A weak, vulnerable person is
transformed by magic lightning into a caped, Herculean hero who can fly.
Um, could you narrow that down a
little more? That could be anybody.
In his second adventure (Journey Into Mystery 84, Sept. 1962), the
Mighty Thor exploited his built-in Captain Marvel motif by having Dr. Don Blake
trapped before a firing squad, unable to reach the walking stick that would
change him into the thunder god. This echoed the many times in which Billy
Batson, Mary Batson or Freddy Freeman ended up bound and gagged and unable to
utter the villain-vanquishing word “Shazam!”
Having fought off an alien invasion
in his first outing, the thunder god flexes his considerable muscles against a
modern army this time out. The story is full of those multi-panel feats of
staggering strength that Jack Kirby was so good at delivering.
The tale continues the
commie-bashing featured in Marvel’s brief superhero revival in 1954, but this
time the heavy has a heavy resemblance to Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro,
who’d only been in power three years. Because DC’s superhero titles usually
backed away from real-world politics, Stan Lee instinctively went in the other
direction, toward giving Marvel’s characters additional verisimilitude by
grounding them in a more recognizable world.
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