Shazam Family Archives!

Our book today is the 2006 DC Archive Edition featuring “The Shazam Family” but overwhelmingly devoted to the exploits of “The World’s Mightiest Boy,” Captain Marvel Junior. The character is – as you might guess – a spin-off of Fawcett Comics’ best-selling flagship super-hero, Captain Marvel, and this Archive Edition reprints his first ten appearances in Master Comics in 1941and his own title, plus a mini-masterpiece of an Introduction by the world’s authority on all things Captain Marvel, P. C. Hamerlinck.

An Archive Edition like this one really serves to underscore an observation I’ve been making for years: Captain Marvel Junior might just be the strangest superhero of them all. He starts out life as teenager Freddy Freeman, who’s crippled by the villainous Captain Nazi (during the same attack, the Captain kills Freddy’s grandfather) and saved from death only by the intervention of Captain Marvel, who manages an arrangement whereby when young Freddy says his name – “Captain Marvel!” – he gains a portion of Captain Marvel’s powers and transforms into a dream version of himself: beautiful, muscular, not crippled, and sporting a skin-tight blue costume and a cape. Captain Marvel Junior has all of Captain Marvel’s powers: he can fly, he’s super-strong, he’s invulnerable to harm. But even from the first, despite being usually cheery, he seemed more serious than Captain Marvel, more mood-driven and intense – more of a teenage boy, that is. He can become deeply affected by the things that happen to him. He can cry tears of outrage. He can act out of anger. He was an edgy Marvel teen hero long before there were any at Marvel.

He gets his powers directly from his hero – he’s the ultimate fanboy. He’s crippled – and orphaned – directly by the guy who’ll go on to be his arch-enemy (which might not sound like much in comic book terms, but name me another hero for whom it’s true). He’s the only superhero who can’t say his own name in public, since before he got to the “Junior” part, the “Captain Marvel” part would abruptly transform him back into Freddy Freeman. And what about Freddy Freeman? The kid is virtually penniless, lives in a shack, and crutches around with a permanent limp – he’s the single worst secret identity in the history of secret identities. In Captain Marvel Junior’s origin story, Captain Marvel forbids him from simply staying in his super-powered form permanently – says Freddy needs to be Freddy so his body can heal properly. But his leg never does heal properly – it’s natural to think that at some very early point, he told the good Captain to go suck an egg and never turned back into luckless, sad-sack Freddy Freeman again.

These adventures – drawn in a darkly and vivid style by Mac Raboy – must have seemed a world away from anything Captain Marvel fans were expecting. Gone are the bright sunny colors of the parent hero – it’s jarring how much of Captain Marvel Junior’s world is shrouded in the shadows of run-down tenements and alley-ways. And the darkness extends to the stories as well: when Captain Nazi (who is, despite everything, an oddly charismatic monster – as fine a recurring super-villain as the 1940s turned up) hatches a fiendish plan to kill Allied scientists or poison American soldiers, good people actually die, and nothing Captain Marvel Junior can do brings them back again.

Reading these old issues really made me wish there were a DC Archive Edition that reprinted more of Captain Marvel Junior – say, the first ten adventures he had once robust sales allowed him to leave Master Comics and get his own title. As far as I can tell, no such volume was ever made – but I can dream.