By the time I became aware of
comics in the late 1950s, Captain Marvel was little more than a rumor.
In the 1960s, if you had asked me
about a caped, super-strong flying hero transformed by magic lightning, I have
replied, “Oh sure. Thor.”
But one had come before him, and
had in fact once been the world’s bestselling superhero.
The Big Red Cheese had vanished in
1954, the victim of both DC’s copyright infringement lawsuit on behalf of
Superman and Fawcett’s decision to abandon its comic book line entirely in the
face of McCarthyesque public paranoia and hostility toward the medium.
I’d found the penultimate issue of
Marvel Family in a secondhand shop
for a nickel, and wondered who on Earth these Supermanish figures were.
What an oddity — immensely popular
characters that couldn’t be published. Even Jules Feiffer, in his seminal 1965
book The Great Comic Book Heroes, was
permitted to republish only a single page of Captain Marvel’s origin. He lived
on only in the memories of fans.
Fortunately, the science fiction
fandom of the 1930s and 1950s had inspired comic book fandom in the 1960s,
helped along by the fact that comic book editors like Richard Hughes, Stan Lee
and Mort Weisinger started publishing letter columns.
“Fanzines” were popping up, and
one fan in particular was determined to keep the spirit of Captain Marvel
alive.
Born in 1939, Alan Jim Hanley had
been just the right age to appreciate the Big Red Cheese in his heyday. A self-published
comic book artist, he worked as a hired caricaturist at Chicago-area parties. In
Alan Hanley’s Comic Book fanzine,
published between 1966 and 1977, he brought the gentle fun of Captain Marvel
back to life in the form of his own pastiche hero, Good Guy. That was a
nickname. Good Guy was officially known as Major Marvel, and was assisted by, of
course, Minor Marvel and Ms. Marvel. They gained their powers with a “Pffft!”
when they pressed “panic buttons” energized by Golden Age superheroes who were lost
in an unpublished limbo.
Good Guy once debated the state of
affairs in American popular culture with the Green Lama while strapped to a
missile headed for Disneyland. “Well, heck, the world seems like it’s drunk on
sexual and violent themes with no time off for sobering up,” Good Guy mused. “A
lot of compounded confusion for folks tryin’ to adjust to this complicated
society.”
Another Good Guy adventure
featured a black Superman confronting racial animus in American society.
I liked Hanley’s work enough to
commission him to do a poster of Good Guy Jr. for me in the late 1960s. Wish I
hadn’t lost track of it.
Hanley’s work appeared in a number
of fanzines and trade publications, and his other characters included The
Spook, All-American Jack and a pastiche of a Lee-Kirby Marvel superhero he called
Captain Thunder (which, you may recall, was the original name of Captain
Marvel). Only in his early 40s, Hanley died in the winter of 1980 as the result
of a car accident.
Such are the vagaries of fate.
I’ll always wonder if Hanley’s sunny, whimsical talents might have found a
broader audience, had he lived. But perhaps not. Innocence still isn’t in fashion,
more’s the pity.
Hanley’s creation Good Guy suggests how you can internalize and personalize the superhero myth, which is much larger than the commercial context in which we always see it.
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