors of the Kree. Starforce consisted of Doctor Minerva (an old foe from Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel who had recently fought Quasar), Captain Atlas (a Kree warrior manipulated by Minerva to fight Quasar), Ronan the Accuser (the most famous of the Kree warriors at this point), Supremor (a clone of Supreme Intelligence from Captain Marvel), Ultimus (who fought Thor years earlier), Korath the Pursuer (a new character from Quasar who was revealed to have been behind an old Inhumans villain known as the Pursuer) and Shatterax (a new villain who had fought Iron Man in an earlier part of "Operation: Galactic Storm")...

When Deathbird still succeeded in killing the Kree emperors, Starforce then tried (and failed) to kill Shi'ar Empress Lilandra in retaliation.

What most of the members of Starforce did not know, however, is that their founder, the Supreme Intelligence, had manipulated the entire Kree-Shi'ar War so that a Nega Bomb would be dropped on the Kree homeworld. It killed billions, but the remaining Kree survivors were mutated and able to evolve to become stronger in the future.

When Captain Atlas discovered that Minerva was aware of this plot, he was not thrilled...

You would think that this would have been the end of Starforce, but you would have thought wrong...

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With the Kree Empire now in ruins and the Supreme Intelligence killed by the Avengers (who decided that they should hold true to their name by avenging the billions of Kree that were killed by the Supreme Intelligence's plot), the Shi'ar Empire took control of the Kree Empire and Deathbird was placed in command of Starforce, with the Kree now serving as part of the Shi'ar Empire. Ronan and Supremor left the team.

This new Starforce faced off against Quasar in an epilogue to "Operation: Galactic Force" in Quasar #35 (by Mark Gruenwald, Greg Capullo and Harry Candelario)...

Starforce also fought against the Silver Surfer in a minicomic that came out as part of a deal Marvel had with Drake's Cakes in the 1990s.

They appeared in the final storyline of the short-lived 1994-95 series, Blackwulf, by Glenn Herdling and Angel Medina, which starred an alien hero who ended up on Earth.

Finally, during the Annihilation event, in the pages of Annihilation: Ronan #1 (by Simon Furman and Jorge Lucas), Ronan runs into Korath and we learned that when the Kree Empire regained its independence from the Shi'ar Empire, the members of Starforce were considered traitors for working with the Shi'ar and thus they were all exiled.

Luckily for Ronan, he was able to fight his way back into the good graces of the Kree and even became the ruler of the Kree Empire.

That's been the last of Starforce so far, but we only need a new cosmic crisis to draw the heroes (and villains) of the Kree Empire back together again.