Shazam! The World's Mightiest Mortal - Volume One!

It's one of the grandest ironies in the history of comic books I think that when DC Comics acquired the rights to publish the long-defunct Captain Marvel comic character they were forbidden to use the actual name "Captain Marvel" as the title because Marvel Comics had slipped in and used the name for their "Space-Born Super-Hero". It's ironic because it was DC which had driven Captain Marvel off the stands after years of a lawsuit suggesting the character was a mere copy of Superman. It was a hardball legal maneuver that was merely a ploy to stifle a character was actually in some years outselling DC's Man of Steel. So when the mavens at DC wanted to make hay on the character they were immediately hamstrung. 

Thanks to DC's lawsuit the only time I'd seen Captain Marvel before his debut was in the pages of The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer and then only on a single page. Feiffer wasn't even allowed to reprint a complete story because of the lawsuit. 

 

When DC finally delivered the new comic named Shazam, the old/new hero Captain Marvel was introduced by Superman himself, almost as if to say it's okay now, you can enjoy the adventures of this rip-off of me, all is forgiven. To really make the project jump DC plied original artist C.C. Beck back into comics to take the art chores. Denny O'Neil and Elliot S Maggin wrote the scripts. The art felt much simpler than that of any other DC comic at the time, many of which had taken on more realistic aspects such as the darker Batman books. Beck gave us very simple backgrounds and warm fuzzy characters who almost felt like they'd come from the pages of Peter Rabbit. 

The twenty-year gap was explained away by a single story which said that Billy Batson and the immediate cast of the vintage Fawcett comics had been put into suspended animation by the evil Dr.Sivana who got himself and his kids caught up in it also. This gimmick was good enough and we started having adventures. But it's clear that DC wanted to tap into a younger audience with Shazam, kids perhaps more likely pick up the latest Richie Rich comic than House of Mystery. 

There was a charm to these early stories and Beck's artwork was handsome enough, but it lacked verve. The stories were whimsical, but there was never any real sense of danger for the assembled Marvel Family who took on the likes of the Sivanas and other no-goodniks. 

Shazam was a pretty book, but isolated from the larger DCU it was easy to ignore, as I did originally only picking up the comic with the fourth issue. I remember being entertained by it, but it read quite quickly and the new stories seemed to have less heft than the reprints which DC used to fill out the book from time to time. 

I picked up the comic intermittently, put off by the well-crafted by cutesy covers that suggested this was a mere kiddie book. I was not really grokking the potential glory of the title. 

Characters like Tawky Tawny seemed to be from a different kind of comic book universe, one filled with friendly ghosts.

The title found its real footing with me as a reader when DC's wonderful 100-page format was used for the first time. Here we got some of the new but a great deal more of the vintage Fawcett material. The old stories were quaint but felt more insistent. 

There were some signs of improvement also when the back-ups with Captain Marvel Jr. started with art by others like Dick Giordano and Dave Cockrum who brought a more familiar look to the pages. 

Bob Oksner in particular seemed to have a gift for drawing pretty girls and Mary Marvel was no exception. His art became a highlight of the book. The arrival of E. Nelson Bridwell to help write the book was a harbinger of things to come as well. 

After a year it seemed that C.C. Beck's work was diminishing. I'd learn later that he'd rather disliked his tenure on this new Captain Marvel book, finding the stories somewhat goofy. I  couldn 't disagree with him, but I was also happy to see him drift away from the book to make room for others like Kurt Schffenberger (a Fawcett original) and more work by Oksner and others. 

The title improved immensely when it became a 100-pager full time. The packages were filled with good modern stories and great vintage ones. Each package felt hefty and full of delight. Now it must be said that the new collections do not give the reader any of the original Fawcett material, only the new stuff produced in the early 70's. 

But reading those Bronze Age stories now after many decades, I enjoy them much better than I did at the time. The goofiness doesn't offend my constricted fanboy feelings as it did back in the day, and I'm much more open to a lighter tone than I was back in the day. Even Beck's somewhat childlike approach doesn't brace me as it did back then. These are warm pages with bright happy characters who at the time might not have fitted into a universe filled with Batmen and Man-Bats, but they have a whimsy that still feels fresh. 

Turns out though the books hadn't caught on with my kind and the book fell into a period of decline or reprint before a big change came. That change was brought on by the adventure a new TV show. More on that next time. 

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