Hope I Die Before I Get Old
I'm trying to decide whether to buy Day of Vengeance, the DC big-event miniseries which sounds like a Klingon holiday. Part of the problem is that DoV is written by Bill Willingham, of whom I am a little wary after the Batman crossover "War Games." Another part is that I'm out of town and away from my friendly neighborhood comics shop, so I won't be able to buy DoV for a while. A bigger part is that I don't really get into DC's magic-themed characters, which DoV intends to spotlight.
However, one big factor in DoV's favor is its spotlight on Captain Marvel. Lately I've been thinking that Cap really doesn't fit into the modern super-soap-opera paradigm. While Cap is one of the oldest superheroes (born in Whiz Comics #2, February 1940), neither his basic setup nor his accumulated mythology really lend themselves to serious fanboy scrutiny. In the early '80s, when Alan Moore was reworking the British Cap-clone Marvelman (known in the U.S. as "Miracleman"), he "updated" Marvelman's similarly fanciful adventures by claiming they were essentially the dreams of sedated superbeings.
Conceived and nurtured in an atmosphere so disdainful of reality it made the Superman comics of the '50s and '60s look like Tom Clancy novels, Cap and his extended Marvel Family were more about fun than continuity. When DC incorporated Cap and the other former Fawcett characters into its multiverse in the '70s, their world was simply dubbed Earth-S and continued pretty much intact, as unique in its way as the cartoon-populated Earth-C.
However, when Earth-S was compressed into the single timeline which survived Crisis on Infinite Earths, it didn't leave much room for hangers-on like the three Lieutenant Marvels, to say nothing of Mr. Tawky Tawny (the talking tiger) or Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. For several years even Cap's closest "relatives," Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr., were off-limits. Writers Roy and Dann Thomas and artist Tom Mandrake restarted Cap in Shazam! The New Beginning, a grim 1986 miniseries, but that didn't lead to much. Cap found more favorable treatment as a member of the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis Justice League, and wandered in and out of various books for the next several years. Finally, Jerry Ordway's 1993 graphic novel The Power Of Shazam! superseded the Thomases' treatment, and Ordway ended up writing the ongoing series which followed. Although Ordway tried mightily to recapture the same sense of good clean fun which characterized the pre-Crisis Cap, he still had to contend with the serious realities (so to speak) of life on DC-Earth -- which by and large frowned on the goofy.
The other major problem Cap faces is his age; or more specifically, his teenage alter ego's. While the adult Captain Marvel is practically immortal (as seen in DC One Million, for instance), Billy Batson is not. Different writers have handled this issue differently. DC's first Cap story (from its early-'70s revival) explained that Billy and company had been trapped in suspended animation for a couple of decades. However, an adult Billy is almost certainly bad news. In Kingdom Come, Mark Waid and Alex Ross allowed Billy to age, at a horrible cost. Alan Moore postulated that while a Marvelman was active, his human alter ego did not age, and vice versa; again leading to trouble. (In his unpublished crossover proposal Twilight of the Superheroes, Moore didn't apply the same logic to Cap, instead giving the adult Billy Batson a much creepier fate which was exponentially more unsettling.) Lately DC seems to be avoiding the issue by placing Billy in the same kind of perpetual high school zone as its other teenaged heroes.
Still, unlike his peers, Billy is practically forbidden from growing up. Captain Marvel is at his heart a child's vision of an adult superhero, and an adult Billy Batson would have about as much relevance to the character's unique place in comics as an adult Charlie Brown. Indeed, as long as Cap's world was separated clearly from the rest of the DC multiverse, it could remain an oasis of harmless adventure, where the villains all knew Cap's secret identity and still managed to get beaten on a regular basis. It could be a kind of Brigadoon where time slows to a crawl to preserve the idyllic status quo. Modern superhero comics are filled to bursting with serious, realistic explorations of the nature and problems of costumed vigilantes. The genre could do worse than to allow one of its standardbearers to return to the environment into which he fits best.
Therefore, for the good of the character, I hope DC finds some happy corner of its universe for Billy and his adult heroic identity -- if not by the end of Day of Vengeance, then perhaps in Infinite Crisis. Adulthood brings a certain inevitable loss of innocence, but when one's entire worldview is built around innocence, one should hold onto it as long as possible.
However, one big factor in DoV's favor is its spotlight on Captain Marvel. Lately I've been thinking that Cap really doesn't fit into the modern super-soap-opera paradigm. While Cap is one of the oldest superheroes (born in Whiz Comics #2, February 1940), neither his basic setup nor his accumulated mythology really lend themselves to serious fanboy scrutiny. In the early '80s, when Alan Moore was reworking the British Cap-clone Marvelman (known in the U.S. as "Miracleman"), he "updated" Marvelman's similarly fanciful adventures by claiming they were essentially the dreams of sedated superbeings.
Conceived and nurtured in an atmosphere so disdainful of reality it made the Superman comics of the '50s and '60s look like Tom Clancy novels, Cap and his extended Marvel Family were more about fun than continuity. When DC incorporated Cap and the other former Fawcett characters into its multiverse in the '70s, their world was simply dubbed Earth-S and continued pretty much intact, as unique in its way as the cartoon-populated Earth-C.
However, when Earth-S was compressed into the single timeline which survived Crisis on Infinite Earths, it didn't leave much room for hangers-on like the three Lieutenant Marvels, to say nothing of Mr. Tawky Tawny (the talking tiger) or Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. For several years even Cap's closest "relatives," Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr., were off-limits. Writers Roy and Dann Thomas and artist Tom Mandrake restarted Cap in Shazam! The New Beginning, a grim 1986 miniseries, but that didn't lead to much. Cap found more favorable treatment as a member of the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis Justice League, and wandered in and out of various books for the next several years. Finally, Jerry Ordway's 1993 graphic novel The Power Of Shazam! superseded the Thomases' treatment, and Ordway ended up writing the ongoing series which followed. Although Ordway tried mightily to recapture the same sense of good clean fun which characterized the pre-Crisis Cap, he still had to contend with the serious realities (so to speak) of life on DC-Earth -- which by and large frowned on the goofy.
The other major problem Cap faces is his age; or more specifically, his teenage alter ego's. While the adult Captain Marvel is practically immortal (as seen in DC One Million, for instance), Billy Batson is not. Different writers have handled this issue differently. DC's first Cap story (from its early-'70s revival) explained that Billy and company had been trapped in suspended animation for a couple of decades. However, an adult Billy is almost certainly bad news. In Kingdom Come, Mark Waid and Alex Ross allowed Billy to age, at a horrible cost. Alan Moore postulated that while a Marvelman was active, his human alter ego did not age, and vice versa; again leading to trouble. (In his unpublished crossover proposal Twilight of the Superheroes, Moore didn't apply the same logic to Cap, instead giving the adult Billy Batson a much creepier fate which was exponentially more unsettling.) Lately DC seems to be avoiding the issue by placing Billy in the same kind of perpetual high school zone as its other teenaged heroes.
Still, unlike his peers, Billy is practically forbidden from growing up. Captain Marvel is at his heart a child's vision of an adult superhero, and an adult Billy Batson would have about as much relevance to the character's unique place in comics as an adult Charlie Brown. Indeed, as long as Cap's world was separated clearly from the rest of the DC multiverse, it could remain an oasis of harmless adventure, where the villains all knew Cap's secret identity and still managed to get beaten on a regular basis. It could be a kind of Brigadoon where time slows to a crawl to preserve the idyllic status quo. Modern superhero comics are filled to bursting with serious, realistic explorations of the nature and problems of costumed vigilantes. The genre could do worse than to allow one of its standardbearers to return to the environment into which he fits best.
Therefore, for the good of the character, I hope DC finds some happy corner of its universe for Billy and his adult heroic identity -- if not by the end of Day of Vengeance, then perhaps in Infinite Crisis. Adulthood brings a certain inevitable loss of innocence, but when one's entire worldview is built around innocence, one should hold onto it as long as possible.
posted by Tom Bondurant @ 4:17 PM
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