History time!: Captain Marvel, or, Comics Does A Thing
Back when Superman was first published in the ’30s, comics were still trying to figure out what the fuck they were going to be. To give you some idea, the guys publishing Superman (Detective Comics Inc.*) got blindsided by the favorable public response to Superman and overwhelmed by newsstand requests for shit with just Superman in it.
They were pretty much just in the habit of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck, and you could pick up a comic and get like Superman, a cowboy story, some Flash Gordon bullshit that made no sense, a Sherlock Holmes rip-off, and then something that may or may not have been an ad, nobody was really sure anymore. Readers would come back to the newsstands asking for shit like whatever, the dealers would tell the publishers what was hot, and then they’d tweak their content. Superman was hot enough that, within a few months, everybody who was doing comics wanted their own knock-off.
Fawcett Comics decided that their Superman knock-off should be a homeless prepubescent transformed into a veritable god amongst men by an irresponsible wizard. No, really. In their defense, it was the fucking ’30s. You could pull some shit back then and not really have anyone think too hard about it. Billy Batson, impoverished orphan, could transform himself into Captain Marvel by saying the word “Shazam” and summon the wizard’s ghost by lighting a lamp. Billy Batson was given a twin sister (who turned into Mary Marvel) in short order, with other familial characters being added later. Popularity-wise, comics depicting the adventures of Captain Marvel & Crew eventually blew the doors off the original on which he was based, in no small part because rather than having a sidekick for reader-identification, they played directly into young readers’ power fantasies.
Which is about when DC Detective Comics Inc Some Fucking Dudes I Don’t Even Know Anymore National Comics decided to start cease-and-desisting the everloving shit out of everybody who had a super-strong dude who punched people on the moon wearing tights. They had a couple of publishers pretty much dead to rights and a couple of other publishers on iffy-at-best grounds, and most everybody just switched to a slightly different Hitler-punching moon-guy rather than fight it. When they went after Fawcett over Captain Marvel, though, it was a big enough cash cow that Fawcett threw down.
Seven fucking years later, the judge found that Fawcett’s Captain Marvel was indeed an actionable rip-off of Superman, which is pretty bullshit, but that it didn’t matter because National Comics had somehow fucking failed to properly copyright Superman, which is just like, seriously? (I urge you to keep that one in mind the next time you’re tempted to think of Batwoman’s Canceled Wedding or whatever the fuck is going on with the New 52 as the dumbest thing DC’s ever pulled.) National’s appeal did eventually see the “you forgot to file the fucking paperwork, dumbasses” part of the decision overturned, after which Fawcett pretty much gave the fuck up, because this had been going on forever.
In 1952, Captain Marvel and Company were mothballed, and Fawcett shut down and sold off its salvageable properties, which were either tweaked to disappear “Marvel” or reprinted abroad, where the Second Circuit’s tyrannical reign held no sway**.
Fast forward to the halcyon days of the 1960s, when Marvel Comics started printing things that people actually wanted to read. They came up with their own Captain Marvel, because Captain Obvious was I guess a little too obvious, and copyrighted the name and the character. Since Fawcett was off the map, and their copyright had been largely borked beyond all recognition anyway, Marvel had roughly zero problems doing this.
That Captain Marvel started life as an alien soldier called Captain Mar-Vell and wound up being an epic “You fucking did it again, didn’t you?” moment in history when, five years later, DC decided to license all the old Fawcett properties and didn’t bother to make sure that the one they really, really wanted was still fucking usable first.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics having actually gotten their shit together in something approaching a reasonable fashion, DC had to redub the original wizard-urchin Captain Marvel “Shazam,” after his transformation phrase/the name of the ridiculous knob who decided to turn a child into magic-Superman. Did I mention that? Yeah. “Shazam” is both a magic acronym and the sorcerer’s name.***
So Captain Marvel-the-Magic-Manchild can’t really be called that in promotional material, thanks to Marvel-the-Company alternately squatting on the rights and laughing at DC and actually using the name for a revolving slate of various heroes. (Currently filling the slot is Carol Danvers, previously known as Ms. Marvel, who got her powers from alien hand-waving and being a badass.) I mean, I’d think a little bit more poorly of them if DC hadn’t been such incompetent cockmongers about this from start to finish, but there you go.
Bonus round: “Marvelman” was created as a Captain Marvel knock-off by the British reprint company that Fawcett licensed reprint rights to before they went under as an alternative to folding themselves once they ran out of Captain Marvels to reprint. Because they actually did go out of business before Marvel Comics started up with their Captain Marvel, when the people who got the Marvelman rights wanted to go back to using “Marvelman” over a decade later, they had to turn their knock-off of a knock-off into yet another knock-off called Miracleman. This is why not even Alan Moore knows what the fuck Alan Moore was doing in the ’80s.
*Started life as like a division of National Allied Publications. Then National Allied Publications went bankrupt but Detective Comics Inc. didn’t, at which point in time Detective Comics Inc. purchased National Allied Publications and turned into National Comics because fuck everything.
**Or, more accurately, where it wasn’t fucking worth suing anybody over cheapie black-and-white reprints.
***It was considered socially acceptable to be a lot drunker at work back then.
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