The True History of SHAZAM! and the original Captain Marvel

      

Part 1 of several.

Hi friends, and welcome. For regular followers of me, this blog, the Captain Marvel Culture website, the Captain Marvel Culture Facebook group and page, the Captain Marvel Culture YouTube channel, and who may have seen my posts and comments and answers on YouTube, Facebook, Quora, and pretty much any article or blog post that purports to tell the history of any Captain Marvel, what follows should be familiar history. However, what with the upcoming "SHAZAM!" movie in post-production, as well as Marvel's "Captain Marvel" movie following hard upon, it seems that lots of people continue to post inaccurate histories as the authoritative truth.

The latest of these was on https://www.slashfilm.com/history-of-shazam. It was well written, with an air of authority. It seems to me, however, that it was written by somebody who did research on the Internet for a few hours rather than tracking down the source material. There are misconceptions and inaccuracies all over it. I don't want to assume that's what the writer did, but it is obvious that they did not go the extra step to find out the difference between a copyright and a trademark, or that Whiz Comics #1 was merely an ashcan and never released to the public.

There are plenty of other examples of inaccurate info being given as authoritative truth on YouTube, Quora, and Facebook and the mainstream press (which is not to say that they are dealing in "fake news." That's a whole 'nother thing). But rather than log all of them here, I would just like to see if I can straighten this whole mess out and give researchers a one-stop shop for this history.

In 1938, Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster, a writer and artist team from Cleveland, Ohio, finally found a buyer for their ground-breaking character, "Superman." Long story short, their character, generally acknowledged to be the first true comic book superhero, first appeared in Action Comics #1. About that time, the publisher, National Allied Publications, was reorganized as Detective Comics, Inc. (after its first all-original, single-subject comic book with ads, Detective Comics) and would later come to be known as DC Comics.

Before long other superheroes appeared, and other publishing companies, either already extant or newly created, started introducing more superheroes.

Fawcett Publications had been started by retired US army captain Wilford H. Fawcett. "Captain Billy," as he was known, had published a pamphlet of patriotic writings and low-brow humor to entertain his veteran buddies in V.A. hospitals in his home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The pamphlet was called Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang. This publication became a big hit among the college set in the 1920's, spawning a large, diverse, and successful publishing company. Its titles included, over the years,  Daring Detective, Family Circle, Motion Picture, Screen Secrets, True Confessions, Mechanix Illustrated, and Woman's Day.

Noticing the success of superhero comic books, one of Captain Billy's sons, Roscoe Fawcett, decided to get Fawcett Publications into that racket. Citing surveys that showed the largest audience for superheroes was 10-to-12-year-old boys, he laid out the dictum "Give me a Superman, only have his other identity be a 10-to-12-year-old boy rather than a grown man." He put art director Al Allard in charge of the project with the assistance of editorial director Ralph Daigh, and staff writer Bill Parker and staff artist C.C. Beck were assigned to create this hero (as well as fill up a 64-page comic book with additional stories).

At first, Parker came up with the idea of a team of superheroes, each with a different power. But it was decided that this would be too confusing, so Parker went with the single hero.

The story he wrote began with Billy Batson, orphan newsboy, trying to sell his papers outside a subway station in the rain late at night. A stranger in a dark coat and hat came up to him and asked "Why aren't you home in bed, son?

"I have no home, sir," the boy said. "I sleep in the subway. It's warm there."

Without hesitation, the stranger said "Follow me!"

AND FOR THE FIRST AND LAST TIME THAT THIS WAS EVER A GOOD IDEA the 10-to-12 year old orphan followed the mysterious stranger into the subway.

The stranger took him to a long cavern lined with statues of "The Seven Deadly Enemies of Man" (more on that later). At the end was an old wizard who introduced himself as "SHAZAM!" With a crash of thunder, a display on the wall revealed his name to be an acronym:

Solomon - Wisdom
Hercules - Strength
Atlas - Stamina
Zeus - Power
Achilles - Courage
Mercury - Speed

Shazam proceeded to tell Billy Batson that he knew about his hard life but that since his heart was pure, he would pass on the responsibility for defending the weak and fighting for justice to him. "Speak my name!" he commanded,
Billy did so.

And in a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning, Billy was transformed into the mighty hero...Captain Thunder!

Wait...what?

That's right, his name was Captain Thunder, he was to appear in the first issue of Flash Comics from Fawcett Publications, and an "ashcan" issue was produced to secure copyright and solicit distribution.

But All-American Comics (sister company to Detective) had just come out with their new comic by the same title.

So Fawcett decided to re-title the book Thrill Comics and produced an ashcan. But Pines Publishing was coming out with Thrilling Comics.

So Fawcett decided to go with a title that referenced their very first publication, and came out with Whiz Comics, and produced an ashcan. And in all these ashcans, the hero was named "Captain Thunder."

It made logical sense what with the lightning motif and the thunderous transformation. But someone didn't like it.

In testimony in the lawsuit with National (more on that later), Ralph Daigh said he didn't like that name. Comic book historian Jim Steranko reports that it was considered too "clamorous." So the histories say that artist Pete Costanza came up with the name "Captain Marvelous." It was shortened to Captain Marvel and since the Ashcan of Whiz Comics was considered issue #1, the first issue to hit the stands was #2, cover dated February, 1940.

(There seem to be a lot of people who think that the reason for the name change was that there was "Captain Terry Thunder" character in Jungle Comics #1, cover dated January, 1940, but I doubt this. The earliest reference I have been able to find to this theory is a website from 2012. In all previous histories, it has never been mentioned. Steranko, in particular, wrote his history in the early 1970's based on interviews with the surviving Fawcett staffers, and it was never mentioned.) 

The character was a big hit, and before long it was decided to give him a solo title. The first issue was written and drawn by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in a legendary two-week period with some help from their friends when they took a hotel room and did after-hours work while they were creating Captain America for Timely Comics. The title came to be Captain Marvel Adventures.

In time, Captain Marvel developed a family of superheroes around him. There were the Three Lieutenant Marvels, Captain Marvel, Jr., Mary Marvel, Uncle Marvel, and in Fawcett's Funny Animals, even Hoppy, the Marvel Bunny! (click on the names for more about each of them)

Captain Marvel was even the first comic book superhero in a motion picture! Movie serials had made a comeback recently with the success of Flash Gordon, and Republic Pictures was shopping for a comic book property. They opened discussions with Detective for Superman, but it didn't work out, so they closed the deal with Fawcett for Captain Marvel. The Adventures of Captain Marvel movie serial, starring Tom Tyler as the hero, Frankie Coghlan, Jr. as Billy Batson, and Nigel de Brulier as Shazam, is generally acknowledged as one of the best ever made.

Captain Marvel's comics went on to sell more copies than Superman. Bill Parker wound up in the military during World War II and never came back to comics, but Otto Oscar Binder wound up becoming the main writer for the character and wrote more than half of all the stories of Captain Marvel and those of the other Marvel Family characters. It was he who really solidified the character of the hero and the sense of fun and "whimsy" for which the Marvel Family line of characters were known.

Of course, nobody likes a rival to their success, and the publishers of Superman were no exception. By 1941, Detective Comics, Inc. had shut down at least two Superman imitators with lawsuits. With The Adventures of Captain Marvel nearing release, they went after Captain Marvel. They issued a cease-and-desist letter claiming that the similarities between the two heroes were so great that it constituted copyright infringement, and that Captain Marvel stories were copying Superman stories.  This did not stop Fawcett and Republic from releasing their Captain Marvel works. So then Detective sued Fawcett Publications and Republic Pictures in September 1941. The case finally went to trial in March, 1948.

The arguments included the fact that both heroes had tight costumes, were super-strong, super-fast, and had alter-egos in journalism, and fought against injustice (Clark Kent was a newspaper reporter, and Billy Batson had become a radio reporter). Other similarities included flying and the fact that their arch enemies were bald scientists (Lex Luthor for Superman and Dr. Sivana for Captain Marvel) but in those instances, Captain Marvel came first. Instances were also shown of Captain Marvel doing things that Superman had done previously.

Fawcett countered by pointing out the differences between the two characters (the color of the costume, the age of the alter ego, and the fact that while Superman was a visitor from another planet, Captain Marvel was a product of magic, for instance, and that there was no "Lois Lane" romantic angle in Captain Marvel stories and no villain as prevalent in Superman stories as Dr. Sivana was against Captain Marvel). They also showed examples of not only Captain Marvel doing certain things before Superman did them, but heroes of literature and mythology, like Tarzan, Popeye, and Hercules doing things like these before both of them.

Fawcett also pointed out that the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, which distributed the Superman newspaper strip, had failed to print the required copyright notice on a bunch of Superman strips. There were also certain irregularities with the copyrights of the material in certain issues of Superman comics. Therefore, they claimed, the Superman character's copyright had been abandoned, and it did not matter whether or not Captain Marvel or his stories violated it.

McClure Syndicate Superman strips without proper copyright notice

By the time the decision was handed down in 1950, Detective and it's sister company, Superman, Inc., had reorganized to form National Comics Publications, Inc.

The U.S. District Court (93 F. Supp. 349) ruling recognized the similarities and differences between the characters and held that the character was not in violation of National's copyright. It did find that though there were conflicting testimonies by Fawcett employees as to whether there had been orders to copy Superman and Superman stories, the court was satisfied that copying did happen. However, the failure of Detective and McClure to ensure that appropriate copyright notices were affixed to at least 160 newspaper strips did constitute abandonment.

Thus, Fawcett won the case. Of course National appealed.

In 1951, Judge Learned Hand of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals (191 F.2d 594) decided that the inadvertent copyright omission did not constitute abandonment, and though Fawcett was not trying to deceive customers into thinking that Captain Marvel was Superman, copying of stories did happen. Copying of stories is an infringement of copyright. So National won. Now all that was left was to determine damages. Damages were to be determined by finding every instance in which Fawcett's Captain Marvel stories copied National's Superman stories.

This would have required many hours of cataloging over a decade's worth of comic books. By this time, sales of comic books had declined since their WWII peak, particularly in the area of Superheroes (though Captain Marvel was still popular). So Fawcett made the business-wise decision to settle with DC for $400,000 and agree not to publish Captain Marvel ever again. They closed down their comic book division, sold off a few of their properties to Charlton Comics, and their last issue was Marvel Family #89, cover dated January, 1954.

(Some folks say that Fawcett folded, or went bankrupt, or into receivership, or dissolved as a result of the suit. Nothing could be further from the truth. By settling with DC, Fawcett had unloaded a great legal expense and a division that was not nearly as profitable as it had been, even without the lawsuit. They went  on to contnue publishing magazines and expanded into paperbacks and other media, until selling out to CBS Publishing for $50 Million in 1979.)

(It is not true that DC acquired the rights to Captain Marvel as a result of the settlement. I have found no evidence to back that up, and lots that makes no sense if it were true. Find out the surprising person who did say it was true in the next episode!)

NEXT: What happened next! Other Marvels! Other Companies! Other lawsuits! Aliens and androids and...oh my!

SHAZAM! Director Announced! REAL NEWS!

Part two of a three-part post series.

This is not a full-service "clickbait roundup," but in my research I could not avoid finding a few articles and posts about the news and thus are linking them in the body of this post. I hate the Interwebs.

In my previous post, I talked about the apparent news from four days ago of the start date of DC's "Shazam!" movie and how it relates to Marvel's "Captain Marvel" movie. This post is about the announcement the day after that of the director announced for "Shazam!"

Comparisons between the "Shazam!" and "Captain Marvel" movie projects are inevitable on this blog for several reasons. For one thing "Shazam" is the trademark by which DC markets the original superhero named Captain Marvel and his several reboots and reinterpretations under their watch. For another, these movies were announced and are scheduled to be released at about the same time. Finally, of course, this blog is about all those superheroes that have gone by the name of "Captain Marvel."

So now, about a month or so after Marvel announced that Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck will be directing their "Captain Marvel," DC has announced that David F. Sandberg will be directing "Shazam!"

I had never heard of this guy before, but that proves nothing, so after I saw the this news on CinemaBlend , I decided to look up this guy a little bit. IMDB shows that apparently he has directed a bunch of shorts and documentaries and a couple of horror features, has also served as writer, producer, cinematographer, composer, and even actor on a bunch of those projects. Wikipedia describes him as a "freelance animator and maker of documentary and short films" before his breakout film, "Lights Out," which was a short from 2013 that became a feature in 2016. Now he is going to be directing a big superhero movie.

The most notable example of someone with a limited resume being given a big genre project somewhat outside of his previous experience that comes to my mind is David Lynch with his version of Frank Herbert's "Dune." David Lynch is a very deliberate director who had displayed a "quirky" sense of filmmaking, but he had never done a movie with more than a half-dozen people and more that a half-dozen dollars before, and it showed. Though the movie was moody and visually arresting, the battle scenes were awkward, the acting was uneven, the script was confusing (especially after the movie had been edited down by the studio for a shorter running time), and had an ending payoff that was different from the book, with a result that would have made continuation of the series impossible. It really seemed like Lynch's brilliant previous efforts, "Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man," had ill-prepared him for a sprawling, quasi-mystical, stellar-political epic (I personally thought that David Lean would have been a good choice, not just because he had directed a great epic film in a desert but because he understood how to make sprawling, geopolitical epics).

However, I have zero familiarity with Sandberg's work, so I am going to have to spend some time watching his films to pass a preliminary judgement on the wisdom of this decision. He has his own website with a lot of videos, so that seems like a good place to start. Maybe there is something about his visual style, his sense of humor, his understanding of children, his sense of wonder, or some other characteristic that I imagine should be a part of a "Shazam!" movie that makes him ideally suited for the job.

For his part, he has made a few statements in public about this. Heroic Hollywood shared his announcement confirming his assignment. In this announcement, Sandberg said nothing disappointing or even surprising at all:

“I’m very happy to say that is true and it’s really awesome. I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Yeah, just because it’s the ultimate wish fulfillment, you know? Every kid wants to be Superman and here’s the kid who gets the chance to be Superman and, you know, finds out that it could also be a challenge.”

“I definitely plan on doing more horror […] but it’ll be fun to try something that’s a little bit different.”

Apparently, he also chats on Reddit, and ComicBookMovie dutifully reported that he said essentially the same thing all over again.

"To keep it general and not go into script details I'd say the core thing that's appealing to me is the wish fulfillment," said Sandberg. "What kid doesn't want to be Superman? This is a kid that basically gets to become Superman."

...and in searching for more of what he has said on Reddit, I found a San Diego Comic Con interview with him. I am going to have to watch that and comment on it later.

One thing I have noticed, though, is how it still seems uncertain whether the hero is going to be named "Shazam." The CinemaBlend article referenced above says, parenthetically, that "the hero was known as Captain Marvel before the New 52 relaunch." On the DCEU Reddit board, the "Shazam!" movie is illustrated by a picture of the New 52 character.

On the other hand, on IMDB, in a description written by "Hellfreezer," it says "he is the holder of the power of S.H.A.Z.A.M; he is Captain Marvel." In an interview with Kevin Smith for IMDB posted on BleedingCool, when Smith asks if Sandberg if he is doing any comic book movies soon, Sandberg relpied "Shazam." Smith exclaims "Captain Marvel?" and Sandberg answers, "yes." Then, of course, in Den of Geek's article about the Sandberg announcement, Dwayne Johnson is quoted as saying:

"What we decided to do was to create a scenario where Black Adam has his stand-alone movie, and Captain Marvel, Shazam, has his stand-alone movie," he told MTV. "We're building our world that way, and then we can come together at some point."

Wait, what? Is there more real news? Stay tuned...

NEXT: The Rock lays down the news!

If you want to see David F. Sandberg's previous work...

RUMOR ALERT! Post on Reddit, Dwayne Johnson Interview Lead to Inferences that "Shazam!" Movie is Cancelled, Black Adam will be in "Man of Steel 2," More.

Sometimes setting a Google Alert pays off.

It seems to have started with a post on Reddit, one that was denied on Twitter, but built upon by an interview on MTV and now the future of the Shazam! hero and related characters in the movies appears to be some thing like this:

Black Adam, played by Dwayne Johnson, is definitely going to appear in movies.

Black Adam will probably have his own stand-alone movie.

Black Adam might face Superman in a movie.

Black Adam might face Superman in "Man of Steel 2."

The "Shazam!" movie might be "off the table," but might still happen, depending on how you interpret the anonymous sources and Dwayne Johnson's interviews.

Captain Marvel or Shazam (whichever version of the hero they decide to use) might or might not appear in anything currently scheduled.

Billy Batson might appear as an "Easter Egg" in something.

As a fan of the Big Red Cheese, I have been hoping for not just a Captain Marvel movie, but a GOOD Captain Marvel movie since one was first announced back in 2003. However, from what little I have read of the scripts that have been written, seen what has been done with the character in the comics, and what I have experienced of what happens to superheroes in movies, it is likely that the concept of the character will be used as a jumping-off point rather than the material of the character be adapted into a good movie.

If that is the case, I won't mind if Black Adam gets all the press and screen time. But maybe, just maybe, someone will figure out a way to handle the character as he deserves. Something like the purity of Captain America with the sense of fun of Ant Man and the youthful enthusiasm of the latest Spider-Man. I know those are all Marvel characters, but it would be a breath of fresh air to bring that sort of stuff into the DC Cinematic Universe.

One thing is pretty much certain: If and when he does come to the big screen, Billy Bsatson/Captain Marvel will be a boy who transforms  into a grown-up superhero, but keeps his own mind. That has been the standard interpretation since Roy Thomas wrote "Shazam! A New Beginning" in 1986, and it has stuck. I liked the original concept, that the boy and the hero were two distinct personalities with shared memories, but that is just too confusing for today's audiences.


Here are other websites spreading the news/rumors/clickbait:
MoviePilot
MovieWeb
ScreenRant
Cosmic Book News
Xania News
Rincon-Celebnews

New Video: Lecture on the DC-Fawcett Lawsuit

This was edited together from the Captain Marvel Culture lecture I did at I-Con in March:

The World's Mightiest Lawsuit

Comic books grew in popularity during WWII for several reasons. One reason was that many superheroes battled against the enemies of America during the war. Captain Marvel was no exception. During this period Captain Marvel comics began to outsell everything else, even Superman. At its height, Captain Marvel Adventures was selling nearly 1.3 million copies every two weeks.

In 1941, Detective Comics, the company that owned Superman, sued Fawcett and Republic Pictures, saying that Capitan Marvel was a violation of their copyright. They claimed that because he was super-strong and invulnerable, and did many of the same things Superman did (fought crime, threw cars around, flew, etc), and many Captain Marvel drawings resembled Superman drawings, Captain Marvel was in violation of Superman's copyright. DC had successfully stopped a couple of other characters through threatened or actual lawsuits. Fawcett answered by saying that because a certain series of the Superman newspaper strip had been printed by the McClure Syndicate without the copyright notice, Detective Comics had abandoned their copyright on the character.

After many delays, the case was tried in 1948, by which time Detective Comics, Inc was known as National Comics Publications.. It was decided that although the similarities between Captain Marvel and Superman were great enough to constitute copyright infringement, the lack of proper copyright citation in the McClure Syndicate strips did constitute abandonment. National appealed.

The appeal was heard by Judge Learned Hand, who ruled that there was no expressed intention by the original copyright holder to abandon Superman, and sent the case back down to the original court. Since it had been decided that Captain Marvel was in violation of Superman's copyright, it now had to be decided what the damages would be. The basis for this was to determine how much Captain Marvel material had been copied from Superman material. Fawcett made the case that there was Superman material copied from Captain Marvel material (in those days almost everyone copied from everyone), and this would mitigate the damages owed. So staffers were put to work on both sides poring over Superman and Captain Marvel comics, looking for matching pictures.

At this point in history, comic books were loosing sales, superheroes in particular. Captain Marvel was only doing half the business he had during the war. There were also rumblings of social pressures against comic books, such as Dr. Frederick Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent. With the expense of the court case combined with the declining income from comic books, in 1953 Fawcett made the financially responsible and business-wise decision to settle out of court. They agreed to pay National $400,000 and not to produce Captain Marvel comic books. At the same time they shut down their entire comic book line.

During the next 13 years the name of Captain Marvel was gone from comic books but far from forgotten. He was mentioned in the Broadway musical West Side Story (which came out the same year as The Music Man, which anachronistically mentioned Captain Billy's Whiz Bang). He was mentioned in the Beatles song Bungalow Bill. The word “Shazam” was used regularly by the TV character Gomer Pyle and once by Peter Tork on the TV show The Monkees.

Quick Trivia: Fawcett did produce one other comic book line after the 1953 settlement: Dennis the Menace, 1958-1980

Next: The British Marvel

Captain Marvel Goes Hollywood

Movie serials had been in decline through the late 1920's and the early '30's as long-form motion pictures and sound came to dominate the industry. Then in 1936, Universal Studios brought forth Flash Gordon, a serial adapted from the newspaper comic strip drawn by Alex Raymond, starring Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe and the stunningly gorgeous Jean Rogers. It had three times the budget of the typical serial of the day, and its action and production values blew audiences away.

The success of this serial led the studios to make more serials based on comic strips. Ultimately, they started to turn to comic book superheroes. Republic Pictures at first tried to make a Superman serial but could not come to an agreement with the company that owned him, So they turned to Fawcett, and Captain Marvel. Thus, in 1941, did Captain Marvel become the first comic book superhero in any motion picture.

The Adventures of Captain Marvel is generally acknowledged to be one of the best serials ever made, and its cast had an amazing set of pedigrees. Tom Tyler (Captain Marvel) was a champion weightlifter and a member of the US Olympic team in 1928. He appeared in many westerns as well as Gone With the Wind. Frankie Coghlan Jr. (Billy Batson) played boys and teenagers for most of his career, and ultimately wound up in an episode of the Shazam! TV series. Louise Currie (Betty Wallace) appeared in movies with such stars as Bela Lugosi, Orson Welles, Gene Autry, and W.C. Fields. William “Whitey” Benedict (Whitey Murphy) was a Dead End Kid and a Bowery Boy. Nigel deBrulier (Shazam) had played Cardinal Richelieu in five different movies, was in most of the big silent epics, and had been in a silent film version of Oscar Wilde's Salome that was featured in the documentary Before Stonewall (this was not the only connection to the gay community that the name of Capitan Marvel would have). Gerald Mohr, who played the voice of The Scorpion, the villain of the story, in 1967 went on to play the voice of Green Lantern/Hal Jordan in "The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure,” and Mister Fantastic in “The Fantastic Four.”

When Superman was finally made into a serial by Columbia pictures starring Kirk Allyn in 1948, the studio got in a dig at Captain Marvel. They used a lot of stock costumes to populate the planet Krypton, the home planet of Superman's father, Jor-El. One of those costumes, worn by Jor-El's adversary on the Science Council, was the costume Tom Tyler wore in The Adventures of Captain Marvel.

Quick trivia: In the days of black-and-white film, various shades of gray were sometimes used to simulate color on screen. The costume Tom Tyler wore as Captain Marvel was actually gray, but “looked” like red on screen.

Next: The World's Mightiest Lawsuit

Early Captain Marvel

Immediately Captain Marvel and Whiz Comics became a success. It is not hard to see the attraction Captain Marvel may have had to young boys. He was, in his alternate identity, a young boy. This boy was a resourceful, adventurous kid, who could handle himself in tough situations, but when faced with a challenge that was greater than a normal man could handle, he could change into a grown man, a mighty hero, by simply saying a magic word. As more than one historian has commented, this was total wish fulfillment. It may have been more difficult for young boys to identify with a grown man who was an alien from outer space.

Further, while the early adventures of Superman were tales of social justice, and laced with the sexual tension of the Superman/Lois Lane/Clark Kent triangle, the adventures of Captain Marvel had it's heroes (Billy Batson and the Captain) battling absurd, almost comedic plots to conquer the world, with little or none of the embarrassing awkwardness of a Clark Kent/Lois Lane exchange. In fact aside from Captain Marvel being particularly shy around women, the whole romance angle was conspicuously absent.

Captain Marvel's primary adversary was Dr. Sivana, a bald scientist who was struggling to rule the world and ultimately gain the crown he believed he deserved, that of the “Rightful Ruler of the Universe.” His look was inspired by C.C. Beck's childhood pharmacist. This was one of the most tenacious and entertaining villains in history.

Shortly after Captain Marvel first appeared, the US entered WWII. Bill Parker went into the service, and never returned to comics. After a while Otto Oscar Binder, an already successful writer of science fiction famous for, among other things, the original “I, Robot” stories, got a job writing for Fawcett's comics. He got the Captain Marvel job and ultimately wrote more than half the Captain Marvel and related character stories published by Fawcett. His writing style established the sense of “whimsy” that so many historians have described Captain Marvel's stories to have. After the end of Fawcett Comics, he went on to write for DC, adding a similar sense of humor to many Superman-related stories, and creating characters like Supergirl.

Next: The Blue Boy

Pre History: The Captain and the Major

This is the first in a series of twice-weekly posting I will be making to this blog, synopsizing the history of the many Captain Marvels as I see it. This is the groundwork for the forthcoming book "Captain Marvel Culture." For more details, go to http://www.captainmarvelculture.com

Magazines, regular periodical publications containing brief, self-contained articles, had been around since before the American Revolution. The advent of regular passenger train service in the 19th century gave the magazine industry a big boost as passengers sought reading material that was portable, of moderate length, and disposable. By the first half of the 20th century, one genre of magazine that had developed a particularly strong following was the pulps. Pulps were magazines that were generally printed on cheap paper and contained short stories , mostly of adventures that appealed to men and adolescents.

Comics, cartoons, and sequential art, illustrations that told stories, had been around, in various forms, since Ug the Caveman took a burnt stick to the cave wall. Combining these illustrations and sequential images with words has been done almost as long as there have been alphabets. Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Bayeux Tapestry, and 18th century broadside cartoons all are examples of this. At the end of the 19th century, comedic comic strips became a regular feature of newspapers. In the early 20th century various types of collections of comic strips, sometimes called “comic books” had been released. In the mid 1930's reprints of newspaper strips had found success as premium giveaways, until in 1934 a publisher named Max C. Gaines got the idea of putting out a collection of newspaper strip reprints with a 10-cent price tag and left them on a few newsstands. They sold out over the weekend. For a couple of years several publishers, many of whom had been in the pulp business, began regular publication of newspaper reprints. One new publisher, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a colorful character who had a successful career writing adventure stories in the pulps, used his connections to put together the first comic book of all-original material with advertisements, Detective Comics #1.

While this was happening, two young Jewish science-fiction fans, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, were desperately trying to make a splash in the comic strip industry with their science-fiction creation, Superman. After several years of rejections and failures, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's company gave them a break, making their character the lead feature in a new comic book, Action Comics in 1938. Thus was the first comic book superhero brought into the world, and the comic book industry never looked back.

The popularity of Superman grew faster than anything else in the publishing industry. It opened the floodgates to a myriad of masked adventurers and imitation superheroes.

Meanwhile, back in the magazine industry, Fawcett Publications took notice. Fawcett was company founded by Captain Wilford H. “Billy” Fawcett. He had fought in the trenches of WWI, and when he returned home, began a pamphlet of jokes and patriotic writings which he distributed to veteran's hospitals. The pamphlet proved to be a success on newsstands and soon became a popular magazine for the flaming youth of the Roaring '20's. A congenial networker and tireless businessman, “Captain Billy” parlayed the success of this magazine, “Captain Billy's Whiz Bang,” into a publishing empire, with titles in almost every magazine genre imaginable. A family man, he brought his children up in the businesses. One of his sons, Roscoe K. Fawcett, noticed the sales of comic books and thought that Fawcett Publications should enter that arena as well.

Roscoe Fawcett tapped art director Al Allard and editorial director Ralph Daigh to head the project. Citing surveys that said that the biggest market for comic books was 10 to 12 year old boys, he said "give me a Superman, only have his other identity be a 10- to 12-year-old-boy rather than a grown man"