15 September 2021

Captain Marvel by C.C. Beck & Otto Binder (No. 79)

Captain Marvel (1941-1953)
by C.C. Beck & Otto Binder 

REVIEW BY KENT WORCESTER:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Captain Marvel followed in the wake of Superman and for a time was the most popular costumed hero on the American newsstand. His real name was Billy Batson, a kid radio reporter who could instantly transform himself into a big-hearted, red-suited lug by blurting out "Shazam!" The career of Captain Marvel was cut short when the publisher succumbed to pressure from National Periodicals, the owners of Superman, over copyright infringement. The year was 1953. It was an unsavoury coda to the Golden Age.

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.


FURTHER READING:



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