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Geoff Johns

Shazam, the Captain Marvel of DC Comics – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Shazam – Billy Batson & Mary Marvel as the Captain Marvel of DC Comics – comic books in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated February 2023 with titles scheduled for release through August 2023.

The Curious Comics History of DC’s Captain Marvel, AKA Shazam!

Captain Marvel and his family once were the top-selling comic heroes of the early 1940s, later became a DC copyright grab living on his own Earth, and later still has been incorporated into DC’s main universe three times over.

This guide uses the modern convention of referring to the character interchangably as Captain Marvel and Shazam.

Billy Batson as Captain Marvel on the cover of Shazam (2023) #1

Captain Marvel was a Fawcett Comics character, created by Bill Parker C. C. Beck, though he would largely be written by Otto Binder starting in 1942. Orphan Billy Batson was recruited by the Wizard Shazam and given the power of six “immortal elders” whenever he uttered the acronym standing for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury

Always whimsical and often beautiful, these Golden Age comics mixed the standard blend of one-off capers and support for World War 2 with oddball flights of fancy. They soon introduced Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr., as well as other recognizable characters like Black Adam and Tawny. The comes were even more wholesome and aimed at readers of all ages than the sometimes grim fantasies of comics like Captain America or Batman.

DC Comics interfered early on, suing Fawcett in 1941 to claim that Shazam was an infringement on their copyright on the similar-looking Superman. The case dragged on for over a decade and never reached a decisive conclusion. In short, the character of Captain Marvel wasn’t an infringement, but some elements of stories might have been. That situation lead the now-beleaguered Fawcett to settle out of court with DC, agreeing to never publish another Captain Marvel comics. They shuttered their comics line in 1953.

(This had the ripple effect of causing British publisher L. Miller and Son to abandon their Captain Marvel reprints and create their own nearly-infringing character, Marvelman – who would be the focus of his own decades of legal wrangling that would lead to him being renamed Miracleman and his rights eventually being sold to Marvel.)

During the early Bronze Age explosion of superhero popularity across all media, DC decided to bring back Captain Marvel, as licensed from Fawcett (who could not publish him themselves due to their settlement). Of course, now Marvel Comics was another big player in the industry, and they had launched their own Captain Marvel to snag the trademark in 1967. As a result, DC’s 1973 Captain Marvel relaunch and every subsequent relaunch was titled, “Shazam” – after Captain Marvel’s transformative word.

This version of Captain Marvel existed on Earth-S from 1973 to 1986 with his complete Fawcett Comics history intact, sometimes interacting with the World War 2 era heroes of Earth-Two.

That changed in 1985-1986 with Crisis on Infinite Earths, which wiped away all of DC’s many accumulated alternate earths in favor of a single unified continuity. In this new continuity, heavy hitters Superman and Wonder Woman were not founding members of the Justice League. Instead, the naive and optimistic Captain Marvel was recruited to serve alongside the likes of Guy Gardner and Doctor Fate.

However, his membership was short-lived, as he didn’t want to make the transition to serving internationally with the team in 1987 (since it might make it hard to keep up his civillian identity as Billy Batson). Billy’s problem with the International league was also DC’s problem: it was hard to focus on the life of a teenager in an ensemble book about adult superheroes.Shazam (2019) #1 Variant Textless

After his Post-Crisis DC debut, Captain Marvel received a pair of slightly conflicting origin stories – one in 1987 and a second in 1994. Both established him as an orphaned only child in Fawcett City gifted powers by the Wizard Shazam, but the 1994 version hinted at another orphan with connections to the wizard. This was the new version of Mary Marvel, who writer Jerry Ordway would introduce in his series The Power of Shazam in 1995. The series had surprising staying power for a 50-year-old brand in the X-TREME 1990s, lasting 47 issues and far into the comic industry downturn at the end of the decade. The series hewed closely to the Marvel Family’s Fawcett Comics roots, focusing on their lives as children as much as their lives as heroes.

After the 90s, Captain Marvel’s comic history grows murkier. Writer Geoff Johns co-opted the character to join his Golden Age revival title Justice Society of America, though in Post-Crisis comics Captain Marvel no longer has a connection to the Golden Age. While this kept Captain Marvel in the spotlight for another decade, it also made his story intertwined with the increasingly grim DC Universe – leading to some truly off-putting developments for him and his family.

Rather than take the opportunity to correct this in New 52, DC and Geoff Johns doubled down on a new Shazam origin (in back-ups in Justice League (2011)) that focused on a more adult and less whimsical take on his “kid playing adult” heroism. This landed him in the line-up of Justice League for the latter half of New 52. DC Rebirth continued the grounded take on Billy’s tough life as an orphan and how the power of Shazam extended to all of his foster siblings, taking things farther by infecting him with Joker-fueled evil for the grim “Year of the Villain” storytline.

Along the way, that early whimsical magic of Shazam has been entirely lost. He transformed from an even more optimistic infringement on Superman to a kid goofing off in a cruel adult world. The point of his stories stopped being bright-eyed wonder and became about Billy’s continued loss of innocence in the adult world of superheroes.

In 2023, Shazam finally escaped from the reverberations of Geoff John’s two decade grip on his continuity to launch under the pen of Mark Waid, an author known for injecting youthful properties with a renewed sense of joy.

[Read more…] about Shazam, the Captain Marvel of DC Comics – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Guide to Shazam, The Captain Marvel of DC Comics

February 20, 2023 by krisis 3 Comments

This week I’m back with my first new DC Comics collecting guide and reading order of 2023 for CK’s Plegeonaut Patrons on Patreon! This guide is for one of DC’s oldest characters, though really he has only been a DC character since the Bronze Age… or since Crisis, depending on how you count. I thought that would make for a confusing muddle of continuity. Instead, it turned out to be a delightful research project putting together this new Guide to Shazam, DC’s Captain Marvel!

Guide to Shazam, DC’s Captain Marvel
This guide is now available to all readers thanks to the magical support of Patrons of Crushing Krisis!

Guide to Shazam, DC's Captain Marvel

Here is what I knew about Shazam before researching his 83-year history for this guide: He’s really called Captain Marvel but we don’t call him that anymore (for reasons). He’s a Fawcett Comics character who DC (legally) stole. A wizard gave young Billy Batson the power to effectively become Superman (which is why DC stole him, legally), with the knowledge of Solomon and some other stuff that spells Shazam.

Oh, and: Geoff Johns is obsessed with him.

Honestly, that’s not a bad place to start with Shazam knowledge, but it turns out he’s both much simpler and much deeper than that. [Read more…] about Guide to Shazam, The Captain Marvel of DC Comics

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: Black Adam, Captain Marvel, DC Comics, Fawcett Comics, Geoff Johns, Jerry Ordway, New Comic Book Guide, Shazam

Justice Society of America – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

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New for Patrons: Guide to Justice Society of America

September 3, 2022 by krisis

After working on the Guide to Doctor Fate launch earlier this week for Pledgeonaut Patrons of CK, I realized it was time for me to finally dive into one of the few corners of DC Universe continuity that I still find intimidating. That’s because this team has been repeatedly in and out of continuity, they’ve been residents of multiple Earths (and at the center of several crises), and their membership spans multiple generations of heroes. I am talking about the original comic super-team that first debuted back in 1940, now completely explained in my Guide to Justice Society of America!

Guide to Justice Society of America

This guide will debut to the public the week that the Black Adam movie releases to theatres!

This is one of those times where I always hoped someone else on the internet would have explained things by now, but they didn’t so I had to take things into my own hands. Yes, I read Wikipedia and Fandom. Yes, I checked out some sites dedicated to the Justice Society. All of them explained the timeline of the JSA either with needless complexity or with the assumption of the reader being a DC Insider.

That’s not good enough for me. I want my guides to be able to explain things to someone who decided to read a comic for the very first time and just happened to pick the title covered by that guide. Many of my older guides are way too complex for that – I have a lot of work to do! But, my newer style of coverage strives for completeness but also clarity.

As it turns out, creating a Guide to Justice Society of America doesn’t have to be all that complicated. If you’ve ever wanted the cliff notes on the team, here’s the simplest way I can explain it: [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Justice Society of America

Filed Under: comic books Tagged With: All-Star Squadron, Crisis on Infinite Earths, David Goyer, Geoff Johns, James Robinson, Justice League, Justice Society of America

Legion of Super-Heroes – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH), Legionnaires, & Legion Lost comic books in omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated August 2022 with titles scheduled for release through December 2022.

DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes (LOSH) are a far-future team assembled from the best and brightest young heroes from many different planets, each with their own unique powers and physiology. Think of it as a cross between the Teen Titans and the Green Lantern Corps.

We usually think of DC comics as arranged by their publishing era, like Silver, Bronze, Post-Crisis, or New 52, which also tend to come with a continuity reboot (or, at least, a light reshuffle). Legion of Super-Heroes is different. LOSH fans do think about their heroes in terms of continuity reboots, but those do not line up DC’s publishing eras. LOSH is considered to be rebooted whenever their future continuity is radically changed such that not all new LOSH stories line up with prior ones.

Sometimes this happens right in the middle of series!

You can read and enjoy any LOSH story or series on its own, but to understand how certain stories rely on each other and where you can follow a specific group of LOSH characters, it makes sense to think in terms of reboots.

For many DC heroes, the first examples of this come with the Silver Age, or immediately after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Yet, the original LOSH) stories extend from the Silver Age through the Bronze Age and past Crisis on Infinite Earths. While they did have a slight pivot after Crisis in 1989 with “Five Years Later,” it was still within the same era of storytelling.

LOSH’s first major inflection point comes with Zero Hour in 2004, which begins what fans refer to generically as “Reboot” continuity.

Then, DC rebooted LOSH continuity prior to Infinite Crisis. This is known to LOSH fans as “Threeboot” era. Characters are sometimes referred to as “New Earth” versions.

However, there is a fourth reboot tucked into 2009 called “Retroboot” that kicks off with the Lightning Saga crossover. It’s called Retroboot because Geoff Johns retroactively inserted his version of the team back into the original continuity just after Crisis on Infinite Earths before handing the team to their author from that period, Paul Levitz. While the rest of DC reboots significantly after Flashpoint in New 52, LOSH continued their “Retroboot” era.

And, finally, Brian Bendis launched a familiar-but-new rebooted LOSH after Doomsday Clock and the explosion of the Source Wall in 2019 as a home for his newly aged-up Jon Kent.

This page exists thanks to research and consultation from @Atmageth!

[Read more…] about Legion of Super-Heroes – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

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