'Shazam:' Quirky Charm of the Gods

Meagan Good and Ross Butler in 'Shazam: Fury of the Gods'

Bart and I went to see Shazam: Fury of the Gods, which had the same quirky charm as the original but seemed overlong to me. These superhero sagas, necessarily lacking surprise, depend on pacing and rhythm, like a familiar piece of music. 

Helen Mirren chewed the scenery like a gourmet as an evil Titan. British Shakespearean actors can handle this sort of nonsense with their eyes closed.

Good Guy: The Ghost Of Captain Marvel

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.

"Justice, Like Lightning, Ever Should Appear..."

I understand the Marvel bullpen wasn’t thrilled about publisher Martin Goodman’s idea of appropriating the name of a legendary Fawcett Comics superhero in 1968, but Roy Thomas and Gene Colan made the best of it with a radical approach.

“Captain Marvel” wasn’t a hero at all, but an alien spy and saboteur misidentified and posing as a superhero. This villain-evolves-into-hero dramatic dynamic would be used effectively again in such titles as Thunderbolts and Superior Spider-Man.

However, random changes in writer, artist and direction made the title seem like a lame afterthought, at least until issue 17 in July 1969, when Thomas teamed with Gil Kane — then at the height of his powers — to revamp the character into what became an affectionate wink at the original 1940s superhero.

Mar-Vell’s green-and-white alien battle armor was traded for the red and yellow of the Shazam shouter’s original costume. They gave Mar-Vell the wish-fulfilling power of pure flight, and restored one of the most powerful elements of the fantasy — that of a boy instantly transformed into a superman. Here, the “boy” was Rick Jones, a teenager who’d been knocking around the Marvel universe from the beginning, who “traded atoms” with Captain Marvel by clashing his wrist bands.

“Kane's long, lanky, powerful figures are in constant motion, and his action sequences are mind-boggling (to say the least),” Lloyd Smith noted. “Plus, he gets to draw Captain America (okay, so it’s rarely really Cap, but still...), some Avengers, and the Hulk.”

The Magic Word 'Kimota!' Transforms Comics

Before his own Watchmen, before Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, there was 1982’s Marvelman, Englishman Alan Moore’s milestone deconstruction of the American superhero.

If you ever need an example of why real art requires an outsider’s viewpoint, this is it. Moore took his loving familiarity with comic book conventions — the superhuman powers, the magic words, the skintight costumes, the youthful sidekicks, the secret identities, the archenemies — and juxtaposed it all in his imagination with mundane reality. The result was not the usual parody, but aesthetic insights that cut in more than one direction.

Using the American dreamscape to expose the American collective unconscious, Moore also explored a philosophical theme that paralleled Plato, who had suggested that with great power comes catastrophe. And Moore did it with a character who had an impeccable, if convoluted, pedigree. Marvelman was the son of Captain Marvel, the grandson of Superman.

When the Superman-DC lawsuit finally put Captain Marvel out of business here in 1953, his British publisher L. Miller & Son saw no reason why such a great concept should die there. Writer-artist Mick Anglo replaced “Shazam!” with “Kimota!” and created Marvelman, clearly a pastiche Captain Marvel, in 1954. The feature and spinoffs ran until 1963.

The character was juvenile even by 1950s standards, pretty thin stuff, but Alan Moore’s reimagining was anything but.

Through sheer luck, I acquired the first issues of the British comic magazine Warrior, seemingly rare in the U.S. I realized immediately that here we had something familiar yet completely original, that the ground had shifted under the superhero fans’ feet. Marvel’s Ultimate titles and the whole twilight atmosphere of today’s American superhero comics can be traced back and credited to that obscure black-and-white British magazine. Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon and Damon Lindelof all owe Moore a debt.

In the middle of a terrorist attack, seedy, migraine-ridden journalist Micky Moran sees the oddly familiar word “atomic” backwards through a glass door panel, mutters it and explodes into the god that he had forgotten he was. His wife is incredulous and the authorities are ungrateful. (An understatement. Their term for the superheroes is “the monsters.”)

Moore’s flair for dramatic surprises that amplify his themes appears throughout the series. When his wife expresses concern for his safety, Micky tells her not to worry — nothing can hurt him, he’s a superhero. Then, in an elevator, strangers hand him a baby, point out that he can’t transform without incinerating the child, and shoot him point blank. As Micky sinks into darkness, he is mocked by his own swaggering words…

The First Time I Saw the Marvel Family

The first time I saw Captain Marvel, and the Marvel Family, I was kneeling on the floor of a second-hand shop in Effingham, IL, fairly desperate to urinate but too engrossed in a comic book to go do it.

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.

From the cover of the second issue of Larry Ivie's Castle of Frankenstein magazine (1962)

Captain Marvel '67: When Villain Turns Hero

Those first half-dozen appearances of Marvel’s Captain Marvel in 1967-68, by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan, were dramatic and innovative.

The Kree invader Captain Mar-Vell was an alien spy and saboteur who, when accidentally compelled to pose as a super hero, found that he was gradually becoming one.

It’s a theme that has been reworked to good effect since, notably in Marvel’s Thunderbolts (when the Masters of Evil posed as a superhero team) and Superior Spider-Man (in which Dr. Octopus took over his archenemy’s identity).

But I’ve heard Stan Lee was unenthusiastic about Marvel Comics stealing the name and Shazam-born thunder of the famous Fawcett hero of the 1940s (it was his publisher’s idea). As the feature fell into other hands, it careened erratically into relative obscurity. What might have been, had Thomas and Colan stayed with it...

I understand that only the first issue was written by Lee. The next several issues were penned by Roy Thomas.

Captain Marvel battles another alien agent, the Super Skrull, in his second issue.

The public thinks Namor is the villain here, and Captain Marvel the hero. But they're being fooled in the space-born hero's fourth issue.

How Captain Marvel Became the Mighty Thor

Captain Marvel had vanished almost a decade before, and to the young comic book readers of 1962 that might as well have been forever. So Stan Lee and Jack Kirby decided it was time to revive the popular concept, with interesting variations. Here's a caped, flying, super-strong hero with the powers of the gods, transformed from his ordinary existence by a bolt of magical lightning when danger threatens. Even disability, as a metaphor for weakness, was carried over from Fawcett to Marvel. Both Freddy Freeman, the alter ego of Captain Marvel Jr., and Dr. Don Blake, Thor's secret identity, were lame.

 Whiz Comics #2 (February 1940), published by Fawcett Comics. 

Savoring Somebody Else's Thrills

Live action super heroes were thin on the ground when I was a boy.

We had little beyond Superman and Zorro on TV and Tarzan at the movies until 1966, when Batman wowed the tube and Superman flew to Broadway.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find that the generation ahead of me had been much luckier, thrilling to dozens of superheroes from the comic books, the newspaper comic strips, the pulp magazines, radio drama and original screenplays as they dashed manically across the movie screen in 15-minute chapter plays every Saturday during the 1930s and 1940s. Each hero’s adventure added up to three or four hours on screen!

I longed to see them as a boy, but they were never shown. When I did get to watch them as an adult, I could still see beyond the repetitive action of the endless, breathless chases and the strained production values to the cinema sorcery that set someone else’s childhood soaring.

The best superhero movie serials? I think they were: 
• Republic’s 1942 “Spy Smasher” starring the able, handsome Kane Richmond as the Fawcett Comic hero. The production values were high (I suspect they used some other film’s classy leftover sets), the action was fine and the wartime plot was even poignant at points.

Captain Marvel: Hollywood's first live-action superman

• Republic’s 1941 “Adventures of Captain Marvel” starring Tom Tyler, which helped propel the good captain into stratospheric comic book sales during the 1940s. The flying effects and fight stunts are still admirable, clearly labors of love. Watch, for example, as Captain Marvel kicks two thugs in the chin with a back flip.

• Columbia’s 1942 “The Secret Code,” starring Paul Kelly (an actor whose career was not confined to the serial ghetto) as the Black Commando. For once, a superhero identity has an almost credible rationale — Kelly plays an American agent who has infiltrated a Nazi spy ring, and who periodically thwarts their plans as the Black Commando without blowing his cover. It’s an original character, but, as my friend David Goode has observed, this could easily have been a serial featuring MLJ Comics’ popular hero the Black Hood.

•  Republic’s late entry, the 1949 serial “King of the Rocket Men.” More of those sharp flying effects are featured in serial about an original character who directly inspired Commando Cody and the Rocketeer. The serial ends, rather startlingly and spectacularly, with the destruction of Manhattan by super-scientific tidal wave.

I thought superheroes were supposed to prevent that kind of thing? Oh, well. Rocket Man did succeed in entertaining us.

A Job for Atomic Anthropomorphic Animals

Atomic Mouse had a healthy decade-long run, from 1953 to 1963.

During the 1950s, Charlton Comics’ bench was surprisingly deep in nuclear anthropomorphic super animals.

They published Atomic Mouse, Atomic Rabbit, Atomic Bunny (not necessarily the same character as Atomic Rabbit) and Atom the Cat — all black-costumed, caped, flying super-strong heroes (although the cat was, true to his species, pretty blasé about heroics).

This radioactive menagerie illustrated two things — that the ubiquitous word “atomic” was a synonym for “super” in the fifties, and that fly-by-night Charlton preferred to “borrow” established features (in this case, that 1940s animated amalgam of Superman and Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse).

Atomic Rabbit was one of three super-bunnies hopping around Charlton.

But the Atomic Mouse feature, thanks to the talented artist Al Fago, was, for a time, actually and accidentally superior to the licensed comic book adventures of Mighty Mouse.

Charlton’s foray into atomic animalism had a more complicated origin, too. When Fawcett’s Captain Marvel — sued by Superman and plagued by poor sales — finally gave up the ghost in 1953, the popular character was resurrected in England as “Marvelman” (now “Miracleman”).

During the 1940s, Fawcett had cleverly exploited the popularity of their lead character by creating a

Tom the Cat became Atom the Cat

Captain Marvel Jr., a Mary Marvel, three rather pointless Lieutenants Marvel, the powerless comic relief Uncle Marvel and, in 1942, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny.

Charlton acquired the rights to a few of Fawcett’s defunct characters, like Nyoka the Jungle Girl, and “Captain Marvel Bunny” was among those. Charlton subtracted the lightning bolt from Marvel Bunny’s suit, changing the character’s name to Magic Bunny and his magic word to “Alizam!” He evolved into “Happy the Magic Bunny,” becoming Charlton’s THIRD super rabbit.

An abundance of bunnies.

Happy the Magic Bunny outlived his inspiration, Fawcett's immensely popular Captain Marvel. Here's a 1957 story.

Shazam! It's Fred MacMurray!

Alex Ross frequently uses MacMurray as the model for the classic Captain Marvel

Best not to piss Fred off.

Fred MacMurray could fly, even without the hot rod he super-souped up in Disney’s “The Absent-Minded Professor.”

The Hollywood leading man had an odd and hidden history with the beginnings of the superhero genre. He was used the model for Fawcett’s Captain Marvel on the cover of his initial appearance in the first published issue of Whiz Comics in 1940, when the whole superhero genre spawned by Superman was only a couple of years old.

By 1943, with Captain Marvel and the other superheroes now enormously popular with both kids and U.S. troops overseas, MacMurray effectively appeared AS Captain Marvel in a dream sequence during the romantic comedy film “No Time For Love,” co-starring Claudette Colbert. In 1940, Captain Marvel wanted to be Fred MacMurray. Three years later, Fred MacMurray wanted to be Captain Marvel. You chart the instant, explosive popularity of the superhero genre right there. You can see the film clip right here.

He-man Fred became a superman in this 1943 romantic comedy