Captain Marvel: The Big Red Rip-off?
Was
Captain Marvel, the famed Big Red Cheese of the 1940s, concocted in deliberate
imitation of Superman? That plaguey old
question. I had occasion to ponder it
again a few years ago when writing the Foreword to Volume 2 of DC’s Archive
Edition of Shazam! In years past, I had resolved the issue to
my satisfaction, I felt, and I have been answering the question ringingly in
the negative ever since. And in that self-same Volume 2, I found additional
evidence to support my cranky contention.
Therein, for example, is the picture
of Captain Marvel on the opening page of the first story in the book. It’s a picture that appears frequently in
the Captain Marvel canon: it depicts our hero holding a plaque upon which are
engraved the names and attributes of the personages whose initials comprise the
magic word Shazam, the word that
young Billy Batson invokes to summon the bolt of lightning that brings the
stalwart Captain. In this portrait of
the good Captain, his cape is sort of hanging over one shoulder. We see Captain Marvel like this pretty
often. The cape-over-the-shoulder pose
is, in fact, a habitual one. It is not only habitual, it’s
distinctive. Superman never appeared with his cape falling, casual-like, over
his shoulder like this. Not back in
those halcyon days of yore anyhow. The
cape-over-the-shoulder thing was Captain Marvel’s and his alone. With the archival evidence now available to
us, we are in a position to know, with certainty, that Captain Marvel was not
an imitation Superman. And yet, one of the most celebrated episodes in the
history of American comic books involves the law suit brought by Superman’s
publishers against Captain Marvel’s publishers, a suit alleging that Captain
Marvel was a blatant copy of Superman.
Some of us have always scoffed at
the idea that Captain Marvel was a knock-off of Superman. Superman was science
fiction, we always said; Captain Marvel was science fantasy, as confused a
gallimaufry of pseudo-science and magic as the roster of heroes whose initials
comprise the word Shazam was of
history (the Biblical character, Solomon) and legend (which compounded the
confusion by mixing four characters from Greek myth—Hercules, Atlas, Zeus,
Achilles—with one, Mercury, from the Romans).
Moreover, we railed away, the
personalities of the two characters—the ambiance of their books—were quite
different. Superman gave us serious, straight-faced fiction. Captain Marvel, on
the other hand, was more humorous. His stories were invested with a whimsical
almost fairy-tale quality. Captain Marvel, said comics historian Ron Goulart,
“refused to take his profession too seriously.” According to Jim Steranko in
his History of Comics (Volume 2),
“Captain Marvel always played it strictly for laughs.” Not at first, Steranko
admits, but shortly after his debut, the red-clad superhero’s stories embraced
humor—“irreverent, outrageous humor that seemed to make the antics of the
‘World’s Mightiest Mortal’ a satire of the super-straight adventures of the
‘Man of Steel.’” Finally, the two characters were drawn quite differently:
Superman was rendered realistically while Captain Marvel was drawn simply, in
an almost cartoony manner.
If this is so, how, then, could
Superman’s publishers be so obtuse as to see in Captain Marvel an infringement
of their copyright on Superman, as was alleged in the letter they filed in
1941?
With the factual evidence of DC’s
archival Captain Marvel in front of us, we can answer that question: quite
simply, Captain Marvel wasn’t, at first, as cartoony and whimsical as all of us
remember him. Even as late as the summer of 1941, a good eighteen months after
Captain Marvel’s inauguration in Whiz
Comics No. 2, dated February 1940, most of Captain Marvel’s adventures were
told pretty straight. Certainly the earlier stories were.
Granted, a couple of comedic
elements infiltrate the stories of the comic book’s second year—a cartoony
gorilla and a fanciful spider; and fantasy seeps in now and again. But there’s
no outright hilarity. Sivana is the stock evil scientist; and he hasn’t begun,
yet, to refer to Captain Marvel as “the Big Red Cheese,” an ear-mark of the
humorous treatment of later years.
It isn’t until Whiz Comics No. 20 (August 1941) that we glimpse the kind of story
and treatment that would distinguish most of the Captain Marvel oeuvre in the
years to come. To put Sivana’s scientific laboratory behind doors bearing the
name “Nefarious Research, Inc.” is the sort of sidelong wink-and-nudge drollery
we would grow to expect. And when Captain Marvel discovers that Sivana’s new
body is just “machinery,” his eyes become cartoony black dots in surprised
reaction, another convention that signals a somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach
to superheroing, an approach that would increasingly shape Captain Marvel’s
adventures—but which is mostly missing from almost all the stories in the first
two years of the character’s life.
In appearance, Captain Marvel in the
first couple years could certainly qualify as a rip-off of Superman. The
drawing style deployed by Captain Marvel’s visual interpreter, C. C. Beck, was
not, at first, cartoony at all. Although somewhat less embellished with
cross-hatching than other artwork of the period, the pictures on the pages of
the early Captain Marvel books did not look as distinctively different from the
pictures in Superman comics as they would a few years later. In short, to the
editorial satraps at the Superman shop, Captain Marvel looked suspiciously like
another attempt to cash in on Superman’s immense popularity.
The first such attempt had occurred
before Superman was a year old. In the spring of 1939, Victor S. Fox, one-time
accountant at Detective Comics (as DC Comics was known at the time), had
realized how successful Superman was and had left to set up his own rival
funnybook publishing firm. Fox promptly commissioned Will Eisner to produce a
comic book about a superhero to be called Wonder Man. Fox specified that Wonder
Man was to have a red costume but, otherwise, was to be a pretty exact
duplicate of Superman except that he would be blond. Wonder Man could leap tall
buildings with a single bound, was superhumanly strong and virtually
invulnerable. Just like Superman. When the first issue of Wonder Comics appeared in May 1939, Harry Donenfeld, then the chief
executive at Detective Comics, quickly brought suit for copyright infringement,
and Fox, caught with his hand in the copyright cookie jar, stopped producing
Wonder Man immediately.
This episode had barely concluded
when Captain Marvel burst onto the newsstands in early 1940. Another superhero
in red longjohns. And he had dark hair just like Superman. Is it any wonder
that Detective Comics filed a “cease and desist” letter almost right away? The
legal struggle went on for the rest of the decade, with judges ruling first for
Superman’s publisher, then for Captain Marvel’s Fawcett Publications. Finally,
Fawcett abandoned the fight and settled out of court. It was 1953, and
superhero comic books were fading fast. As circulation dropped, Fawcett decided
to get out of the comic book business. So Captain Marvel disappeared until
1972, when DC Comics, having negotiated the publication rights for the
character, brought him back to life. But for a complex of legal reasons, DC
could not use the name of the character in the title of the comic book, so the
book was christened Shazam, and it
has been by that name that most of the subsequent attempts at rejuvenating the
character have appeared, albeit with today’s personality-driven superhero
formula.
Fawcett’s “Marvel family” of comic
books in the 1940s were immensely popular. Captain Marvel appeared in several
titles, one of which came out every three weeks. In other titles, we enjoyed
Captain Marvel Junior, Mary Marvel, and others of the family. Captain Marvel
outsold Superman. Naturally, those of us who fondly recall his adventures
resent the law suit that put him out of business. But that fondness should not
blind us to the fact that Fawcett’s superhero looked, at first, remarkably like
another Wonder Man. And with the Archive Edition books at hand, we have the
evidence. The early Captain Marvel was at least as serious and straight-forward
a flying superhero as Superman was. On the basis of the character’s attributes
alone, DC was thoroughly justified in looking askance at Fawcett’s enterprise.
What’s more, Fawcett had a rip-off
reputation. The company was constantly aping the efforts of other publishers.
In this practice, it was not markedly different from other publishers at the
pulp-end of the periodical industry. But Fawcett was notably successful at it.
Fawcett’s first publication,
however, was, as nearly as I can tell, an original conception.
The founder of the Fawcett
publishing empire was a one-time newspaperman and soldier, Wilford Hamilton
Fawcett. Young Wilford had run away from home at sixteen to join the Army, and
he found himself in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. Steranko
says the youth was wounded in the knee and almost lost his leg, but he sought out a specialist in
Mexico, and when he returned to his hometown of Minneapolis, he was ambulatory
on both feet.
He worked for awhile as a railway
mail clerk but soon gravitated into journalism, eventually becoming police
reporter for the Minneapolis Journal.
Then along came World War I. Fawcett went back to the battlefield, this time as
a captain, but when he returned to civilian life in Minneapolis after the
hostilities, he found himself in the ranks of the unemployed. Nothing daunted,
he opened a tavern for ex-servicemen that he called the Army and Navy Club.
Alas, it failed almost immediately, thanks to Prohibition.
Whether Fawcett thought that his
next endeavor would actually make him some money or not, we can’t say. But what
the Fawcett Legend asserts is that sometime in 1919 (possibly in May) he
borrowed a typewriter and typed up several pages of “hot” jokes and “spicy”
doggerel that he had heard hither and yon while on active duty in the military.
He mimeographed these pages and distributed them among his ex-soldier friends
in hospitals and roadhouses. The demand for more of the same was immediate. And
before long, Fawcett was churning out a monthly joke book, which he christened Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. The last two
words evoked memories of a WWI artillery shell, which, as it passed overhead,
went “whiz,” and when it landed, went “bang.”
The first issue of Whiz Bang had an initial press run of
5,000 and was priced at two-bits. Sold at first in the hotel lobbies around
Minneapolis, it grew quickly as its reputation spread. Ex-soldiers, traveling
salesmen, sporting men, bellhops and curious schoolboys gobbled up each issue.
Captain Billy hired joke-writers, and the circulation soared. In 1923, Whiz Bang claimed 425,000 readers.
Subtitled “Explosion of a Pedigreed
Bull,” the pocket-sized periodical aimed at a vaguely rural readership. Editorially,
it was built around the escapades and epigrams of the characters at Whiz Bang
Farm (ostensibly in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis). The cast
included Gus, the hired man; Olaf, another; Deacon Callahan; his toothsome
daughter, Lizzie, whose virtue every male had designs upon; and Pedro, a bull.
(Rejection slips sent to those who submitted material explained that “Pedro,
the Whiz Bang bull, didn’t like this one.”)
For the day, the Whiz Bang content was untrammeled smut.
Bawdy stories, ribald verse, titillating pictures and cartoons, and double entendre galore. By present-day
standards (assuming we have any at all), this stuff was pretty tame withal. On
its pages, “hell” was usually represented by “h—“ or “heck.” Here’s a sample of
the poetry:
I
had a flower garden,
But
my love for it is dead,
‘Cause
I found a bachelor’s button
In
my black-eyed susan’s bed.
The
jokes weren’t much more daring:
“Why,
hello,” said the first poor working girl; “you must have struck it rich since I
saw you last. Them jools, them furs, them everything!”
“Oh,
haven’t you heard?” said the second poor working girl. “I’ve got a new
position!”
You
have to look pretty deep in that one, and you have to start with prurient
expectations.
Captain Billy himself was exactly
what you might expect to find in a fellow who told dirty stories and recited
racy poetry. According to report, he was a hearty man, full of rough humor and
bluff good fellowship. Once his magazine began generating a substantial income,
he started traveling, and wherever he went, he collected jokes and snatches of
poetry, which he shipped back to the home office.
Every month, he contributed his own
editorial, “Drippings from the Fawcett.” Referring to himself as “this
bristle-whiskered old sodbuster,” he championed “the common people,” liquor
consumption, and the “pleasures of living.” And he attacked Prohibition,
reformers, censors, and all their blue-nosed ilk, reveling in his reputation as
a benevolent reprobate.
Tame though it may seem today, Whiz Bang was nonetheless the cutting
edge of social revolution in its heyday. To some, the magazine represented the
decline in morality and the increase of sexual immodesty that seemed to
characterize the Roaring Twenties; to others, Whiz Bang was the emblem of openness and freedom of expression. It
was unquestionably the dominant comic magazine of the decade. And it may be
likened handily to Playboy as an
agent of change or as a reflection of that change in sexual mores among the
nation’s adolescent males.
With the success of Whiz Bang, Captain Billy realized he was
a publisher, and he began producing other magazines. By 1930, Fawcett
Publications had twelve monthly magazines; by the end of that decade, the count
was up to sixty-three. And most of them were clones of other magazines that had
demonstrated appeal on the newsstand.
Fawcett’s first offering after Whiz Bang was True Confessions, an imitation of Bernarr Macfadden’s True Story, which debuted in 1922.
Capitalizing on the pulp fiction fad of the day, Fawcett next brought out Triple-X, a magazine that varied its
title to reflect whatever was selling that year--Triple-X Western, Triple-X Mystery, Triple-X Aviation. In 1926, he
launched Battle Stories and Screen Secrets, which became Screen Play. The same year, Fawcett
started Smokehouse Monthly, imitating
his own flagship. In 1927, indulging his interest in sports and his brother’s
in golf, he bought Amateur Golfer and
Sportsman. (His brother Roscoe had left a job as sports editor on the Portland Oregonian to join what had
become the family business.) And in 1928, Captain Billy bought yet another
naughty joke book, Jim Jam Jems. Then
came the flood of imitations. Seeing the success of Popular Mechanics, Fawcett started Modern Mechanics (which was forced to change its name to Mechanix Illustrated when Popular Mechanics objected to the
initial title because it was so similar to its own). And when Dell Publishing
introduced its briefly successful humor magazine, Ballyhoo, in 1931, Fawcett produced its copy in Hooey within the year. Seeing the success of Esquire, Captain Billy ginned up For Men Only in 1936. And with Spot, he endeavored to hitch his wagon to the success of Henry Luce’s Life. And so it went.
Over at DC, publisher Donenfeld,
himself a veteran of the copycat pulp industry, would have recognized
immediately that with Captain Marvel, Fawcett was doing again what he had
always done in creating his empire, imitating proven success. Fawcett
Publications had moved to New York in 1939 and had begun to formulate plans to
invade the comic book market shortly after its arrival.
Before the appearance of the first
newsstand issue of Whiz Comics (numbered “2”), the Captain Marvel concept evolved through several
permutations. The initial inspiration of Bill Parker, then editor of Mechanix Illustrated, was for a team of
heroes, each possessing one of the attributes later combined in Shazam,
commanded by Captain Thunder. The team notion was soon abandoned,
though—perhaps because of its inherent cumbersomeness—and by the end of the
year, Captain Thunder embodied all the traits of his erstwhile lieutenants.
Captain Thunder was to debut in Flash Comics, but another publisher, the
Detective Comics ally All-American Comics, had just launched a comic book with
that title, so the Fawcett editors tried again with Thrill Comics. That title, unhappily, was too close to another
rival publisher’s Thrilling Comics.
(Is this a pattern that we see emerging?) By the time they resorted to Whiz Comics, Captain Thunder had been re-christened
Captain Marvel. (He had appeared as Captain Thunder only in the “ashcan
edition,” which, as I said, was entitled Flash
Comics, published in-house to establish copyright; but that book was never
circulated until DC’s publication in 1992 of the first volume of the Archive
Edition Shazam, which reprints the
entire Captain Thunder story. The ashcan Flash Comics supplies the reason for the first issue of Whiz Comics being numbered “2”: for the
Fawcett folks, it was the second issue of their magazine even though it had a
different title.)
The fast footwork in these matters
was a company trait. Fawcett Publications concentrated on making money, and it
acted promptly to minimize losses. Any magazine that didn’t prove to be a
money-maker quickly, Fawcett killed without a second thought and devoted its
resources to promoting the magazines that demonstrated their appeal almost at
once.
In what proved to be the most
inspired aspect of the Captain Marvel ethos, the good Captain had acquired an
alter-ego—the youth Billy Batson, who, by invoking the name of the old wizard
he meets in an abandoned subway station (“Shazam!”) transforms himself into a
super-powered adult. (The linguistic hopscotch evident in all these names is
amusing to contemplate: Captain Marvel evokes Captain Billy, which name, in
turn, suggests Billy Batson; Whiz Comics is clearly an echo of Whiz Bang, and
Thunder and “flashes” of lightning seem to originate in the same explosion of
that WWI artillery shell.) Young male readers would identify with Billy, who
was the actual protagonist in the Captain Marvel stories: a smart, inquisitive
and precocious orphan boy (who works like an adult as a radio reporter), he
gets himself into trouble by investigating mysteries, and then he summons a
grown-up version of himself who gets him out of trouble. For any boy reading
these comics, it was a dream come beautifully, simply, true.
The uniqueness of this concept,
however, was not as obvious as Captain Marvel’s superpowers—in particular, his
ability to fly unaided. This was Superman’s ability, too. Fawcett’s lawyers
established later that Captain Marvel flew before Superman did; at first,
remember, Superman got airborne by leaping super leaps. But this is litigious
hair-splitting. Fact is, none of the other longjohn legions of the day were at
all self-propelled flyers. Just Superman. And Captain Marvel.
All the archival and historical
evidence brings us to our conclusion: if Fawcett didn’t set out deliberately to
produce an imitation Superman, it sure looked like it had. And so DC, scarcely
the villain in the piece (despite the sentiments of all us Captain Marvel
fans), seems entirely justified in bringing the law suit that hovered over both
publishing houses for more than a decade. DC’s lawyers were never able to find
a witness who would testify that anyone at Fawcett had been instructed to copy
Superman (as Fox had instructed Eisner), but probably—given the task: create a
superhero—no one needed the instruction. Everyone knew what the comic book
trend was on the newsstand.
Later, of course—about the time we
get to Whiz Comics No. 20 in August
1941—Beck and writer Otto Binder shifted the character off the center of
gravity and started doing more whimsical stories. Before long, the
light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek treatment prevailed. And once that set in, the
similarities between the two characters ebbed away into near non-existence, and
Captain Marvel emerged as a unique creation, scarcely a copy. So unique that no
one has since been able to satisfactorily bring him back to life. But they keep
trying.
Fawcett Gallery: And before we leave the topic, here is a short gallery of Captain Marvel pictures, all made by me in my first foray into fandom, a quarter century ago. Zero Hero was a character of my own invention; ditto his side-kick, the toothsome Starbright. This exhibition includes my caricature of C.C. Beck and of movie actor Fred McMurray, upon whose physiognomy Captain Marvel’s was said to be based. Here McMurray plays the part of the Big Red Cheese, and Zero comes to naught, as was his wont.
Footnit: An earlier version of this
essay, including a review of Volume 2 of the DC Shazam Archive, appeared in The
Comics Journal.
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