Casualties of the Editorial Malpractice I: Captain Marvel

In the "Hitting the Wall" series of columns, I discussed how concept exhaustion, cluelessness, or simple dumbing down turned vigorous superhero concepts into something less, or, sometimes, very little at all. Some characters, however, fell not to flaws in their concept but to changes in the editorial model that made them difficult or impossible to use properly.

Such forces currently render a number of superheroes unusable as first-tier characters even if they once enjoyed careers as stars of their own titles. In the case of the original Captain Marvel, we have a hero who once sold multiple concurrent books in the Golden Age, where such multi-title marketing did not occur so often. Yet today, as proved by at least three failed series, Captain Marvel could barely get arrested in Comicstown. These days, he does well to enjoy the occasional guest appearance in another book like JLA.

Boisterous Youth

When professionals and fans discuss the Doom That Came to Comics, and need a nice statistic to show how selling twenty thousand copies of a comic book does not represent commercial success, they sometimes refer to the Captain Marvel success story. Between multiple titles, at one point Captain Marvel moved over a million units per month.

This, by itself, says much to validate that the character has real appeal. Nor can we explain his current troubled times to mere obsolescence; DC gets away with printing many titles from characters created before 1945.

In some ways, Captain Marvel's success helped do him in, since his resemblances to DC's Superman defied rationalization. To some degree, parallel evolution brought about abilities with which neither superhero began his career (for instance, neither hero could fly in his first adventure; the ability to repel bullets might have developed later as well). Since Superman essentially defined the superhero costuming concept for the characters that would follow, we can expect swarms of similarly-clad creations to populate the four-color publications.

Other attributes, such as the secret identity, predated the superhero model and came to it through the pulps. Yet in Captain Marvel, we had a caped, flying superhero with amazing strength and an immunity to bullets; the hair color matched; the profession of alter egos (roughly) matched (Batson practiced broadcast journalism while Clark Kent practiced print journalism); and an investment of little research could return another bushel-load or so of additional shared traits.

Even if the similarities arose completely by accident, DC had an excellent case for asserting their intellectual rights through legal action. They did so more than once, and ultimately brought the better-selling Captain Marvel to the grave, and would ultimately inherit talents like Kurt Schaffenberger and Otto Binder from the Captain Marvel franchise.

Abortive Returns

When lawyers first euthanized Captain Marvel in the fifties, judgments rendered him impossible to publish, but the character otherwise worked. He had a concept and a context. In the absence of the action of law, the Captain Marvel concept could have continued as long as someone intended to publish.

Something like twenty years later, DC Comics sought to reintroduce the character. Shazam! appeared on the stands around 1973, to much fannish alarm - in some ways, Captain Marvel had played the role of First Martyr of Comics, since his titles vanished while enough fans still existed to justify continued publication; lawyers, instead of market forces, did him in. But the new title did not survive long.

Captain Marvel reappeared in a comics world that had changed, and that had no place for him. Attempts to reintroduce the franchise, again and again, would fail, in spite of a considerable nostalgic attachment talent have for the character and at least some fan loyalty.

What Keeps Killing Captain Marvel?

Somehow, Captain Marvel fails where a number of his peers succeed. Something keeps killing his books, something besides the initial litigation that declared him a derivative property converted by Fawcett from intellectual property belonging to National / DC.

Even if we assume flaws in the character cause his books to fail - and fail again - this doesn't explain how other characters with similar properties can succeed. Captain Marvel's prototype fares well enough; later characters with certain similar traits, such as the Don Blake Thor, managed to endure where Captain Marvel couldn't.

If a character fails repeatedly, in spite of varied interpretations of differing color and in spite of commercially viable talent contributing to the material, we may begin to suspect some toxic outside factor. And indeed a number of such factors do exist.

One among Many Supermen

To begin with, Captain Marvel does not fare well because he suffers from an artificial redundancy. His obvious similarities to Superman render him, indeed, redundant. However, this only represents half of the equation that proves lethal for him at DC Comics. I call the redundancy artificial because Superman and Captain Marvel co-existed for over a decade with no particular redundancy problem evident in their stories; appearing under the banners of different publishers, the characters could blissfully ignore each other. Even under a single publisher, these characters could theoretically coexist. The redundancy deserves the qualifier artificial because it derives from a consciously-created and enforced editorial model of the shared universe, a principal of modern superhero comics that has become so ubiquitous as to stand, for many, above question.

Captain Marvel worked, during his original Fawcett tenure, because he was the World's Mightiest Mortal. Today, he stands as one among many supermen; and, with Superman as primus inter pares among the archetype he spawned, Captain Marvel must compete with better-entrenched competition even to act as an understudy.

Clash of Heroic Models

Captain Marvel belongs in a milieu devoid of soul-searching angst, of heroes who fail, of nuclear bombs that destroy a hero's hometown.

The post-Lee superhero model, indeed, creates an environment toxic to the character. While Captain Marvel might flourish in environments which allow him the opportunity to wrestle to victory with a ridiculous monster like a gorillion, inject him into a story about domestic violence and he becomes a clueless large man in a ridiculous red suit.

Confident but unselfconscious, Captain Marvel as originally conceived provides a particularly inept delivery vehicle for angst, melodrama, and self-pity, the standard hooks for humanizing heroes from the Silver Age onwards. The generic man circa 1940, inflated through tremendous power, provided his model; the heavily introspective (some might say morbidly self-absorbed) man of the subsequent generation perceived the world through an altogether different lens, and attempts to convert one type of man into the other generally do not meet with much success.

Thus, the redefinition of the hero came to exclude the likes of Marvel, and to exist in the confines of the new superhero model at all forced such figures to take up the ways of later heroes. Sometimes this produced a product about as embarrassing as a wheelchair-bound oldster attempting to breakdance to create a masquerade of current hipness. Such displays manage to discredit both the imitator and the imitation, in that the mismatch becomes too obvious for the actor, and the artificiality of the mask - passed of as spontaneous and valid by the role's contemporaries - shows its phoniness.

Absence and Continuity

For reasons which some still see needing justification, DC Comics decided to reinvent the Justice League after Crisis on Infinite Earths as a body devoid of original principal players like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Frequently, where DC revised continuity as part of its much-needed housecleaning, they chose to introduce substitutions to minimize the impact on inherited tales they might want to keep but which had originally featured excised characters. Where a substitute existed with a historical connection to justify the switch, DC would use that substitute.

For the Justice League, DC could have chosen Captain Marvel as a replacement, but he had no particular connection to that team. To use him as a replacement would have seemed an obvious graft. Therefore, DC chose to use the Martian Manhunter, who appeared in the Justice League for its first seven years and had abilities frequently redundant with Superman's (hence the reason for removing him originally).

Captain Marvel's roots lay clearly in the Golden Age of Comics, so we can see the wisdom of not using him there. That he remained absent for the entirety of the Silver Age (as I define it, roughly 1956 to 1972) meant that no canon stories of the period justified a role for him in a revised version.

Again, though, DC confronted a missing-Superman problem when it deleted the Earth-II Superman from the Justice Society. In the revised continuity it intended to create, Superman became a much more recent figure; and the doppelganger superheroes vanished. Captain Marvel, one might think, would have served as an apt replacement for the Golden Age Superman.

Except, of course, that DC intended to leave its options open and not have to explain away how Captain Marvel remained young forty-five years later (one option) nor have to do something about aging Marvel and/or his alter ego, Billy Batson (another option). So the Justice Society slot went, with some strain, to the original Green Lantern.

Continuity gives comics a past and a future, in some ways, versus the perpetual present of the non-continuity story. With the retroactive continuity changes, DC closed the past off to Captain Marvel, both of the Golden Age and of the Silver Age; and Superman's locked-in tenure guarantees that the future offers no place for Captain Marvel.

Power of Shazam! as Paradigm

In spite of the worthwhile talent invested in Jerry Ordway's now-defunct Power of Shazam! series, it stands, in many ways, as a textbook of the ways that the modern superhero comic editorial model provides a hostile environment for a hero like Captain Marvel.

Ordway evidently began the early portion of the series with more of a cartoony and unself-important approach, but, so rumor holds, received word from upstairs to opt for a more realistic, conventional, and universe-connected approach.

The result often seemed baffling, with things that did not belong together grafted together. The last issues I read involved a baffling mixture of intrusive outside characters (Sergeant Steel, Superman, and a Mother Box), inappropriate ugliness (nuclear bombings and a diseased villainous cousin Sinclair Batson dripping worms from leaky boils), self-questioning heroes (much in the early-sixties Marvel Comics vein), and other baggage that do little to make Captain Marvel appear heroic and a great deal to show him as out of place.

Try to take Mister Mind - a talking worm with glasses - and make of him a believable, nay, a frightening villain - and you already stray far from the point. Take away the silliness and you lose one of the legs upon which Captain Marvel stands; humorless self-importance, which has done so much damage to comics in the last generation, particularly threatens tongue-in-cheek classics like Plastic Man and Captain Marvel.

Try to connect the much-beleagured Captain Marvel into another superhero franchise and you run into more trouble. Readers of POS doubtless asked more than once why Marvel traveled around with a Mother Box - does any logical thematic connection exist to relate Captain Marvel to the Fourth World franchise?

Try to infuse reality into the concept and Captain Marvel just increasingly shows how out of place he has become. Does he seem clueless in the context of a nuclear bomb detonating on his hometown? Perhaps this haplessness represents a fundamental clash of concepts and not, after all, a flaw in the character.

Solutions?

Until the comics editorial paradigm shifts, few places exist for Captain Marvel or the characters that connect to him. Nonetheless, barring the across-the-board menace of the imploding market, a working title or feature does not exceed the possible.

Where a creator can't completely dispense with the shared universe, he can nonetheless stake out an uncontaminated corner of it and erect barriers. In such a small fortress, the right talent could make this concept work.

Can contemporary artists make Captain Marvel work? Absolutely. Modern talents with an excellent mixture of cartoony and heroic feels include Rob Haynes, German Garcia, and a small army of delineators who frequent titles like Young Justice and Impulse. Or, reaching beyond the American superhero comics talent pool, a number of elegantly cartoony European talents, particularly those showing some influence of the Tintin strip, have feels that would work.

Can contemporary writers make him work? Yes, with reservations. Peter David, who works on the Marvel's Captain Marvel, might have the feel for the humor. If the nostalgia/sentimentality aspect of the character needs treatment, both Mark Waid (now unavailable) and Alex Ross have ingrained loyalty to the character's iconic aspect. For my dollar (as if that could buy a comic these days), I'd consider Tom Peyer a candidate. Peyer, in Hourman, showed a feel for humor without malice that the Captain Marvel concept depends upon.

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Column 226. Completed 11-FEB-2001.