Captain Marvel is the book which the entire U-Decide stunt exists to plug, so it's the one with the most expectations on it.

And this is a slightly odd issue.  It certainly addresses one of my biggest complaints about the previous series, which was that it simply wasn't about Captain Marvel.  It was about Rick Jones, and Marvel was left as a slight and rather generic hero character.  The lead character was arguably the least interesting thing in his own comic, and I couldn't help wishing they'd just do a Rick Jones comic and be done with it, if that was what they wanted to do.

This issue takes the other approach to the problem, which is to attempt to make Captain Marvel interesting.  Certainly it puts him to the centre of the plot, which is not somewhere he's accustomed to being.  The basic idea is that Marvel thinks he's got the hang of his cosmic awareness powers, and is yanked around by various threats he can sense, steadily driving him mad.

It's not a bad idea in itself, and it does finally give the character some kind of arc of his own.  Of course, it comes across here as a repeat of the old "How can I live with myself when I can't save everyone" Superman plot, but it's still a reasonable choice of theme for this character.

But the story leaves me a little cold.  There's not much drama here - it starts off with Marvel being yanked around arbitrarily by his powers and keeps it up until he goes mad on page 22.  It feels very bitty.  There's not much character interaction here, and the big scene that pushes him over the edge is not an original dilemma.  I quite like the idea of this story, but it isn't dramatised all that well.  It feels a bit like David is rushing the plot in order to have something significant happen in the first issue, rather than letting it move at a natural pace.

ChrisCross is still on art, but without an inker.  Instead, we have Chris Sotomayor's computer colouring doing the job, similar to the work Liquid are doing on X-Treme X-Men.  To my mind, the book looks much better than X-Treme, with stronger colours and a generally higher level of contrast.  ChrisCross's more rounded and curvy figures seem to fit well with this technique.

I want to like it - it looks great, I like the central idea, and I'm interested to see the follow-up.  But the plot is just too forced for me to really get enthusiastic. 

Rating: B

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