I was perusing the penultimate
issue of Fawcett’s Marvel Family, No.
88, but I didn’t know that. Circa 1963, Captain Marvel and his friends had been
out of print for a decade, literally a lifetime to me.
The secondhand shop offered stacks
and stacks of used “funny books” for a nickel each, and avidly combing through
them all constituted an arduous endurance test of a 9-year-old’s bladder.
A man, a girl and a boy — all caped
and dressed suspiciously like Superman — were walking through a door while deflecting
various deadly threats with their invulnerable bodies. So they had Superman’s powers too!
Jokes of Jeopardy was the story’s title. “Geo Pardy?” What kind of
a word was that?
The issue earned my nickel, and my
speculations even after I’d read it. What had happened to these super people?
Where had they gone?
I wouldn’t learn until years later
that they’d been sent to their graves in part by a lawsuit on behalf of the
very Superman they so resembled, and that they had for one brief shining moment
in the 1940s they’d been the most popular superheroes of all. Their very
popularity, I suppose, finally did them in, guaranteeing DC Comics’ enmity.
That may not have been the actual first time I’d seen Captain Marvel, although
I didn’t realize it. Around then, in school, a classmate had brought in a copy
of a magazine I’d never seen, Castle of Frankenstein. There, on the cover, was a black and white photograph
of a caped flying man who was clearly not
Superman. Utterly fascinated, I never got to look inside the issue to discover
who he was. Decades later, when I finally got
to see Republic Pictures’ The Adventures
of Captain Marvel, I found that it lived up to its wonderful reputation
among serial buffs. And yet it was somehow never quite as wonderful as all my pleasantly feverish speculations about
this mystery man had been.
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| From the cover of the second issue of Larry Ivie's Castle of Frankenstein magazine (1962) |
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