PoS #47: The End of a Happy Marvel Family

[jaybee3]

The Catwoman #82 post reminded me of the request by thokstar for final issues from the January Blackest Night one-shots. This is my first post so correct me at will. It may not be dial-up friendly - 6 pages out of 22. ;)  
Power of Shazam #47 art and script by Jerry Ordway

 

 

Basically, the plot is that Freddy and Mary have had their powers temporarily stolen by a lame villain and Billy gets knocked out into the hospital. At the same time Black Adam is trying to be a “hero” in Fawcett which unnerves Freddy and Mary to no end because he has never paid for the crimes of Theo Adam (the murder of the Batsons). The JLA dogs BA’s steps because they pledge to protect the Batsons against him. Black Adam says that he is innocent and hands himself over to the courts - who let him go because they say he is a different person than Theo Adam. Black Adam then teams with Sivana to free his lover Blaze (Shazam’s evil daughter) who he thinks has been wrongly imprisoned in the Rock of Eternity. Billy is pissed and with the help of a Mother Box (and the Wizard) goes after BA. Issue #47 opens with BA learning he’s been tricked into doing this by a monster called The Three Faces of Evil.

 

Cap, the Wizard, and Shazam beat the monster, as well as foiling Satanus (Shazam’s evil son who had been behind it all). Shazam then uses the Mother Box to send BA and Cap to a neutral battlefield to fight/discuss their differences. Cap and BA duke it out and get sucked into a River of the Dead. Cap is eventually saved by Black Adam (still trying to prove he’s not Theo Adam even if its Theo’s body) but they continue to fight to the death because the Wizard told them only one of them was going to come out of there (“No hard feelings” BA tells Cap).


Cap is not buying and tells BA that he will not kill since becoming a murderer like BA would dishonor his parents. He then transforms into powerless Billy.

Naturally BA can’t kill Billy in cold blood and then both are seemingly attacked by the Cerebus of Hades (multi-headed dog) which turns out to be really be the Wizard - because this whole fight has been another of his tests/mind games.

Shazam uses the Mother Box to send BA wherever he wants to go and then re-powers Freddy and Mary and re-pledges himself to guide his chosen Champions.

And now the final page of the series and you can really feel that it’s a goodbye from Jerry Ordway who had written the whole series. It’s also really the last time we ever see the “happy” Marvels again for almost a decade.

After this I think we all know what happened. DC (by all accounts Dan Didio himself wanted this direction) decided that the only way to “fix” the Marvels was to destroy everything they stood for - to make them dark, edgy, even murderous. The Wizard died in Day of Vengeance and Billy took over the role. Black Adam found a family in 52 and became a true anti-hero and then was in the space of one issue turned into an insane mass murderer of an entire country, single-handily killing millions of men, women and children. Mary was sent into a coma (as near to fridging as you can get) to provide angst for Freddy in Trials of Shazam where Winnick turned the star of the series (Billy) into a gray haired “Marvel” who did nothing but watch TV on the Rock and turned the sidekick (Freddy) into the new red-suited “Shazam” or “Captain Marvel” (even DC doesn’t know what to call him -while the solicits for #48 say Cap, Didio says Shazam) with powers that have nothing to do with the Wizard at all. And then for some bizarre reason the sweetest teenager in the DCU was turned into a nasty power-hungry, violent and idiotic “Black Mary” (basically turning the character into a one-note joke) and then in Final Crisis had her possessed by DeSaad and kill someone (for the first time - she didn’t even do that in Countdown!) only so Supergirl could beat her down like a drum. Then because that wasn’t enough they had her turn bad (for the 3rd time!) in JSA so she could corrupt Billy with Black Adam’s power (oh yeah, Isis is evil now too) so the Wizard could come back to life and like a jerk take their powers away and tell them to get lost. None of this matches the tone of Ordway's Power of Shazam which is as different in tone as can be. For a company that seems to be recalling everything from the Silver Age from Barry Allen to the classic Doom Patrol, in the case of the Marvels it seems they’ve used as a template the worst excesses of the 90’s for stories. I’m not expecting much from the Blackest Night one-shot but I’ll hope for the best.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[theanswer]

I kind of agree with the people at DC. The characters were getting old in their civilian forms and if they aged any further the cuteness was going to get creepy. I mean who wants to read about an adult Billy Batson who turns into a super strong version of himself? Not much of a transformation after that. :/

I think a new Marvel family with a new bright faced boy adventurer is needed.

[tsunamiwombat]

I think the idea of a littleboy turning into a super strong adult is even creepier. A little boy in a mans body, complete with hormones and the ability to destroy a city without any of the social or mental self control built up by years of socialization inferred by the process of becoming an adult.

OH YAH, THAT CAN'T GO BADLY.

[theanswer]

But that's what Billy was and that's kind of prevented by his powers in the first place. The whole wisdom of Solomon thing.

[jaybee3]

And the whole point of Billy was that of all the beings who have lived since Shazam put down Black Adam, it was Billy who the Wizard chose to be his Champion - because he had the purest and noblest heart (he was the only DC hero that Neron couldn't corrupt) and the greatest inner moral integrity. Add the Wisdom of Solomon to that when he's Captain Marvel and you have a person with just as much willpower and force of will as WW or Superman.

[theanswer]

But that's because Billy was a child, which he no longer is.

[jaybee3]

Yes on that I agree. Aging the Marvels dilutes the mythos. The whole idea is that of a little kid who can transform himself into the "Mightiest Mortal on Earth" and a full grown adult with just one magic word. The ultimate in wish fufillment - that's why Captain Marvel outsold Superman in the 1940s when most of the readers WERE little kids.

The most successful post-Crisis story starring Captain Marvel - Kingdom Come doesn't count - is Jeff Smith's Monster Society of Evil where Billy and Mary are visibly very small and very young (and I'm sure when Morrison gets around to writing the Earth-5 issue of Muliversity, the Batson will be aged back several years). It doesn't help that with things like OYL and Winnick's Trials of Shazam (where Freddy is now in college) it seems DC WANTS to age their teen characters quickly. And with the Marvels that doesn't work. A 17-year old Billy Batson transforming into a 20-something Captain Marvel doesn't exactly change much (except he's bulked up and in a costume) and Mary Marvel loses much when Mary Bromfield is 17 and already looks like her power-up self instead of the 13 year old little girl she used to be in PoS or even in the early Fawcett stories. With teenagers a few years make a LOT of difference.

That said at this point it would be even more disastrous to start over with new characters. Billy Batson IS Captain Marvel. It's been that way for almost 70 years now. DC should just make lemonade out of lemons and get some writers who actually like the Marvels to write them.

[theanswer]

Well they have the whole Fawcett style Captain Marvel mythos in it's own separate universe now, so if fans wanted Billy back they could just make a series about that Captain Marvel while the new Captain Marvel in the regular DCU continues on.

And it's not about getting different writers. It's just the fact of the matter is they're too old. Billy was a hormonal teenager who turned into the pure Captain Marvel, which almost lead to accusations of statutory rape because of his relationship with Stargirl. That's not exactly a CM style story, but it is a logical one considering his age and it stands to reason that his stories would become more mature as he aged further because if they didn't then the cuteness would just make Captain Marvel a creep.

And it wouldn't be disastrous. They've got thousands of Green Lanterns, four people with the name Flash, three Starfires at one point, and enough Batgirls, Robins, and others to populate Mars. They can get away with one more Captain Marvel.

[theaesthete]

I take your point about the creepiness. . . lord knows that at age 12, if given the power to turn into a super-strong manly adult, I would never have turned back. . . and I would have been a creep of the first order!

But to be fair, super-Wisdom is one of the powers Billy gets when he turns into Captain Marvel, so it's not as bad as all that.

[tsunamiwombat]

Solomon was a bronze age King who lived in a not so nice time, his 'wisdom' might be considered less then kosher (no pun intended) by modern sentiments... just look at the real actions of King David, one of the most lauded men of my own religeon, he slaughtered THOUSANDS of civilians.

[jlbarnett]

he's got the WISDOM of Solomon, not the beliefs or morals or anything like that. The Wisdom of Solomon basically function by allowing him the intelligence to cut through a problem and solve it.

[skjam]

That (never turning back) was done with Kid Marvelman in the Marvelman/Miracleman series and the consequences were gruesome enough that that particular story never needs to be done again.