Monica Rambeau's New Superpowers Answer a Question WandaVision Never Resolved
Meet Photon, with the power to manipulate light energy.
Monica Rambeau is a woman of many aliases. So far, we’ve seen her as just Monica, the Blipped daughter of Maria Rambeau who hung out with Carol Danvers in Captain Marvel and who became a captive of Wanda Maximoff’s sitcom fever dream in WandaVision. But in the new trailer for the upcoming Marvel Movie The Marvels, she’s Captain Rambeau, who is working with the mysterious S.A.B.E.R. investigating a space oddity.
But later in the trailer, we see her in a superhero costume. But just what name will she go by? A quick look at her powers and her comics history reveals the truth.
Monica Rambeau has an illustrious history in Marvel Comics, and that means that she’s gone by multiple pseudonyms. Across universes and even within the Prime one, she’s gone by Captain Marvel, Phasar, Spectrum, and Daystar.
Monica’s black-and-white costume in The Marvels is reminiscent of her costume in the comics.
But currently in the comics, she’s operating under the name Photon. That name seems like the most likely option for her MCU superhero alias. After all, she can manipulate light energy, and a photon is the smallest unit of light energy, a massless particle that moves at the speed of light.
Her costume in the trailer also looks oddly similar to Photon’s latest redesign which debuted in late 2022. Marvel Comics has been known to pre-empt MCU events with adjacent comics runs, so if Monica is going by Photon in the MCU currently, it’s likely she’ll use the same name in The Marvels.
Monica Rambeau’s Photon redesign in Monica Rambeau: Photon #1, published in December 2022.
There’s probably a reason Monica’s name is being kept under wraps for now. Though we’ve seen the genesis of her powers in WandaVision and this trailer shows her using her light energy powers deliberately, we haven’t seen her really come into her own as a superhero.
Hopefully, The Marvels will give her the origin story — complete with a name fitting her supernatural power — she deserves so she can join Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel as a trio of galactically powered badass women.
