Monica Rambeau

Monica Rambeau was a New Orleans harbour patrol lieutenant when she was caught in the discharge of an extradimensional energy weapon, and came out able to convert her body into any wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio, microwave, x-ray, visible light, gamma. She can be a laser, a broadcast signal, or nothing at all, and she travels at the speed of light while doing it.

She is also one of Marvel's most systematically undervalued heroes. Monica was the second Captain Marvel, she chaired the Avengers, and she was then quietly written out of the spotlight for years while the codename rotated to other people. Marvel has spent the last two decades correcting that, through Warren Ellis' Nextwave, Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers and Ultimates, and her Spectrum identity, which finally matches the scale of what she can actually do.

Roger Stern and John Romita Jr. created Monica in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 in 1982, giving her the Captain Marvel name and a fast track into the Avengers. Stern made her the team's chairwoman during his celebrated run, a genuinely rare position for a new character and the first Black woman to lead the team.

Marvel then mishandled her for years. She was written out with power loss, took the names Photon and then Pulsar, and lost the Captain Marvel identity to Genis-Vell and eventually Carol Danvers.

Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen's Nextwave in 2006 restored her reputation with a satirical, extremely quotable run in which Monica flatly points out that she used to lead the Avengers. Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers and Ultimates followed, giving her the Spectrum name and pushing her into cosmic-tier stories where her powers finally make sense at scale.