It is ludicrous to suggest that C.C. Beck, Bill Finger, Otto Binder and the others who worked on the Marvel family of comics were merely aping the Superman formula. Batson/Marvel offered an inner big brother reassurance fantasy that was very different from what was going on with the Man of Steel. Captain Marvel lived in his own worm-ridden, frog-infested, heightening-filled funkadelic universe. And Beck's laconic, sometimes hypertoony pages spoke an easy vernacular that the early Superman teams never quite achieved. Between the stories, which ever more elaborate, and the artwork which assumed a pleasing unfurnished innocence, Captain Marvel implied a very different comic book future from one lead by the march of Superman.
Most comics historians revere Captain Marvel and foes like Dr. Vivana and Mr. Mind's Monster Society of Evil. But only a small fraction of the over 1000 "Marvel Family" comics have been reprinted. Jules Feiffer once described Superman as the "Lenin of super-heroes" and Captain Marvel as Trotsky. "Ideologically of the same bent, who could have predicted that within months the two would be at each other's throat?" But they weren't of the same ideological bent: Superman wasn't an endearing goofball. Given the gaps in our material history, the more apt formulation might be Captain Marvel as Trotsjy and Superman as Stalin.
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