First, a few brief items from the Full Disclosure Department: as a kid, my favorite superhero was Captain Marvel. I read a lot of his comics, watched his Saturday morning TV show (coupled with “Isis”), and when I was in kindergarten, dressed as Captain Marvel for Halloween. I literally cannot remember a period in my life when I could not recite the roster of gods from whom Captain Marvel derives his powers, and whose initials form the magical incantation “SHAZAM!”. That incantation summons forth a bolt of lightning that transforms young boy Billy Batson into the Big Red Cheese himself: Captain Marvel, who would take to the skies in his red suit with the gold armbands and the large gold lightning bolt on his chest and the white cape, trimmed with gold, tied around his neck with a golden braid.
So you might say that this newest incarnation of Captain Marvel, written and drawn by BONE creator Jeff Smith, takes me back a ways: back to my earliest years of comic fandom, or really, fandom of any sort whatsoever.
Historically, Captain Marvel is one of the oldest of all superheroes, with a labyrinthine publication history. First appearing in 1939, the Big Red Cheese was the flagship character for Fawcett Comics. For a time Captain Marvel was the nation’s sales leader, outselling even the DC Comics titles featuring Superman. However, a copyright infringement lawsuit soon resulted in the removal of Captain Marvel from publication (DC alleged that Marvel was based on Superman). Later, DC itself licensed Captain Marvel and much later bought the character outright. Meanwhile, Stan Lee’s Marvel comics came out with its own Captain Marvel character, who was completely unlike the more familiar Captain Marvel in all particulars; but Marvel Comics actually trademarked the Captain Marvel name, so that when DC decided to resurrect their character in the 1970s, they could not name their new comic book “Captain Marvel” or use his name in the title in any way; hence, every comics incarnation of the Big Red Cheese ever since has been called SHAZAM!, or featured the word “Shazam” in some way.
Jeff Smith’s graphic novel, which gathers in its entirety a story that was originally published in a four-issue limited series in 2007, is a good starting point for the uninitiated. Smith starts at square one, assuming nothing on the part of the reader in terms of familiarity with the character, which is rather nice. At the same time, he is retelling one of the most famous Captain Marvel stories, “The Monster Society of Evil,” in which Earth is invaded by the evil Mr. Mind. First, though, we meet our young hero: Billy Batson, who in Smith’s vision is a young homeless boy in New York City. Billy finds himself in a subway tunnel that leads him not to more subway tunnels but to a very strange place indeed: a cavern dominated by statues depicting the seven deadly sins, with an ancient wizard sitting on a throne while a great block of granite dangles from a string above his head. Here Billy Batson takes on the powers of Captain Marvel, just before the wizard is crushed by the granite block. Never fear, though: this wizard, in the best comic book fashion, lives on in a way – Billy Batson can confer with him by visiting the Rock of Eternity.
Along the way, Billy meets his sister Mary and his ally Talky Tawny, an old vagrant man who turns out to be a talking tiger. He also incurs, for the first time, the enmity of the man who will become his arch-villain, Dr. Sivana. And then the first of the skyscraper-sized robots turns up in the middle of Central Park, and Smith’s story is off to the races.
There was always a certain kind of “Gee whiz!” quality to the Captain Marvel stories I remember, and it’s this quality that Jeff Smith captures in spades. Captain Marvel isn’t the type of character who, in my view, lends himself to the kinds of darker existential angst that tends to dominate the superhero genre of today. If things like Peter Parker’s eternal guilt over his failure to save Uncle Ben, or Bruce Wayne’s constant toeing of the fine line between hero and criminal, or even Superman’s loneliness as the last survivor of a destroyed planet, are what you look for in a superhero tale, then Captain Marvel probably isn’t for you. This isn’t the deepest of stories, but it is a story that has a lot of heart in it, and good cheer amid the derring-do. Jeff Smith’s art (colored by Steve Hamaker) is perfectly suited to the tone of the tale he is telling. This is not a cynical kind of story, and the focus throughout remains tight on the characters, never deviating even to show the usual depictions of crowds of thousands of New Yorkers fleeing in terror from the giant robots in their park.
Jeff Smith has not written a great superhero epic here, but I’m not sure he wanted to in the first place. He’s written a very entertaining superhero yarn, and that’s fine with me. I hope he gets to revisit the character someday.
(DC Comics, 2007)
