Man’s Best Friend

Although The Curse Of Shazam isn’t a series I plan on purchasing, your humble host has tried to refrain from joining the chorus  - an admittedly small one, I must add – of outraged Captain Marvel fans decrying the wholesale reconstruction of a beloved Golden Age character.

After numerous failed attempts to revive a once-thriving creation that DC itself once put out of business, it seemed inevitable that the company would one day throw the baby out with the bathwater and rebuild the Big Red Cheese – errrrr, I mean “Shazam” – from scratch to better fit the needs of a modern comic book universe and its continuity-crazed fans.

To be frank, despite the noble attempts of such creators as Jerry Ordway and Jeff Smith, the classic Captain Marvel never really seemed to click with modern readers at any rate. I first discovered the Marvel Family during DC’s first revival in the ‘70s, and found myself far more captivated by the Golden Age reprints included in the comics than anything devised the creative teams of that period.

The gentle humor, quietly detailed characterization and old-fashioned thrills of the Fawcett era belong to an earlier age that seemingly can’t be recaptured by writers and artists – no matter how talented – in the 21st century.

So why not rename the character Shazam? The real Captain Marvel and family flew into the sunset back in 1953 anyway.

The following story is a nice example of how Golden Age Cap stories often dug a bit deeper than one would expect from a series featuring talking tigers and evil alien worms. I can’t imagine a tale like this playing to the far older and cynical audience comics are directed toward these days, but it remains affecting all the same.

From Captain Marvel Adventures # 38 (Fawcett, August 1944), here’s “The Man Nobody Loved” by writer Otto Binder and artist Pete Costanza.

*Sniff*

A Very Marvel Christmas

Now that two-thirds of my family is in the throes of the dreaded December cold virus, today seems as good a time as any to spread a little holiday cheer around the Blogosphere.

So, for the entire week The Time Bullet will present vintage comics and other miscellany celebrating the obscure, Wintertime celebration known as “Christmas!”

First up, “Captain Marvel And Billy Batson’s Xmas” by the Hall of Fame team of writer Otto Binder and artist Pete Costanza. The story originally appeared in Captain Marvel Adventures #69 (Fawcett Comics, February 1947).

Mummy Dearest

Captain Marvel, Junior and Mary face their greatest challenge – well, next to DC’s legal team – as The Time Bullet continues its pulse-pounding countdown to Oct. 31!

From The Marvel Family #79 (Fawcett Publications, January 1953), it’s “The Dynasty Of Horror!” The story was written by Otto Binder and drawn by C.C. Beck (pencils) and Pete Costanza (inks).

Marvel Vs. DC

Despite what DC attorneys argued at the time, the Golden Age Captain Marvel wasn’t all that similar to a certain Man Of Steel. They could both fly, bend steel in their bare hands and laugh away a hail of bullets, but the Big Red Cheese’s cheerful outlook and whimsical adventures were far different from the more serious Superman’s.

(Grant Morrison makes an excellent case for just how different the two characters were in his must-read super-hero dissertation/memoir, Supergods.)

Such differences mattered little to DC, however, who viewed the Captain’s swift and massive success as a serious threat to the Superman franchise and filed suit. By the end of the ’40s, the two publishers had been locked in litigation for more than seven years and were headed for a courtroom showdown.

At that point Captain Marvel was no longer the cash cow of the World War II years (Adventures was published bi-weekly at its peak with a circulation of 1.3 million copies an issue), but still earned enough profit to support an entire line of comics. A judgement in DC’s favor would not only wipe out the Big Red Cheese but every other title published by Fawcett.

In their typical whimsical matter, Captain Marvel co-creator C.C.Beck and the equally legendary writer Otto Binder addressed this situation in Captain Marvel Adventures #97 (Fawcett Publications, June 1949).

Beneath an ingenious cover illustration of a photographed hand “wiping out” the Big Red Cheese, the issue contained the tale of a felonious artist who acquired a magic eraser that could eradicate any person or object.

As a plot device, the eraser worked on a variety of levels. It served as a seemingly unbeatable challenge for Captain Marvel while subtly acknowledging the hero’s entire world as nothing more than a series of drawings on paper.

(C.C. Beck himself even makes a one-panel cameo toward the end of the tale.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if the eraser was also a commentary on the ongoing DC/Fawcett lawsuit. And is it just me, or does the story’s villain resemble a young Jerry Siegel?

‘Walt Toady’

Siegel & Shuster

As we all know, Captain Marvel was indeed wiped out a few years later after Judge Learned Hand ruled against Fawcett. The Marvel Family and every other character and title published by the company disappeared from the face of the Earth for decades.

A few publishers trotted out their own Captain Marvels before DC revived the one and only Big Red Cheese in the early ’70s. Although a host of talented creators have taken their shots at the Marvel Family (including Jerry Ordway, Mike Kunkel, Jeff Smith, Mike Norton and C.C. Beck himself), no one has ever quite captured the artistic or commercial spark that made the Golden Age tales so memorable.

These days, the Marvels are barely a presence in the DC Universe. Those rare times when Cap interacts with The Man Of Steel – his rival of long ago – it’s usually in the role of a glorified sidekick.

It’s hard to imagine Cap ever being an upper-tier character for the very company that engineered his downfall. But then again, perhaps the Big Red Cheese has already enjoyed the final laugh.

After all, to steal an insight from Morrison’s Supergods, DC was eventually knocked off its lofty perch by a company named “Marvel.”

Here’s “Captain Marvel Is Wiped Out” by Binder and Beck.

The Man Out Of Time

Unless a “think-outside-the-box” creator is allowed total freedom with the character, i.e. Jeff Smith and Mike Kunkel, it’s become rather clear that Captain Marvel will never recapture the glory years when his adventures routinely outsold Superman, Batman, Captain America and just about any other super-hero you could name.

My theory: the character simply isn’t kewl enough to survive in these harsh years of Blackest Night zombies, Green Goblin vaginas and You-Know-Who knows what.

After all, Cap’s greatest appeal was reader identification. Billy Batson was a child – just like much of the super-hero audience back then – and what kid wouldn’t love to turn into an all-powerful hero with just one magic word?

The concept is still powerful, judging by my own son’s reaction to the character’s recent appearance in the animated Batman: The Brave & The Bold. Unfortunately, children his age don’t really pick up American super-hero comics these days.

With a core audience that skews closer to readers in their 20s and far, far beyond (I’m 47, FYI), DC is forced to shoehorn  Cap, Junior, Mary and the rest of the Marvel clan into an “adult” comic-book universe where relativism rules and super-villains routinely commit acts of ultra-violence with little or no consequences.

How can a hero who’s essentially a big, lovable galoot fit into such a tableau? He doesn’t, judging by the Marvel Family’s miserably grim appearances in Trials Of Shazam, Countdown and – perhaps worst of all – a recent JSA arc that rendered both Billy and Mary radioactive for years to come.

(Jerry Ordway really should have known better.)

So, I suppose all that’s left for the long-suffering Marvel fan is the past. DC was supposed to reprint the original “Monster Society Of Evil” serial at one point and a classic story pitting Cap against Surrealism was recently published in Art Spiegelman’s excellent Toon Treasury Of Classic Children’s Comics.

And … perhaps that’s good enough. Although the corporate desire to retain such “properties” as the Marvels until the end of time probably renders such hopes irrelevant, Captain Marvel and company could well be better off resting on their well-deserved laurels.

Not everything is meant to translate into harsher times, after all.  Let’s just leave Cap and his whimsy to a time and place that better appreciated such qualities.

As a tribute to our old friend, the Big Red Cheese, here’s the oddly appropriate “Captain Marvel’s Inferiority Complex” from Captain Marvel Adventures #80.

The writer and artist are, sadly, not credited.