Amphibian goddesses, talking vegetables, and nuclear bugs, oh my!
The Shazam!
comic books have had quite a bizarre and colorful history.
Back in the 1940s, comic book stories rarely took up more than 10 pages, and serials were
even rarer.
But then there was the two-year marathon "Monster Society of Evil" arc by Otto Binder and C.C.
Beck in Captain Marvel Adventures 22 through 46.
The Monster Society is an interplanetary cabal run by an unseen mastermind named Mr. Mind.
He has the entire resources of the Axis Powers at his disposal; even Hitler himself happily
takes orders.
After months of nearly dying at Mr. Mind's hands, Captain Marvel finds out that he's
actually a caterpillar with cute little glasses.
But this doesn't make him any less of a threat, as Mr. Mind turns the Great Wall of China
into a giant shield for the invading Japanese army.
This is a story so jam-packed that it introduces two unrelated underground civilizations in
one five-page chapter.
Other highlights include Mr. Mind firing so many German cannons it knocks the Earth out
of orbit and invading Scotland in an island-shaped battleship, as well as Captain Marvel on the
back of an unfrozen mammoth.
Captain Marvel is many things, but we never expected "dirty scab" to be part of his resume.
But in "Captain Marvel and the Revolt of the Comics!"
in Captain Marvel Adventures #22, that's pretty much exactly what he is.
Apparently, in the Captain Marvel universe, comics heroes write and draw their own stories.
That becomes a problem when stand-ins for familiar characters all walk out, including
Popeye and Flash Gordon.
There's also a version of Batman who wears a pair of baseball bats and has an actual
robin for his sidekick.
"Holy headache."
Whatever their grievances might be, Captain Marvel puts them back to work, whether by
appealing to their patriotism or by rescuing his fellow superheroes from a danger even
they can't handle: a mob at the department store.
Some of the over-the-top flag-waving in wartime comics can seem a little ridiculous.
But that's not true for every story.
Some of them are very ridiculous.
For instance, there's "Captain Marvel Visits Portland, Oregon, or Knighthood Flowers Again!"
in Captain Marvel Adventures #29.
Cap is promoting a scrap metal drive for the war effort when he meets with a modern-day
Don Quixote named Richard Chickenheart.
Chickenheart's obsession with artifacts has led him to regular "spells" in which he thinks
he's a medieval knight.
To keep him out of trouble, Billy Batson tags along as his pageboy in between turning into
Captain Marvel so that he can intervene when Chickenheart becomes violent.
Before his mental breakdown, Chickenheart is about to melt down his priceless collection
of unique historical treasures to make into guns and tanks.
All his troubles turn out to be the fault of another collector named Bart Black, who
wants to buy Chickenheart's collection for $5,000, which somehow makes him the bad guy.
But nobody seems to realize that all that money could pay for a lot more military gear
than anyone could ever get from a couple pounds of armor.
In Captain Marvel's comics, natural phenomena are the work of various whimsical characters.
"Captain Marvel Enforces the Law of Gravity!"
in Captain Marvel Adventures #31 adds the Council of Gods to the series' improvised
pantheon, and they proceed to repeal, you guessed it, the law of gravity.
Predictably, this is bad news back on Earth, where Captain Marvel zips around the city
keeping people from floating off into space.
Meanwhile, some gangsters take advantage of the situation by wearing spiked shoes and
towing off a safe like a balloon.
Once he's dispatched them, Captain Marvel chases the problem back to the Council but
gets stuck in the waiting room, along with a two-headed toad alien who lets him know
he could be waiting for eternity.
Fortunately, he has connections, since the wizard Shazam used to be on the council.
And so, he manages to successfully convince the council to put the law of gravity back
on the books.
"I can fly!"
Captain Marvel's adventures are full of dozens of mad scientists with elaborate schemes.
But Dr. Groon from Captain Marvel Adventures #49 goes above and beyond.
In the first panel of "Captain Marvel and the Unknown Killer," Groon's medical colleagues
are already banning him from his brain-transplantation experiments.
But that night, he seemingly returns to attack one of the doctors who denounced him before
Captain Marvel intervenes.
As Groon tries to take out the next man on his hit list, Cap is shocked to discover that
he's a gorilla in disguise.
You'd think the hairy arms and legs and the cheap plastic mask that doesn't even cover
his whole face would've been a tipoff.
The gorilla explains that he's the fruit of Groon's experiments and that he killed the
doctor and decided he might as well kill some more doctors while he's at it.
After the ape escapes to kill again, Captain Marvel takes another mask off him, and it
turns out that the gorilla is Dr. Groon after all.
Crime is foiled, justice triumphs, and we're all left confused.
"I'm confused!"
In "Captain Marvel and His Loneliest Day," from Captain Marvel Adventures #49, Billy
Batson overhears a broadcast from the lone attendant of an iceberg-monitoring station
in Greenland announcing that he's going to quit before cabin fever sets in.
So Billy decides that Captain Marvel shall keep it warm himself.
As it turns out, the Stamina of Atlas doesn't extend to boredom, and it's only a few hours
before Cap starts climbing up the walls.
After 892 games of solitaire, he gets fed up enough to go hunting for someone to talk to.
That leads us to the hilarious image of Captain Marvel chatting with a penguin until it eventually
covers its ears with its little flippers.
The absurdity escalates as Captain Marvel decides to train penguins to dance and a deer
to pull them in a sleigh and also to dress up a walrus as a clown.
But then a polar bear interrupts the proceedings, though, after a quick beatdown, it joins the
circus as well.
Fortunately, no one witnesses this spectacular breakdown except the old attendant, who happily
takes his job back now that he has this circus to keep his mind off the solitude.
In "Captain Marvel in the Land of Surrealism" from Captain Marvel Adventures #80, Billy
covers an art show by Surrealist painter Leonardo Vinch.
Vinch refuses a prize for imaginative art because he claims he drew it all from life.
Nobody believes him, but Billy's at least intrigued enough to drive with Vinch to the
Goofy Grotto, where all the cymbal plants and eyeball flowers from the paintings actually
do exist.
Cap then has to intervene when one of the creatures traps Vinch to paint him.
The Captain Marvel team returned to this well four issues later with "Captain Marvel and
the Surrealist Imp."
This time, the land of Surrealism comes to Earth, and artistic inspiration comes from
a little cucumber-headed imp in a bathrobe.
He's bored with all the dull paintings he has to send down while all the best Surrealist
ideas go unused.
So instead of sending painter Hans Krendler what he wanted, he emerges from Krendler's
canvas to inspire more Surrealist paintings by turning the real world surreal.
First, he redecorates Krendler's apartment with a dresser sporting human hair and ears
and tongues for drawer handles.
The prank nearly turns deadly when he twists the highway into a pretzel, but then, of course,
Captain Marvel successfully intervenes.
"What the hell was that?!"
In Marvel Family #20, "Captain Marvel and the Mistake of Father Time" delivers exactly
what it promises when the mystical old man accidentally leaves his hourglass upside-down
during a nap on a cloud.
Back on Earth, Captain Marvel is musing on his failure to save a crashed pilot because
he was too busy with a house fire.
This could've easily been a cheap gimmick, but C.C.
Beck's handling of it seems more like the work of an avant-garde artist rather than
a superhero adventure.
Most of Cap's adventures are as talky as an episode of Seinfeld, but Beck makes the absurdity
of the situation twice as shocking by playing it totally straight.
Some scenes, like the plane flying backward, play out in eerie silence.
It all adds up to one of the most memorable stories from any comic of the era.
"Well, good luck with all that."
"Captain Marvel and the Dinosaur Dilemma" in Captain Marvel Adventures #123 begins with
Billy's boss Sterling Morris showing up to work with a baby dinosaur on a leash.
"Dino" makes himself a nuisance in record time, tackling Billy and jumping out the window.
Billy turns into Captain Marvel and rescues him, and then he investigates how Sterling
found a dinosaur a couple million years past its sell-by date.
He finds a pet shop on the corner offering a special on baby dinosaurs and traces them
to a local farmer who found the eggs preserved in a frozen cave.
For whatever reason, he decided nobody needed to know about the scientific discovery of
the century except some guy who sells dog food.
But that's the least of Captain Marvel's worries since all the cute little baby dinos quickly
grow up and become a little too destructive.
Cap pens them in and finally gets a scientist to study them, but that doesn't last long
once Dino breaks clean through the fence.
Cap eventually decides to load all of the dinos in a giant bullet-shaped capsule, fly
it to the Wizard's home on the Rock of Eternity at the nexus of space and time, and then send
them back to their natural time period.
In the world of Captain Marvel, even something as abstract as instincts can make for concrete
sparring partners.
In "Captain Marvel Battles the Discarded Instincts" from Captain Marvel Adventures #124, a little
old man discards his bad instincts not through self-discipline, but by locking them in a chest.
When his wife throws it out and Sterling Morris finds it at the flea market, the instincts
re-emerge in smoky trails that look like ghost versions of the Seven Dwarfs.
Even fairy-tale logic doesn't quite cover just why the little old man seems to have
only discarded animal instincts.
To wit: Captain Marvel spends most of the story fighting off "the instinct of hibernation."
Morris thinks he can fly once he gets "the instinct of migration."
And "the moon-baying instinct" makes some poor opera singer howl like a wolf on live TV.
Plus, an electrician catches "the lemming instinct," which makes lemmings all swim out
into the ocean to die.
But at least that gives us the undeniably awesome image of Cap punching a shark so hard
that it goes flying backward.
"Pow!
Right in the kisser!"
Fortunately, Cap's life-saving instinct is strong enough to beat out the hibernation
instinct, and the little old man whistles all the instincts back into the chest.
Captain Marvel Adventures #133 gives us "Captain Marvel and the Dog Dilemma," in which the
title character doesn't even appear until a third of the way through.
Instead, the story follows hardworking groundskeeper Herman Klodd, whose duties include walking
his boss's poodle, Poopsie.
He starts thinking about how much easier Poopsie's life is and somehow manages to whip up an
"ego-exchanging machine" right then and there.
We don't get much of an explanation for how this is possible.
But at least C.C.
Beck has some fun designing the device, as Herman and Poopise are wired up to metal caps
made from a coffee container and dog food can.
Captain Marvel gets involved when Billy spots a grown man barking and chasing a cat on all fours.
Meanwhile, Herman realizes how half-baked his idea was when his new owner expects him
to eat dog food and do tricks, and then spanks him when he doesn't.
After a day of every indignity a dog can experience, Herman manages to tell Captain Marvel the truth.
So Cap jams the cans back on Herman and Poopsie's heads, and everything goes back to what passes
for normal in these comics.
Averting nuclear bug war
Most of these stories come from the postwar era, and this one tackles the biggest anxiety
of the era: nuclear war.
In "Captain Marvel Battles the Bug Bombs" from Whiz Comics #150, Billy Batson tours
an atomic power plant and quizzes them on their vulnerability to espionage.
His guide assures him that it's airtight, all except for some ants that interrupt their lunch.
Alas, it turns out that those ants are little spies when the plant's radar spots the latest
of several unexplained nuclear explosions in the Amazon.
Captain Marvel flies down to investigate and discovers a raiding party of wasps carrying
cute little wasp-sized bombs.
He also finds an enormous anthill and its ruler, an enormous ant.
It turns out that he grew with the help of scientific hormones.
That doesn't really explain much of anything, let alone why he's wearing what appears to
be a baby blue Christmas cracker crown and matching boots.
Apparently, the solution to bug war is bug genocide, since Cap sets off a chain reaction
by punching a wasp into the atomic pile that nukes both the wasp and ant armies out of existence.
"Buh-bye."
"Buh-bye.
Buh-bye.
Buh-bye."
"Buh-bye.
Buh-bye."
To be an underdog is to fight against the entire world, and that was literally true
for Captain Marvel.
"Captain Marvel Battles the World" from Captain Marvel Adventures #148 ditches the usual third-person
omniscient narrator so that Earth can speak for itself about his annoyance with humans
always digging into his "skin" for oil and metal.
Our planet decides it's had enough and removes all the clouds to burn humanity off.
All the strength of Hercules can't stand up against a planet, so Captain Marvel has to
lean on the wisdom of Solomon and outsmart Earth.
First, he drops an ice asteroid into the atmosphere to restore the clouds.
Then when Earth starts knocking over buildings with the roar of icebergs grinding together,
Cap plugs them up with a couple of tons of felt.
Finally, when Earth tries to split the Americas, Cap lifts all of South America like a continent-sized
mattress and flies it back into place before "gluing" it together with lava.
Earth gets ready to make the fight even meaner when a giant comet comes hurtling along, but
Cap proves that Earth needs humans as much as they need it by annihilating the comet
with a block of plutonium.
In 1973, DC struck a deal with Fawcett to produce new Captain Marvel comics, and a few
years later, they bought the characters outright.
DC pulled in top talent for Shazam!
with C.C.
Beck returning for the first few issues, along with an A-list writing staff, including Denny
O'Neil at the height of his reinvention of Batman.
But the wacky humor of Captain Marvel Adventures was tough to recapture, and a lot of the '70s
Shazam! tipped it too far into plain silliness.
For instance, issue #10's "Invasion of the Salad Men" is exactly what it sounds like.
Some vegetable-shaped aliens crash-land on Earth and freak out all the locals too much
to get any help repairing their ship.
Captain Marvel is the only one willing to hear them out, but he learns that the repairs
are well out of his price range.
The solution comes from an inspired bit of silliness: Cap and the vegetable aliens make
and release a movie, and then collect the earnings, over the course of what appears
to be about an afternoon.
And all that silliness is accompanied by an appropriate blizzard of terrible puns, such as:
"As head lettuce, I am giving the orders!"
(rimshot)
During Captain Marvel's DC years, he frequently teamed up with his old rival Superman, and
their adventures rarely got weirder than "O Captain, My Captain!"
from Action Comics #768.
Cap's sidekicks Captain Marvel Jr. and Mary Marvel show up in Metropolis to ask for Superman's
help, as they think their leader's been turned into a disembodied chin.
Meanwhile, Junior can't slow down and Mary can only talk nonsense.
Then a swarm of amphibians in the shape of one huge frog slices Mary in half.
Superman finally realizes what she's trying to tell him through all the gibberish and
says the magic word to become Captain Marvel.
Then Supes and his body-mate fly into the heart of the frog swarm and find the frog-head
Egyptian goddess Heqt, who is protesting all the frogs killed in cancer research.
There's a lot of weirdness here, but also a lot of sincere love for Captain Marvel.
When Superman defends Cap after Junior dismisses him as an also-ran, he could just as easily
be referring to the character's neglect in the real world.
And when Superman describes Cap's negotiation with Heqt by expressing how he couldn't possibly
think of anything more ludicrous or more moving, he could be talking about the best Captain
Marvel stories.
After Flashpoint rewrote the history of the DC Universe in 2011, Shazam got as big an
overhaul as anyone.
For one thing, his name officially became "Shazam" after years of everyone calling him
that anyway.
"Shazam!
Oh, hey there, son."
For another thing, the compact Marvel Family expanded to the six lightning-powered heroes
featured in the movies.
Coinciding with the release of the first film in 2019, DC launched a new Shazam!
comic book written by Geoff Johns.
It's a strange one, not just for its content, but also because Johns seems to be constantly
fighting with the material.
And in the story of the Shazam Family's journey through the Seven Magiclands, whenever the
fairytale fun tries to poke through, it's interrupted by actual or threatened dismemberment.
But fairytales can be plenty grim too, and Johns handles that balance best with the Funlands
and their ruler, King Kid.
At first, it's pure wish fulfillment in the form of a world-sized theme park with unlimited
free rides and candy.
The forever-young king has made it a haven for abused children, but only as long as they
stay children.
His own history of abuse has turned him against all adults, so as soon as his subjects turn
18, they're enslaved underground to keep the coasters rolling.
That includes Billy's foster sister Mary, and King Kid quickly turns on the rest of
the family when they reveal their adult super-selves.