Captain Marvel Adventures?

CAPTAIN MARVEL!

With one magic word--SHAZAM!--young Billy Batson is transformed into the World's Mightiest Mortal: CAPTAIN MARVEL!

The original Captain Marvel is my second-favorite superhero, surpassed in my fannish pantheon only by Batman (because, well...Batman!). I'm referring to the Big Red Cheese, the top-selling comic-book superhero of the 1940s, not any of Marvel Comics' later usurpers of the name. You may know him as Shazam; he's Captain Marvel to me. 



I've written previously of how I became a Captain Marvel fan, but there's a specific element of that I want to re-visit. Before DC Comics licensed (and much later purchased) Cap from Fawcett Comics in the early '70s, and even before my first real exposure to the character via Super 8 home movies of the 1941 Adventures Of Captain Marvel serial, I had a picture in my mind of who and what I thought Captain Marvel should be. 

Captain Marvel, beaten by Superman and prone on the floor behind Lois Lane. As if.

That mental picture was not based on any actual Captain Marvel adventure. A letter of comment printed in a Lois Lane comic book made reference to DC putting Captain Marvel out of business in the '50s. From that wisp of an inspiration, my imagination conjured an expectation of a straight-ahead Eisenhower-era superhero, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. Yeah, like Superman, sure, but like a very specific version of Superman: the TV Superman. The late George Reeves.



On The Adventures Of Superman, Reeves portrayed the Man of Steel as a tough, no-nonsense hero, particularly during the show's first two seasons. I didn't necessarily envision some actor like Reeves playing Captain Marvel in a movie, but I did picture a similar approach to straightforward Captain Marvel comic-book adventures, perhaps with a bit more '50s science-fiction angle (kinda like Superman And The Mole Men, Reeves' superhero debut). 




Understand: this was around 1971 or so. Captain Marvel's comic book appearances were not readily accessible to anyone but collectors, so I had no familiarity whatsoever with the humor and whimsy of much of that material. Nor did Tom Tyler's portrayal of Cap in The Adventures Of Captain Marvel offer any clue to the essential lightheartedness of the Big Red Cheese; from those silent Super 8s to an epic evening spent watching the entire original serial (with sound!) at a 1972 Syracuse Cinephile Society event, my first actual glimpse of this World's Mightiest Mortal offered no clue that Captain Marvel's adventures were anything frothier than a Doc Savage pulp novel.



When DC revived Captain Marvel in 1972 for a new comic book series called Shazam!, I was introduced to the lighter approach that helped the good Captain outsell Superman during World War II. I was all in at the time; the appeal of the new stories grew thin, but I remained in awe of the vintage reprints.

But I've rarely gotten the latter-day Captain Marvel I really wanted. I wasn't expecting (and did not wish for) a quasi-realistic interpretation of a hero with clenched teeth and the weight of the world on his frilly-caped shoulders; I just didn't want the stories to be silly.




Right before the Shazam! title was cancelled in 1978, its final two issues started to veer away from attempts to copy the elusive charm of Cap's late '40s/early '50s exploits. I wasn't blown away with that pair of issues at the time, but enjoyed the series more as it switched to a backup strip in the giant-sized World's Finest Comics title. Writer E. Nelson Bridwell and artist Don Newton presented a somewhat more serious Captain Marvel that maintained a sense of wonder but reclaimed a feeling of excitement that had previously been missing from Cap's adventures in the '70s.



In 1994, writer and artist Jerry Ordway produced a hardcover graphic novel called The Power Of Shazam! that managed to hit all the right marks. My only quibble was that it repeated the mistake of having the adult Captain Marvel retain the mind of the child Billy Batson; that misguided approach was introduced by Roy Thomas in a 1987 mini-series called Shazam: The New Beginning, a book as drab and empty as a superhero comic book could be. I'm sad to say that all subsequent incarnations of Captain Marvel have repeated this approach of Billy the kid's mind in Captain Marvel's adult body, like Big with super powers. (Ordway's subsequent Power Of Shazam! ongoing series suffered from some ups and downs, but was overall far more interesting to me than any extended Shazam series that has followed it.)




Captain Marvel was also used well in the pages of JSA, Justice, and particularly in the oversize one-shot Shazam!: The Power Of Hope in 2000, written by Paul Dini and gorgeously illustrated by Alex Ross. In 2015, we got two perfect takes on Captain Marvel, as writer Grant Morrison got it exactly right in the one-shot The Multiversity: Thunderworld Adventures, and so did Jeff Parker and Evan Shaner in the two-issue Convergence: Shazam!



I have no affection whatsoever for any current version of the original Captain Marvel. The 2019 Shazam! film was based on writer Geoff Johns' revamp of the character, introduced in 2012 as "The Curse Of Shazam!," a backup series in Justice League. This ham-handed reboot is even more frustrating when you consider that Johns demonstrated a much better grasp of Cap when he was writing JSA. 

But I know the real Captain Marvel. He's out there somewhere, even if DC isn't likely to ever call him by his real name again. But he's out there, starring in exciting new adventures of the world's mightiest mortal. I hope we'll get to read those adventures some day.



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