Clearly visible cat butt opens the hangar door for one of the weirdest additions to Captain Marvel’s extended family.
Amid all the hype for the newly released Captain Marvel trailer, Marvel quietly released the first official teaser poster for the female-fronted superhero flick at the same time. The poster is elegant, but it doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know…
…or does it?
Eagle-eyes fans quickly spotted an odd shadow to the left of the hangar doors on the poster.
A little photoshop magic and “voila!” one cat butt.
There is only one “cat” associated with Carol Danvers a.k.a. Captain Marvel — Chewy — a cat that Carol adopted in the pages of Giant-Size Ms. Marvel #1, way back in 2006 and who was named for Han Solo’s copilot in Ms. Marvel Vol. 2 #5. Since then, Chewy has been a recurring presence in Carol’s life.
Chewy was so important to Carol that when she was assigned to be the Avenger’s official ambassador to space in the pages of Captain Marvel, Chewy came along for the ride … and that’s when things got really weird.
In Captain Marvel #7, Carol and Chewie teamed up with the Guardians of the Galaxy. And when Rocket got one look at Carol’s pet, he identified it as a “flerken” and began trying to kill it “before it could lay eggs.”
While Carl managed to prevent Rocket from killing her pet, it turns out the racoon was right. Chewy was a “flerken,” perhaps the last in the universe. As a flerkin, she could shapeshift her body into a Lovecraftian nightmare — pulling extra mass as needed from a pocket dimension.
The next issue Chewie did exactly what Rocket was afraid of — laying dozens and dozens of eggs. Eggs that attracted intergalactic poachers, eager to sell the last of the flerken to he highest bidder.
But Chewie wasn’t going to take that laying down. She ate the interlopers in a grotesque body morphing display that would make David Cronenberg flinch — involving many tentacles and far too many teeth .
Crisis averted, Chewie returned to lovable kitty mode.
Carol left Chewy and her eggs in a safe haven. Only to discover that flerken can teleport as well, when her companion “popped” back onto the ship as she was rocketing away — comfortable with the fact that her eggs were now safe.
So that is the significance of the cat butt on the poster for Captain Marvel. Will we get Chewie? Will we discover he is secretly a flerken? It seems hard to justify putting a cat on the front of the poster if the answer was, “no.” But I suppose we will have to wait until March 8th, 2019, to know for sure. Or maybe we will have to wait for Carol to meet Rocket in Avengers 4.
My money is on “flerken.”
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