Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Captain Marvel

Alright, alright, calm down a minute and I'll try to explain. I am Captain Thunder, the Black Power of Shazam. And if you have never seen me before, that's okay, cause I only ever made one appearance anywhere before ever, and that was in an article for the Comic Buyer's Guide.

See, Roy Thomas, the Dr.Moreau of rehashed golden-age superheroes, brought me out to DC as a proposal for the introduction of Captain Marvel to the DC Universe. Actually, I was Captain Thunder, the Earth-1 equivalent - I was even secretly newspaperboy Billy Batson, although I looked like Rudy from Fat Albert.

This is a proud tradition in comics known as "Throwing the minorities a bone." Sometimes me and the second Dr.Mid-Nite and the second Wildcat and the second Mister Miracle and just about the second everybody would get together and hang out at Steel's place. This was before he got big. Back then, we just called him ... the second Superman.

Speaking of seconds, allow me to present ...

Why, it's Captain Marvel! We all love Captain Marvel, don't we? Yeah, WHIZ radio! Shazam! Tawky Tawny! Big Red Cheese ... Of course, THIS Captain - despite his red suit and magic word - is just a wee bit different.

You're looking here at the second Captain Marvel, a character completely unrelated to the original Fawcett creation of the Forties and who pretty much reeked like wookie ass. Rather
than an orphaned boy granted terrific powers in order to defend justice, this Cap was an amnesiac robot with loose limbs.

Cap debuts in a story which bears the legend "Based on a character created by Carl Burgos," which lends even more confusing twists and angles to his existence, inasmuch as he curiously has few ties to the company or creator of the original character. Burgos was, as you may know, the creator of the original Human Torch - also a robot with a human identity and a nondescript red jumpsuit.

We first catch up with our hero as he wanders a dark house, suffering a complete memory loss. This is NOT a good start, in my opinion. As he paces the house, bits and pieces of his memory return, escorting us back to his origin . (In the second story of this issue, Cap AGAIN has a blackout. He has more blackouts than a Kennedy. I wonder how often this happened to him. And how long it's gonna take before one of these blackouts ends with him standing in a strange motel room with a dead hooker on the bed and four kilos of pure heroin in his overnight bag)

We're taken to an alien world where a group of scientists has created Captain Marvel, The "Human Robot" - which I think works on the same level as "Meatless Burger" - for the "good of man." And BOY, is he ever handy to have around.

Check this out:

Marvel is instructed to utter the word "Split," which he does even though I think if I were in his situation - no memory, wakes up on a table surrounded by men in hospital gowns, being told I'm a robot - I'd be hesitant to jump when the enigmatic bossguy says so. Anyway, for his willingness to participate, Marvel is rewarded by having his arms and legs fall off. Obediently uttering the word "Xam!" - which I guess isn't really a word, so much as "Split" is - Marvel finds himself spontaneously reattached to his disparate parts. "Hello again, toes!"

He's told that the reason he can split is to "make repairs to your body..." (The hell?) and to - and this is a favorite of mine - "to prevent an attack from more than one person." That seems overly optimistic to me. "Blast, there's more than one person, but luckily fewer than four people, attacking me right now. Haha, the joke will be on them. HERE COME MY LIMBS!"

"HERE COME MY LIMBS" would've been my first choice for Captain Marvel's battle cry, by the way.

Actually, Cap could dissect himself into a startling array, basically at every joint and then some. Every finger could split independently at the joint, the arm at the elbow, wrist and shoulder, his pelvis could detach, his legs split at the hip, knee and ankle .... heck, I suppose his toes could probably separate independently, too. Oh, and his head could fly around independently too, just like Sir William Gull at the end of From Hell. XAM!

Cap's got that "magic word" weakness of having a common term as his mantra. If I knew the guy, I would've abused it. "Well, time for dessert Captain. Which would you prefer, salted liver with anchovy gravy or a banana split?" ... "Um, the one that isn't the liver." ... "You want the liver? No problem! Eat it all up!" ... "No, I want the other one. The thing with the bananas" ... "Say it Cap." ... "Alright. I want ... the ... banana SPLIT (THUD)."

Anyway, shortly after building him, Cap's native world explodes and he non-chalantly rockets to Earth (Says he, witnessing his planet's destruction "Now I'll have to find a new home." No kidding) where, once again suffering a terrible loss of memory, he is taken under the wing of an Earth boy. The writers were surely aware of Cap's shared namesake, evidenced if only by the presence of Marvel's young ward. Introduced in the first story only as "Billy...from the USA" (I swear), he's later given the full name of Billy Baxton, a short hop-skip-and-jump from the original Marvel's identity of Billy Batson.

Besides his handy ability to draw-and-quarter himself at will, Marvel can shoot laser beams from his eyes, fly, deflect bullets, emit electric shocks from his body, use some kind of half-assed telepathy and probably more; he's one of those characters whose powers were so poorly defined as to make him effectively omnipotent. But turning back the page for a moment, note that he can shoot electricity AND laser beams, but his only reputed defense against an attack by more than one person is to haphazardly fling his limbs at them.

Also, his powers stem from a magic element he keeps in his flat, completely non-medallion-looking medallion. The element is called "X" ... not "Element X," not "Chemical X," not "Cherry flavored X-Pops" ... Just "X." It is clearly identified in the medallion by the large letter "M" emblazoned on the front.

The stories in the first issue have that sort of meaningless Golden Age "twist ending" feel - well, except for the first story which is just Captain Marvel walking around the house losing body parts until Billy brings him his Ritalin. The first story starts with
Cap being involved in a plane crash (Which his super powers are apparently useless to avert. Or his super-powers might just be useless), then falling under the sway of evil "invisible" aliens (pictured above, and as you can see, they are not only visible but bear some resemblance to Milk&Cheese. "I'm an invisible alien of hate!") who kidnap everyone on the plane and plan to kill them, but then change their mind and ask Marvel to help them return home, and they go, and Cap has another blackout, and then I don't remember a damn thing about the story.

The last story in this issue continued the comic's newly-found tradition of swiping popular characters' names, as they introduced Plastic Man - their version lacking every bit of inventiveness
that made the original so appealing.

In this tale, the Captain is bedevilled by aliens (not invisible, but blue this time) who come from Venus but who live underwater, and have come here
to destroy us, then send Cap to meet his doom at the hands of a native Venusian "Gronk," to wit Plastic Man, and then the twist ending is that the aliens actually came here to warn us that nuclear bombs were polluting our atmosphere, and the Venusian who did all the killing and destroying was only pissed because his parents had been killed by a rogue Gronk a couple of days before the mission started. This Venusian went on to become ... Bat-Man. No, I kid.

Changes abound between issues as Cap goes from sandy brown hair to blonde, from a magenta jumpsuit to a red one, puts on a mask and has his medallion change from a mere insignia to something actually resembling a medallion. Of course, nothing can change the subtle way he's won our hearts.

He also changes identities from "Mister Marvel" (brilliant) to "Roger Winkle" (haha), now a college professor at Dartmoor, as well as something of a comical euphemism for the penis. He's also, by this point, gained a useless love interest and some supporting cast.

I thought I pretty much had this company pegged as some hack penny press which survived by harvesting the names of
popular characters from defunct publishing houses - this comes from a bat-eared, gargoyle-looking villain called The
Ray, which had prepared me for a total rape of the Quality Comics line. Of course, they derailed me with the use of TINYMAN for the nom de guerre of a shrinking District Attorney who uses his puny weakness to fight crime.
Somehow.

In any case, he was the perfect target for a second-hand DollMan tag, but I'm guessing the book's creative staff thought that was too femmy. Thus, Tinyman. Much better.

On a final note, the first issue is also one of the most catastrophic
cover scenes in the history of the medium. Not only is young Billy tied to a dangerous machine, but that machine is clearly reading that it is ready to blow even as an electrical monster of some sort is rising from it and reaching towards Billy with scary lightning mitts, all the while he's surrounded by menacing alien robots with terrible facial hair while Captain Marvel bursts into the ship only seconds away from a raging wall of water under the baleful gaze of ANOTHER type of alien, armed, watching the events below unfold through the UFO's canopy while even MORE UFO's fly in the skies in the background. Jesus. What, they couldn't light Billy on FIRE, too?