An old foe returns in Captain Marvel: Dark Tempest #1, and even that’s no match for Carol Danvers’ most pressing issue: generational divide.

With Kelly Thompson’s fifty issue run now concluded and Alyssa Wong’s own tenure on the Captain Marvel title incoming, the storied Ann Nocenti brings us a new limited series taking Carol on a —what else?— cosmic adventure placing her in the crosshairs of Nitro, an old adversary of Mar-Vell’s. But when a group of bright but frustrated youths get involved in her drama, Carol is forced to step up and be more than just another superhero.

Before getting into Dark Tempest #1 proper, I think it’s worth getting the uncomfortable bit out of the way first. I respect Nocenti’s long, successful career in comics, but lots of this issue is —as the kids say— a little cringe. An unexpected element in this story is a subplot involving Carol’s weirdly flippant attitude towards younger people that, to be fair, is probably headed somewhere and not just there for the sake of it, but it’s jarring coming from a character who isn’t known to be especially crotchety. This is one of the more inconvenient aspects of telling stories in a large, shared universe on a sliding timescale: how old is Carol supposed to be, exactly? The MCU version specifically places her early adulthood in the 90s with suspended aging, but 616 Carol has been vaguely twenty/thirtysomething since her introduction in the 60s. When she bemoans the agitation young people hold towards “boomers” and “breeders” in this issue, it comes off like something Carol would say and more like it’s Nocenti herself airing out some personal grievances about youth culture in 2023. I could be wrong! Maybe Nocenti doesn’t actually feel so derisively towards them and it’s just an unsuccessful attempt at “young” writing. Jessica Drew, the other major character who features in these scenes, offers a counterpoint to Carol’s opinions, but she doesn’t push back on them too hard either. Also not helping matters is the fact that these youthful mouthpieces in the issue are all specifically young black people, which also feels potentially loaded. But that might be an unfair accusation. In any event, so much of this issue seems to grind to a halt when it comes to that section of the script that it may be hard for some to overcome.

With all that being said… Dark Tempest #1 is just fine? That’s kind of the unfortunate thing here. It’s not bad, but I’m not really sure what to make of this story based on one issue. Knowing Thompson’s long run just ended and Wong’s promising take on the character is arriving soon, it places Dark Tempest in an awkward spot wherein it can’t do anything too radical with the character, but should also probably feel substantial in some form. These sorts of interstitial limited series are actually quite common throughout Marvel’s yearly slate and share similar issues, so I’m willing to cut Nocenti a little bit of slack in that regard. Artist Paolo Villanelli does great work with the material, however, and the cosmic trapping of this story should offer him a lot to do in the coming issues. I just wish there was a little more “there” there in this one.