Things were different in 1940. A lucrative trademark was a jealously guarded intellectual property. National had their socialist strongman in fetters, milking his uniqueness for every dime and dollar. The last thing anyone there wanted was another Superman, let alone a potentially more charming and profitable one.
While National’s legal team would eventually contrive to prove otherwise, Captain Marvel wasn’t much like Superman at all. Superman celebrated the power of the individual in settings drawn to look as true to life as possible. Captain Marvel’s stories offered a world that slid and slipped and became unreal, a world where the word took center stage. He embraced the interior world of dream logic, fairy-tale time, and toys that come to life. If Superman was Science Fiction, and Batman was Crime, Captain Marvel planted his flag in the wider territory of pure Fantasy.
His origin story detailed an out-and-out shamanic experience of a kind familiar to any witch doctor, ritual magician, anthropologist, or alien abductee.
Young Billy Batson’s journey begins in a typically mundane setting. Here on a city street corner at night, the reader is introduced to an orphan boy, a victim of the Depression, selling newspapers outside the subway station where he sleeps rough. When Billy is approached by an odd character in a slouch hat and trench coat, he seems to take it all in stride. The stranger’s face is hidden in the shadows beneath his hat brim, and Billy shows a level of trust that would seem unfeasible in our pedophile-haunted twenty-first-century world when he agrees to follow the dodgy figure into the station.
A train arrives in the otherwise deserted station, and it can only be a train from another reality, with modernist motifs daubed across its side like graffiti painted by Joan Miró. Resembling the streamlined Platonic prototype for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express, the train carries Billy into a deep, dark tunnel that leads from this world to an elevated, magical plane where words are superspells that change the nature of reality.
Billy’s psychedelic tunnel voyage culminates in another empty train station. Entering, the boy finds himself in a threatening archway of flaring shadows. At the end of the corridor, Billy stands face-to-face with a long-bearded “wizard” who outlines the boy’s new and unexpected duties and abilities. All the while, a monstrous, trembling cube of granite hangs suspended by a splintering thread above the wise man’s venerable skull. Everything is heightened, torch lit, and feverishly real as higher powers explain to Billy their plan.
Billy Batson, good and true, has been selected to take the place of the retiring wizard, who has used his powers to protect humankind for the last three thousand years and wants a break. The transfer of power is accomplished when Billy speaks the wizard’s name—“Shazam!”—triggering a thunderclap and flash of lightning. In the swirling smoke of the ultimate conjuring trick stands a tall man in a cape. He wears a red militarystyle tunic with a chunky yellow lightning bolt on the chest. His cape is white with a high collar and braided yellow trim. He has a yellow sash around his waist, red tights, and yellow boots. (He wisely steers clear of the underpants-on-the-outside look.) With his slicked-back brilliantined hair, he looks like the boy Billy grown up, perfected. He looks, in actual fact, almost exactly like the actor Fred McMurray, upon whose features Charles Clarence Beck based those of his hero. His final task complete, the wizard slumps back in his throne, and the immense block of stone drops to smash his body flat. His spirit form haunts the panel like Obi-Wan Kenobi dispensing postmortem advice to the fledgling superhero.
It’s a heady brew and it extends the potential of the superhero in the way that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” pushed the prevailing idea of popular music into something unforeseen.
The magic word was a concept that connected the hero to the basis of human speech; language, storytelling. Captain Marvel’s power came not from years in the gym or from his alien biology or his royal blood. His power came from a spell. He was a magician.
I remember walking alone as a child, chanting every word in the dictionary in the hope of finding my own Shazam! Eventually, everybody searches for his or her own magic word: the diet, the relationship, the wisdom that might liberate us from the conventional into the extraordinary. That eternal human hope for transcendence gave the Captain Marvel strip rocket fuel.
Shazam! has entered the culture as an Abracadabra or Hey Presto!—an all-purpose magical incantation. It was a word of enlightenment and personal transformation that accomplished, in a white-hot instant, what decades of Buddhist meditation could only point toward. His powers were the siddhis claimed by ultimate yogins. In the language of ceremonial magic, Shazam! summoned the holy guardian angel—the exalted future self—to come to one’s aid. When Billy’s natural curiosity got him into trouble, the word could summon Captain Marvel to deal with any and all consequences.
In fact, Shazam was an acronym. Captain Marvel’s powers were derived from six gods and heroes of legend. He was endowed with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. Mercury was all over the concept, from the bright yellow thunderbolt motif on the captain’s scarlet tunic, to the word games and the presence of the old wizard who gave Billy his word. Billy worked as a roving boy reporter for WHIZ radio, going one step beyond newspaperman Clark Kent in scoring such a prestigious adult job. The tower atop the WHIZ building crackled like the RKO Pictures logo with graphic zigzags. A boy radio announcer seems so perfect a job for a modern Hermes that it’s barely remarkable.
All of this made Marvel the first occult—or, perhaps more accurately, Hermetic—superhero; Marvel was the magus in tights, empowered by angels and the divine. Where Superman’s strength relied on pseudoscientific explanations, Marvel’s adventures opened doors to a world of magical self-belief and transformation. Where Superman tightened his jaw and tackled the ills of the real world, Marvel smiled a lot and had room for whimsy, warmth, and a well-developed personality. Where Superman’s cape was plain, adorned with only his S brand, Marvel’s was flamboyantly decorated with gold trim and fleur-de-lys. He was wearing the military dress uniform of a regiment of future men and women.
Marvel heralded another innovation. Superheroes had so far been loners. In 1940 Batman had only just hooked up with Robin, and the era of boy sidekicks was yet to kick off in earnest, but Captain Marvel had family. A superhero family! In 1942, he was joined by his cousin Mary Batson, who only had to speak the name of her hero, “Captain Marvel,” to transform from wise and good Mary Batson into the wise and good Mary Marvel, who could punch a building to dust. The third member of their team was the magnificent Captain Marvel Jr., from Whiz Comics no. 25, 1941.
In an era when so much of the artwork could at best be described as robust primitif, the work of Mac Raboy on these strips had an illustrative delicacy and a grasp of anatomy and movement that made it unique. His Captain Marvel Jr. was a lithe Ariel, effortlessly capturing the blue-sky freedom and potential of youth better than any other superhero. With such accomplished competition as Raboy in the studio, Beck’s polished professional line work also developed a new gloss that propelled Captain Marvel’s sales beyond those of even the mighty Superman. Backgrounds seemed more solid in Marvel Family stories, the shadows were blacker and more distinct, the focus and depth of field somehow sharper, and the comics developed a deluxe look that recalled Disney animation and the best of the newspaper strips.
In his turn, Captain Marvel spawned his own imitator, the British Marvelman—a character who provided my own first exposure to superheroes, when I was three years old and picking my way through a bizarre “Marvelman Meets Baron Munchausen” adventure. Marvelman was a child of necessity rather than inspiration. When DC successfully sued Fawcett Comics, Captain Marvel’s publisher, in 1952 and new Captain Marvel comics ceased to appear, a hasty substitute strip was assembled to fill the pages of his ongoing British reprint title. Editor Mick Anglo reconfigured the basic Marvel Family setup and remade the character as a blond hero in a stre
amlined jet-age blue costume with no cape and no exterior underpants. Billy and Mary were replaced by Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman. And yet, as if litigation was somehow built into the concept’s atomic structure, Marvelman himself became the subject of a bitter court wrangle that continued for decades and involved major comic-book industry players like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Todd McFarlane. Captain Marvel and his cloned offspring found themselves tangled in statutes as if the law had enacted its judgment on Prometheus. Exile would follow. DC would go on to completely destroy Fawcett in court, but the word Marvel would return to haunt DC Comics.
Despite the legal wrangling, the exile and disempowerment of the original Captain Marvel, he and his family had made their mark on the culture. Elvis Presley’s first single appeared three years after DC filed the lawsuit that brought down the entire Marvel Family universe, but the king of rock ’n’ roll identified so strongly with Mac Raboy’s lithe superboy that by the time his own physique was somewhat less than slender, he had his costumes designed to recall Captain Marvel Jr.’s boyish, cavalier spirit. Take a look at the short capes and high collars Presley wore in his later years and note how Captain Marvel Jr.’s tousled, jet-blue cut was re-created on Elvis’s troubled head. Even the lightning bolt TCB logo on the tail of his private jet derived from Captain Marvel’s chest emblem, marking the beginning of a continuing cross-pollination between comics and popular music, two equally despised and scapegoated midcentury art forms.
It is hardly any surprise that Captain Marvel was Ken Kesey’s favorite superhero as well. In 1959 Kesey had volunteered to take part in a series of clinical LSD trials, which inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey and some young followers painted a school bus with Day-Glo colors, wrote Furthur on the destination board, and set out to recruit an army of rebels—an alternative society of liberated superhuman beings.
The story of Kesey and his Pranksters with their superhero alter egos—Mountain Girl, Cool Breeze, Black Maria, Doris Delay—and dreams of a new society was transformed into myth by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which talks of Kesey’s trips into the mountains to summon down lightning from the Rock of Eternity and release a thunderbolt pure enough to blind the squares and deafen the bigots and change the world forever.
The spirit of Marvel lived on.
CHAPTER 3
TWO MONTHS BEFORE the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the story “How Superman Would End the War” appeared in Look magazine. It showed Superman breaking into the führer’s bunker, lifting the whimpering dictator by the throat, thus acting out the wishes of so many of his readers:
“I’D LIKE TO LAND A STRICTLY NON-ARYAN SOCK ON YOUR JAW, BUT THERE’S NO TIME FOR THAT! YOU’RE COMING WITH ME WHILE I VISIT A CERTAIN PAL OF YOURS.”
The “pal” turned out to be Joseph Stalin. Superman whisked both men to the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva where, as the scowling despots sulked like scolded children, a headmasterly man with a gavel delivered his verdict:
“ADOLF HITLER AND JOSEPH STALIN—WE PRONOUNCE YOU GUILTY OF MODERN HISTORY’S GREATEST CRIME—UNPROVOKED AGGRESSION AGAINST DEFENSELESS COUNTRIES.”
And that was how Superman would end the war. The Superman who slung wife beaters out of windows or threatened elected officials—the outlaw reformer of 1938—had somehow survived into a very different world from the world of his creation. In 1941 the idea of the revolutionary working-class hero was already suspect. Rough-and-ready toughs who took the law into their own hands were potentially traitorous revolutionaries. In a time of war, patriots were heroes and so the ultimate hero became a superpatriot. The man from Krypton was now a Good American, a staunch and enthusiastic defender of the status quo. There could be no such thing as a crooked president or corrupt cops in the world of forties Superman. It was a hostile makeover no less thorough than the one that sublimated the oily haired, transgressive libido of Elvis Presley into a US Army uniform and regulation buzz cut in 1958. Sample covers show the Man of Steel riding a phallic missile rodeo-style through the sky, twenty years before Dr. Strangelove. This newly domesticated Superman posed with an American Eagle perched on his arm, and in one memorably tasteless episode, he encouraged his readers to “Slap a Jap!” as an aid to the war effort.
Then in 1941, Marvel’s Captain America Comics no. 1 pioneered a new superhero who made it his mission to strike back against the “Japanazi” menace with no holds barred. Captain America, the ultimate patriotic superhero, was the brainchild of another of comics’ great creative double acts: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.
Jack “King” Kirby was the most influential superhero artist of them all, with an imagination and range that sat comfortably inside a visionary tradition running all the way from Hebrew scriptures and epic mythology through William Blake and Allen Ginsberg. Born Jakob Kurtzberg in August 1917—Jack Kirby was the one of his many pennames that stuck—Kirby grew up in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a member of the Suffolk Street Gang, he was familiar with the thrill of full-on physical conflict in a way that many of his bookish young contemporaries were not. Indeed, unlike Joe Shuster or Bob Kane, who drew fights at a sniffy remove, Kirby dragged his readers directly into the wild flail of fists and boots that typified the real combat he’d experienced. His figures captured how it felt to somersault through a crowd of antagonists. His heroes and villains clashed in bony, meaty brawls that could sprawl across page after page. Superman might wrestle a giant ape for a panel or two, but in Kirby’s hands, the fight scenes were a thrilling end in themselves.
Kirby served in World War II as a private first class in Company F of the Eleventh Infantry. He landed on Omaha Beach at Normandy two months after D-day in 1944 and proceeded with his unit into occupied France. There he saw action at the battle for Bastogne, Belgium, enduring frostbite so severe that Kirby almost lost both feet and was finally mustered out with a combat infantry badge and Bronze Star for his trouble. His memories of the war informed his work for the rest of his life, but nonetheless, Kirby portrayed violence as a joyous expression of natural masculine exuberance. When American Nazis marched into the building where Simon and Kirby had their studio, demanding the blood of the Captain America creative team, it was Jack who rolled up his sleeves and went to sort them out.
As for Captain America himself, he was Steve Rogers, a skinny non-com who volunteered for a military experiment designed to turn an ordinary man into a superwarrior. Like my dad, or Jack Kirby, Steve just wanted a crack at Hitler. And, like many men in the populations of the Allied nations, he reckoned he could take the scrawny little paperhanger if only there weren’t thousands of miles of occupied territory, barbed wire, soldiers, tanks, and minefields between the sniveling Adolf and the proud fist of retribution.
Unlike Superman or Batman, Captain America was a soldier with permission to kill. Until this point, the superheroes operated on the fringes of the law, but Captain America’s violent work was endorsed by the Constitution itself! Turned down for the military, Steve applied for an experimental treatment of Super Soldier Serum and Vita-Rays. Before the formula could be mass-produced, its creator was murdered by Nazi agents, leaving a newly brawny and supercharged Steve Rogers as Uncle Sam’s one and only supersoldier.
Each issue of Captain America was kinetic, brutally overwrought, and sensationalistic. Every cover featured a brand-new tableau of imminent superatrocity: A girl, her blouse ripped to ribbons, writhes on a medieval torture rack while a leering hunchback, preferably sporting swastika tattoos, threatens her cleavage with a glowing poker; Captain America launches himself through a wall on a motorcycle, destroying a portrait of Hitler on the way and simultaneously repelling a hail of bullets with his Stars and Stripes shield, while his faithful teen partner, Bucky, mows down Ratzis with the feral glee of a William S. Burroughs wild boy. There would invariably be some combination of boiling oil, rabid gorillas, vampires, or fiendish snake-fanged Japanese involved. Every square inch of illustration conta
ined a frozen moment of grotesque threat or swashbuckling derring-do.
Kirby relied on his remarkable drawing skills to provide a living for his family and was serious about selling his books in an overcrowded market. Where Superman had flown the Axis leaders to an international court of law, Captain America took the fantasy to its far more satisfying next level. Kirby knew that wish-fulfillment pictures of American superheroes punching out Hitler’s teeth would sell magazines in a fearful world, and his instincts were right. In Captain America, Simon and Kirby gave America’s troops, in the field or at home, a hero they could call their own.
Superhero stories were written to be universal and inclusive, but often they’ve been aimed, it must be said, at boys and young men. Perhaps that’s why a mainstream myth has developed in which comic-book superheroines are all big-breasted Playboy girls with impossibly nipped waists and legs like jointed stilts in six-inch heels. But while it’s true that superhero costumes allow artists to draw what is effectively the nude figure in motion, there have in fact been more female superhero body types than male.
The first superheroine, you may be surprised to learn, was not a voluptuous cutie in thigh boots but a raw-faced middle-aged housewife called Ma Hunkel, who wore a blanket cape and a pan on her head in her debut appearance, All-American no. 20, 1940. A harridan with the build of a brick shithouse she was the first “real-world” superhero—with no powers, a DIY outfit, and a strictly local beat—and the first parody of the superhero genre all in one. Ma Hunkel, aka the Red Tornado, was a Lower East Side lampoon of Siegel and Shuster’s lofty idealism. The mainstream has forgotten Ma Hunkel, although, like all the rest, she’s still a part of the DC universe and now has a granddaughter named Maxine Hunkel, a talkative, realistically proportioned, and likeable teenage girl who also challenges the superbimbo stereotype.