You demanded this, too!

Top 10 Marvel characters of all time:

10. Dracula

9. Madelyne Pryor as the Goblin Queen

8. Zombie Mary-Jane Watson

7. Lila Cheney

6. The In-Betweener

5. Willie Lumpkin

4. Heimdall

3. The Whizzer

2. Daken

…

…

and

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1. Wolverine

Because you demanded it!

The Top 10 DC characters of all time:

10. Jerry Lewis

9. “Goody” Rickles

8. Doiby Dickles

7. Alexander Luthor of Earth-3

6. Pariah

4. Sugar (tie)

4. Spice (tie)

3. The Spirit

2. Jean Loring/Eclipso

And…

…

…

…

1. Quisp

Danny Glover likes Shazam!

Holy crap, it’s a review!

***

It’s Danny Glover time here at LY&HF. Why? Because I’m too old for this shit. Yes, I’m starting a “regular” segment reviewing comics meant for kids. First up, Shazam!

But, uh, not the universally beloved one that just came out, by cartoonist Jeff Smith. No, the other (relatively) recently published one.

Showcase Presents Shazam! Denny O’Neil, Elliot S! Maggin, E. Nelson Bridwell, C. C. Beck, Bob Oskner, Kurt Schaffenberger et al. DC, 2006. $16.99, 528 pages.

Ah, Captain Marvel. Has any character ever had a more tortuous path through the serpentine labyrinth of copyright? First appearing in 1940, he was for a time more popular than Superman. That must have irked Superman’s publisher DC comics (then called “National”), so they sued Captain Marvel’s publishers, Fawcett, claiming Captain Marvel was an infringement of copyright on Superman. They were both strong guys in underwear suits who flew around and fought crime and stuff, see. DC won the lawsuit, forcing the cancellation of Captain Marvel’s comics and his disappearance from the four-colour realm.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, a British publisher had been reprinting Captain Marvel’s adventures for British readers. Upon Captain Marvel’s cancellation, the publisher started printing instead the adventures of new character who was essentially just a knock-off, a Schmaptain Schmarvel named Marvelman. Decades later a young Alan Moore started writing Marvelman, and the rest is copyright clusterfuck history.

Back in the US, in the early seventies Fawcett licensed Captain Marvel to DC and DC started printing new adventures of “the big red cheese”, as he was known.* Only, in the interim, rival company Marvel comics had started printing their own series called Captain Marvel, featuring an entirely unrelated new character. So, to avoid further copyright issues, DC published the new adventures of the old Captain Marvel in a book called Shazam!, the word that transformed young orphan Billy Batson into the superheroic Captain Marvel.

Still with me? Right. This volume collects most of the new material created for the Shazam! series, which ran from 1973-1978. (Completists beware: the page count just falls short of space for the final two issues, 34 and 35).

The secret of Captain Marvel’s success, back in the day, was the stories’ innocent, childlike sense of fun. Marvel himself was pure wish fulfilment–what kid hasn’t wished they could turn into a powerful adult? He was surrounded by a colourful cast, including sister Mary Marvel, sidekick Captain Marvel Jr, comic relief Uncle Marvel and the three Lieutenant Marvels, and talking animal pals Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and Tawky Tawny the tiger. And, importantly, he was drawn mostly by the great C. C. Beck, whose rounded, clean art perfectly complements the stories’ childish fun.

When DC revived the character in the stories reprinted here, they decided not to tamper with these elements. Remember, this was two decades before the accepted method for reviving old properties was to make them darker and grittier. So they put C. C. Beck back on the art, and his uncluttered panels still have a cartoonish appeal. When Beck left the book, his replacements (mostly Kurt Schaffenberger) maintained some continuity in style. Although other characters were now drawn with greater “realism”, and there was more detail in the backgrounds, Captain Marvel himself and alter ego Billy Batson were still drawn cartoonishly, complete with two little black dots in place of their eyes. In some ways, Schaffenberger’s art is more effective than Beck’s, precisely due to this contrast between the obviously fantastic Marvel and his more mundane surroundings. The difference between fantasy and reality is marked through the art itself.

As for scripts, who better to place on a kids’ book than Denny O’Neil? O’Neil had by then started his socially relevant work on Green Lantern that would see Green Lantern’s young sidekick Speedy become an addict, and his run on Batman that reverted Batman to his early guise as the brooding dark detective. So O’Neil seems like an odd choice, but I was surprised at how well he acquits himself here, delivering simple, entertaining stories for a younger audience. And O’Neil’s replacements Elliot S! Maggin and E. Nelson Bridwell show even more continuity with his scripting style than Beck’s replacements do with the art.

Despite what you might expect–it is the seventies–there’s precious little attempt to update the characters visually or thematically. In later stories, “lovable fraud” Uncle Marvel (a biologically unrelated buffoon, a combination of Falstaff and Don Quixote who falsely claims to have superpowers himself) grows an ill-advised moustache, and Billy Batson sports some wicked flares. But that’s about it.

The stories themselves are, one and all, goofy. They feature all the implausible plot twists and bizarre set-ups that will be familiar to readers of other “silver age” Showcase volumes, especially the Superman ones–only written and drawn some 15-20 years later. While later issues expanded the stories to “full-length” (around 17 pages), in earlier issues the stories are rarely over 10 pages. So they often make odd jumps in logic, especially as the last panel approaches, requiring a bit of expository dialogue. But even that fits the general childlike tone of the series.

As in many “silver age” stories, there are places where the goofiness takes flight into full-blown surrealism. Of all the treats here, the best is the character Sunny Sparkle, “the nicest guy in the world”. Everyone loves Sunny, so much that random strangers passing him on the street give him their jewelry or groceries they just bought. When he phones a charity to pick up all the stuff he’s been given (ovens, tennis rackets, sewing machines, golf clubs…) he has to stay indoors; otherwise, the drivers of the delivery truck will see him, refuse to take his stuff and leave him their truck as another gift.

Characters like Sunny fulfill the potential of the silver age’s general air of illogic. Not every bit of Shazam! is an imaginative gem like Sunny, but there’s enough of these bits to keep you entertained. What more could you ask for?

Recommended? Good clean fun for kids. Not as good as Jeff Smith’s new series, no doubt, but what is? For adults, the stories provide mindless diversion in small doses.

* It’s always seemed unsavoury to me that DC would start printing new stories about a character which they had earlier tried to erase from history. It’s as though EMI had tried to produce their own Grey Album after hassling Danger Mouse. Legal, definitely, perhaps even morally permissible, but still somehow icky.

Tempted out of the wilderness by a good old-fashioned fist-fight

That kooky firebrand, Noah Berlatsky, is once again taking potshots at comix’ sacred cows. Now, I should say that I agree with some of this comics comics critique of Berlatsky’s approach. In his criticism Berlatsky often seems to be trying to raise his arbitrary preferences to objective aesthetic standards by the force of sheer rhetoric alone (but, hell, doesn’t everyone?). It’s an exceedingly thin line between “Modern art comics suck!” and “Marvel is better than DC!”.

On the other hand, Berlatsky’s brief take on Clowes and Ware, in the comments section, is pretty spot-on:

“[Clowes'] visual sense seems very pedestrian to me; his layouts tend to be pretty boring, that monochrome color thing he often does strikes me as drab and ugly; his drawing is blandly half-assed in a way I don’t find charming at all. His stories seem magical-realist in a really perfunctory way that seems completely New Yorker ready. I don’t see much in his work that seems to use the comics medium impressively. Without his literariness, I don’t think he’d really exist, so yeah, it doesn’t make sense to suggest he’d be better without it.

Chris Ware’s another story; obviously he’s an amazing artist with a unique visual sense. Unfortunately, I think he’s been abandoning much of that in recent years in favor of…a drabber, more literary approach. His layouts are moving more towards grids, for example, his stories heading more towards New Yorker territory, rather than some of the absurdist or (really excellent) satiric stances he took in his early days. I think Ware has done less literary comics, and I liked them more, at least. ”

Indeed, on both counts. Both artists have stultified as they’ve grown all respectable and stuff.

Take Jimmy Corrigan, for instance. A lot of the crazy Superman/Smartest-boy-in-the-world stuff from the original comics was left out of the book, and I think that was an artistic mistake. That material was far superior to the interminable but oh-so-respectable 19C flashback (“It’s a generational saga!”) that bogs down the second half. At any rate, I enjoyed it a lot more. I also find Quimby and the Big Tex/God/Robot Sam et al. collection far more appealing than the latter parts of Jimmy Corrigan, or his most recent Rusty Brown stuff.

Even so, what saves Ware’s recent work from falling too far down the New Yorker hole is that it’s still fairly unrelentingly bleak. I can’t imagine the New Yorker, or any other bastion of middlebrow literary respectability, publishing work that is as routinely vicious in its black humour as Ware’s work remains.

As for Clowes, I suspect I have more time for his earlier work than Berlatsky does. For instance, strips like Needledick, Suicide, Desert Island, etc were funny, startling bits that could only be done in comics. Even some parts of Like a Velvet Glove pack a strong visceral punch–not an effect often associated with Clowes’ work today. But I thought the quality of the Eightball back-ups declined markedly, starting with #10 or so. And once Ghost World was finished, Clowes’ stories all seemed to me like J. D. Salinger fanfic, at least in their tone and thematic content. David Boring was so well-named that I didn’t make it past the first chapter.

(Speaking of Ghost World, wasn’t the insertion into the movie of Steve Buscemi as a Thora Birch-screwing mary-sue just utterly creepy? I’m sure there was no squicky wish-fulfilment at all in Terry Zwigoff’s and Clowes’ decision to turn a physically ugly, anachronistic, older man and social misfit, dissatisfied with modern culture, into the obscure object of desire for a spunky, quirky teenager. No doubt they did it to make the story more commercially appealing; which may help explain why Art School Confidential didn’t exactly set the box office alight)

But Clowes’ worst flaws can be summed up in two words:

Adrian Tomine.

‘Nuff said, true believer.