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

DC had brought Captain Marvel back to life again after decades in limbo thanks to DC's very own lawsuit. They had brought back one of Captain Marvel's original creators in C.C. Beck. Despite this though the book seemed to not be catching on. Beck himself was disgruntled and after a year slipped away from the title. Artists like Kurt Schaffenberger (another original Cap artist) and Bob Oksner among others moved in to make the book look a bit more like other DC titles. But the attempt to target especially young readers seemed a failure. That is until TV took an interest. 

 

DC slapped a little blurb on the cover which said "Shazam! Saturday's TV Hit Show!". The live action Shazam! show from Filmation was making people take notice. So in another brilliant move DC decides to double down and give the comic reader even more new wonderful Shazam! stories. Well actually they didn't. 

What they did was turn the book into a reprint magazine for four issues. While still touting the TV connection the reader found solid but aged Fawcett stories inside the comic which was for sell on the stands. It wasn't until the TV show got a second season that DC finally got gears going to revise the series to fit and they gave us all some wonderful surprises as well. 

E. Nelson Bridewell and Kurt Schaffenberger gave us a new more DC friendly version of the hero. Billy Batson is sent on an across-country odyssey during the United States' bicentennial year to visit important cities. His companion is Uncle Dudley who functions as his "Mentor" on the trip. This new mentor and Billy use an RV to traipse across the land and there they meet others and save lives from various plots by Dr. Sivana or Mr. Mind. Further Billy is given a device which allows him to contact the very "Elders" who give him his powers for useful advice. In other words, DC made the comic as much like the TV show as possible and thanks to Bridwell they did it in a rather clever way. 

And then there was Isis. Dick Giordano knocks out some typically handsome art to introduce the Filmation-created female counterpart for Captain Marvel. She's a teacher who is empowered by Egyptian gods. She gets her very own comic for a time and so the Saturday morning comic corner at DC gets a little bit larger. 

So Billy Batson and his "Mentor" Uncle Marvel (sporting a mustache to evoke that Les Tremayne look) travel to the cities of Washington D.C., Philidelphia, Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Columbus meeting TV executives and battling the menaces they find there. They are aided in the battle by Kid Eternity and Minute Man. The "Superman" featured on the cover of one issue is not who you think it is. They battle the schemes of Sivana and the brawn of Black Adam and IBAC.  

Then Schaffenberger steps aside and is replaced by artist Tenny Henson, a Filipino talent. He's really good and wraps up the peripatetic adventures with stops in Detroit and Indianapolis. Mr. Mind steps in as the uber-villain while Mr. Atom shows up to supply the muscle. Bridwell's scripts are smart and clever and do a grand job of transferring the essence of the TV show to the handsome comic. But things are about to change big time. 

The cross-country odyssey is ended when the threat of Captain Nazi resurfaces. But the biggest change is the art which is done in this single issue by Alan Lee Weiss with inks by Joe Rubinstein. The classic appearance of the Marvels is at long last abandoned and a more realistic look wins the day. I liked the classic look, but I loved this new more muscular modern Captain Marvel. 

In the next issue a new artist appears by the name of Don Newton and Captain Marvel and the Shazam Family will never look the same. Under a rugged Mike Nasser cover we have a Cap who is at once more real and still evocative of the classic in a battle against the evil King Kull which blows the top off. Sadly this is the last issue of the classic Shazam! run, but it's not the end of E. Nelson Bridwell's and Don Newton's Captain Marvel. But first there's this. 

DC had teased a meeting between "The Man of Steel" and "The Big Red Cheese" several times over the years since they had procured the rights to Fawcett's number one hero. But despite many tempting covers, the contact always proved less than advertised. Superman makes two appearances on Shazam! series covers and is not featured in the comic book. Lex Luthor does make contact with what was dubbed "Earth-S" but thinks he had a dream. DC worked extra hard to make the first conflict between these two mega-heroes a big deal and they succeeded with the "All New Collectors' Edition" of "Superman Vs. Shazam!". Rich Buckler is tapped to draw this oversized epic with a script by Gerry Conway, the writer who had previously given the world the first ever team-up of Superman and a certain friendly neighborhood wall-crawler. Supergirl and Mary Marvel have substantial parts to play in this yarn, but after all these years the excitement of that first big clash seems somewhat dimmed. 

Still, it's a great way to wrap up this volume. Next time we get to see what I think is perhaps Captain Marvel's most shining moments at DC when we follow Bridwell and Newton to Worlds Finest and beyond. 

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Super Friends Saturday Morning Comics - Volume Two!

The Super Friends comic book by E. Nelson Bridwell and artist Ramona Fradon settled into a sturdy pattern and apparently was a decent seller lasting just under fifty issues. Certainly, there was a synthesis with the cartoon show, the two feeding off and feeding into one another. Reading these stories today, there's a sense of a lighter tone, a tone more akin to what one finds in early Silver Age Justice League stories by Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky. The late 70's a time when I found DC's offerings across the board more appealing than Marvel's. DC seemed to have a more reliable production system which seemed rarely if ever to be hit by the "Dreaded Deadline Doom" which afflicted Marvel somewhat frequently. 

 

The Wonder Twins did get some development in the comic beyond the exceedingly limited treatment they had on the cartoon. The range of transformations seemed more vigorous and imaginative, and the duo were even given secret identities and a hint of a homelife. 

Bridwell did a good job of working in recognizable figures from the cartoon as well as the DCU into the stories. Villains such as the Scarecrow and Gorilla Grodd were part of the cartoon but also were up and running villains in the pages of the comics. A standout issue co-starring Black Orchid  reallly pops off the stands, as she's a character rarely given any attention beyond her short-lived early 70's series. She seems an odd fit for the Super Friends given the dark tone of her previous stories. 

But mostly the comic book could be counted on for a light-hearted yarn or two which had heroes functioning as heroes and were not overcome by the complexities of a life fighting crime. Seeing heroes like Wonder Woman, Superman and especially Batman and Robin smiling was a welcome change considering the sober events often occuring in their own books. 

DC won first place in my admiration of comic companies when in the late 70's they actually seemed to be doing something about the rising prices of comic books. Whereas at Marvel you'd get a bleat or two bemoaning the inevitability of prices increases and little else, DC was trying out different formats at different price points. When they jumped to fifty cents, they added pages and gave readers more features with a raft of interesting back-ups in all their comics. In Super Friends we got The Seraph and Jack O' Lantern, two of the international heroes created by Bridwell. Romeo Tanghal and Bob Oksner drew these interesting features. 

Plastic Man would up as well, and that made sense since Plas would soon be given his own cartoon show from Ruby-Spears. Marty Pasko and Joe Staton created a hectic fun version of Plas, and he was a welcome addition to the comic. Green Fury was an oddity, as the lovely Brazilian heroine became a common sight in the pages of the regular Super Friends stories, almost as if she was being considered for inclusion into the team. 

While Bridwell's international heroes showed up from time to time in the comic, the worldly ethnic heroes from the cartoon never appeared. We never see Black Vulcan, El Dorado, Apache Chief, nor Samurai in the pages of The Super Friends. But we do get the likes of Godiva, Bushmaster, Olympian, Little Mermaid and Wild Huntsman. 

The series seems to have ended somewhat abruptly in 1981. Bridwell had suggested that his villainous future villains Futurio and Futurio XX had another incarnation, but we never see it. Instead, the series ends on a yarn featuring and explaining the origin of Green Fury. It must be noted that artist Romeo Tanghal had taken over the penciling chores on the main feature with issue forty-two and to my eye the series lost a step. Tanghal was a fine artist but his take on the team was somewhat pedestrian compared to Fradon's dynamic pages. 

The Super Friends ended in part to make way for new interpretations of DC's animated stars. The familiar Super Friends would go away only to be replaced eventually by a very different approach to which cleaved even more tightly to current DC continuity. And the whimsical world created by Bridwell would be replaced with a vigorous approach developed by the great Jack Kirby himself. More on that next time. 

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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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