'Captain Marvel' Producer Reveals What Comics Inspired the Movie

With Captain Marvel's big screen debut on the horizon - arriving in theaters in just two months - comic fans everywhere are flipping through the back catalogues to read some of the character's most popular runs, trying to get prepared for what Marvel Studios has in store for Brie Larson & company.

If you're looking for a guide on which Captain Marvel books to read ahead of the movie, the best place to start is with the run that inspired Larson's version of the character. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the books that provided the most influence for the new Carol Danvers were the ones written by Kelly Sue DeConnick.

During a visit to the set of Captain Marvel, ComicBook.com heard from producer Jonathan Schwartz, who said that DeConnick's comics were vital to creating Larson's character.

"Yeah you know there's a run of comics by Kelly Sue DeConnick that really gets to the core of the character in a way that we thought really made us want to translate it to the screen," Schwartz said. "She really understood Carol and really made her modern and vibrant and cool in a way that she wasn't always written as. Sorry. That wasnt the great quote of all time. And a lot of great artists working with Kelly at that time. Dexter Soy is great and Jamie McKelvie was amazing and it just sort of represented a vision of the character that we thought would translate to screen really easily. And Kelly's actually been working with us on the movie and has been very helpful and consulted with us and shot a cameo the other day which hopefully you guys can all pick out. But she kind of had a vision for Carol that leaned into her Air Force roots in a really cool way and leaned into the power of a character in the inspirational nature kind of at the core of Carol that we thought was super cool."

While DeConnick's run of Captain Marvel provided much of the basis for the character in the film, Schwartz made it clear that the story being told on the big screen is mostly original.

"Everything Kelly Sue did was great," the producer continued. "Some of that's based on Earth some of that's based in space. It's all amazing. I'd say it's much more useful as reference for the character than for plot specifics which isn't uncommon in these movies. Sometimes We go and say we're going to make a movie about Civil War even though that's a little bit of an adaptation of that that storyline as well. Sometimes it's this group of characters called the Guardians of Galaxy seems cool let's put them on their adventure and sometimes it's this is what's cool about this character, there's this issue, this issue, this issue and that all kind of becomes the grist for the mill filmmaking."

Captain Marvel hits theaters on March 8th.