Captain Marvel Enters the 21st Century

“At comic book conventions, when you’re on panels, they always ask what’s the one character you’d like to write that you haven’t written yet,” reflects Judd Winick, who’s written several titles for DC and Marvel in recent years. “I’d always answer Captain Marvel. And when Dan Didio came on board at DC and began tackling all the big characters, trying to figure out how to give them all a kick in the pants, we talked a lot about why the problems with Captain Marvel, why it felt like this one character was stuck in amber.”

Part of the problem had to do with the Captain’s convoluted history. He was created by Fawcett Comics in 1939, and at one point was so popular that he was even outselling Superman. But then DC sued for copyright infringement, evenutally won on appeal, and the character went into limbo until 1973, when Fawcett licensed the property to DC. By then, however, Marvel had already developed their own Captain Marvel, so DC had to rename the book after the magic word young Billy Batson would say to change into Captain Marvel and back again: Shazam! (Which, of course, was also the name of the Saturday morning TV show that presented its own version of the character.)

Winick got to take the character for a test spin last year in a miniseries which teamed him up with Superman, but as DC’s “Infinite Crisis” created room to give all their books a “radical new direction,” Winick pitched Didio on a new version of Captain Marvel that reinterprets his god-like powers so he can fight magical threats rather than ordinary supervillains. More importantly, Winick’s The Trials of Shazam!, which debuted two weeks ago, strips the Captain Marvel concept of much of the whimsical elements that have stuck to the character over the decades. “I want the character to be taken seriously for once,” he says. “People actually call him the Big Red Cheese; I think he’s the only character that has an acceptable dorky nickname like that. But when I say the Big Red Cheese is dead, I just mean that Captain Marvel’s going to be taken seriously, given the same weight and gravitas we give to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and other characters. But I’m a comedy writer, so there’s going to be laughs.” Winick sees the new interpretation of Captain Marvel as reaching out to teenage readers who would gravitate more naturally to titles like Batman, as well as adults who could no longer abide the character’s frivolous side. The tone of the scripts is matched by the artwork, digitally painted by Howard Porter, showing a radical new style of his own. (Fans are still debating the new approach online, but for those who don’t like Winick’s version, DC’s also got another miniseries from Jeff Smith coming some day which harks back to the character’s Golden Age roots.)

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