Marvel’s Joe Quesada Explain’s Captain Marvel’s Mohawk Design

Marvel fans are now rather used to seeing Captain Marvel with a mohawk when she’s fully armored up, but Marvel had to be sold on going with that design, and Joe Quesada recently broke down part of that process.

Captain Marvel was rocking her full red and blue costume complete with that trademark helmet in the newest trailer, and Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer took the opportunity to explain how the mohawk design came about on social media, complete with sketches.

“Since it seems to be a topic of conversation today I dug up the original sketches I did while in the Marvel office to try to sell the team on Carol’s mohawk hair helmet,’ Quesada wrote. These were all on three separate scraps of paper but I condensed them here. In the initial drawing I was trying to give Carol a haircut that would work inside the helmet in order to give the mohawk shape. The rest were rough concepts of what it may look like when the helmet wrapped around her head. @McKelvie took that and made it look much cooler.”

You can see the sketches above.

The full costume redesign wouldn’t be realized until Jamie McKelvie got his hands on the character, which wasn’t easy to make happen, though Kelly Sue DeConnick came up with a bet to make it into a reality.

“And so I called Jamie and was like, ‘Alright, I want you to make a bet with me,” DeConnick said. “I bet if you do a Carol Danvers redesign for Captain Marvel that Marvel will buy the design from you. And if I win this bet, then I get a redesign and you get paid. And if I lose this bet, I will pay for the redesign. My husband would have murdered me, because you don’t front money for billion dollar companies. I mean, I would have murdered me, that’s nonsense.”

It all worked out in the end, as McKelvie delivered and Marvel bought the design.

“It was extraordinary,” DeConnick said, “because he’s probably the best designer working — as far as the look of contemporary hero costumes goes … He knocked it out of the park.”

Captain Marvel stars Academy Award-winner Brie Larson (Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Ben Mendelsohn, Djimon Hounsou (Korath), Lee Pace (Ronan), Lashana Lynch, Gemma Chan (Minn-Erva), Algenis Perez Soto, Rune Temte, McKenna Grace, Kenneth Mitchell (Joseph Danvers), with Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson), and Jude Law.

Captain Marvel launches on March 8, 2019, while Avengers 4 hits on May 3, 2019, followed by Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5, 2019.