Black Adam's New 52 Origin

[lordultimus]

Comments

[silverhammerman]

What really strikes me about this is that it's utterly symptomatic of the way that DC has spent actual decades unable to figure out that Captain Marvel is a children's character (to a greater extent than most superheroes) and ought to be written as such.

Additionally this really doesn't do much beyond add a layer of convolution to Black Adam's origin: Instead of simply being a proto-Captain Marvel who went bad, he's all bound up in the concept of the Marvel Family, and that instant conceptual hook gets diluted. Not to mention that taking away the idea that the Wizard straight up made a mistake in choosing his original champion is a small thing that nonetheless removes nuance and makes the Wizard even more two dimensional.

And since this reminds me, how the hell did we come out of Convergence without that Jeff Parker/Doc Shaner Shazam being made into an ongoing?

[janegray]

I'm confused. So, what, Adam killed his nephew? Just like that? It's really difficult for me to believe that he'd just off the only family he has left, his sister's child whom he went to great lengths to find and rescue, without evn trying to just defeat him without killing him first.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

Since I haven't read this, I'm just guessing, but from what was posted, I thought that if he had his hand over the boy's head, both lightning bolts would have hit him. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong, though.

[beardedjellybean]

It's not outright shown that Adam kills him, he just mentions Aman's "sacrifice" later so its up for debate.

And they have predominatly different viewpoints, with Adam fuelled by vengeance, despises those who enslave others and he does tend to kill his way through his problems (which works well in his time, not always the best in the modern day).

[jaybee3]

That is what is suggested. It's weird. It's Geoff Johns in JSA who went to such pains to make Adam a semi-sympathetic anti-hero and it was the same Geoff Johns who gave him a family (Isis and Osiris, who were created just to be killed in 52) and it was the same Geoff Johns who turned Adam into a neigh-unstoppable genocidal killer and it was the same Geoff Johns who gave us this "new" origin for BA (which is actually a retcon of Johns' own previous origin) - which yeah it makes sense if you take idealistic and hopeful Aman as a proto-Billy Batson, except Geoff Johns gave us Billy BRATson in the DCnU because he said readers (i.e. males 18-40, certainly not little kids) couldn't relate to an orphan who is sunny and optimistic.

Back in the day during when Black Adam was all over the place and Billy/Cap and Mary/Freddy were MIA, I remember a lot of people saying that as for as DC was concerned Black Adam was now the face of the Shazam franchise. And when you see the kind of stuff DC puts out that kind of thinking makes a lot of sense.

[janegray]

I get that, but... Predominantly different viewpoints just doesn't work for me as a *realistic* motive to murder your sister's child whom you have gone to great lengths to save. At least not as a first move, without even trying to defeat him non-lethally first.

I mean, just off the top of my head, Talia (before they turned her into a total villain) and Ra's al Ghul also had completely different goals at times and even went so far as to openly fight each other, but Ra's always did everything he could to beat her without killing her. Same with Deathstroke and Cassandra. Mystique and Rogue. Magneto and Xavier. Even Loki was extremely reluctant to kill Odin, usually leaving it as a last resort.

I could buy that eventually, after trying at length and continuously failing to get his nephew to either support him or at least not getting in his way, Adam might snap and kill the kid. But like 5 minutes after getting rescued by the kid, from a wound Adam got because he fought so hard to save the kid, when said kid is the only family he has left and is hugging Adam while telling him how much he loves him and begging him not to resent him?

No. I hope it's just a red herring, because if Adam really did murder him that's bad writing.

[long_silence]

So did they ever follow up on who the other members of that council were and what happened to them and their magic in modern times?

[beardedjellybean]

Hate makes people do extreme things, but you do make some excellent points and I don't know at the end of the day. Like I said, it's not implicitly shown that Adam actually kills him so it's up for debate.

[beardedjellybean]

By modern times it appears that the rest of the council has died and so has their magic, the Wizard is the only one left and he bestows what's remains of his power to Billy.

[jaybee3]

The Convergence Shazam (with Shaner's art) was the absolute best thing to come out of Convergence. You can see Parker and Shaner REALLY loved the characters, the mythology and got their voices down.

Its a far cry from the writers DC usually hands the Marvel Family. Eric Wallace, who write Osiris in Deathstroke's Outsiders (one of the worst ongoings DC has ever put out) and then was assigned a "Power of Shazam" one-shot tie-in to Blackest Night remarked that he saw Billy and Mary as "tragic figures. That, in turn, makes them irresistible to write." [http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=29115]. I'm sure Wallace is a nice guy and a talented writer, but thats a bizarre way of approaching the Marvel Family. In Countdown, the writers obviously loathed Mary (and knew next to nothing about her history i.e. no parents ever mentioned) and Judd Winick seemed more interested in creating his own mythology (and getting rid of the one that lasted 60 years) and turning Freddy into a clone of Billy/Cap except with a mullet. It got so bad that in JL: Cry for Justice, James Robinson actually poked fun at how no one knew what to call Freddy/"Shazam" or who he was. In the end he turned out to be a fake and the real Freddy (one of the most powerful beings on Earth) had been held a captive the whole time. DC Editors literally let Robison mock Winick's version of Captain Marvel and treat him as a joke (and of course Mary was treated as a joke from Countdown into Final Crisis into JSA - literally no one took her seriously in-universe).

Didio has said before that he didn't think the Marvel Family's "ethos" fit into the modern DCU (which is why most successful Captain Marvel stories take place outside the DCU like in the Little Billy Batson title or in Jeff Smith's Monster Society of Evil or even in Young Justice the cartoon), and has seemingly used that as an excuse to make the Marvel Family the poster children (literally since they are underage characters) for how to turn sunny idealistic heroes into dark grimmer "edgy" characters. It's why DC loves Black Adam - Captain Marvel not so much.

This is across the company line. John August, assigned by WB to write a Shazam screenplay, actually tried to make one in line with the ethos of the character (i.e. for kids) and WB? In the wake of Nolan's Batman, they wanted it to be "edgier" and they wanted more Black Adam, and they wanted Billy to be older (maybe so they make him Percy Jackson?). August gave up. He talks about it here: http://johnaugust.com/2009/shazam-done

It's no accident that the current movie version of Shazam which is on a fast track and is being shepherded by Geoff johns, has only one name attached - The Rock as Black Adam. That's the only thing anyone will discuss in connection to the project. The actual main character - Billy Batson, in either kid or Shazam form? Never brought up.

WB has no idea what they are doing. If Disney owned the Marvel Family (just like if they owned Wonder Woman) we would see the Marvels with their own merchandise (for all of them). Mary would be back front and center to get the young girl market (which was her role in the Golden Age and which DC no longer cares about) and there would be both animated and live-action versions of the characters flooding the Disney pipeline. WB, on the other hand, the company that brought up Harry Potter (and it was Diane Nelson, President of DCE, who was in charge of that). They want "edgier". They want Black Adam.

What can you do?

[locuatico]

He could easily be DC's Squirrel Girl, yet they keep on trying to make him "edgier"

[trooper924]

It's because it's TRAGIC. It's TRAGIC that Black Adam gained a family, only to lose them in a horrible fashion. It's TRAGIC that said loss caused him to go on a murderous rampage across the globe. And now it's TRAGIC that he may have sacrificed his nephew to overthrow the dictators running his country.

And it's all TRAGIC because as far as DC is concerned, tragedies are the only stories worth telling.

[junipepper]

WB has no idea what they are doing. If Disney owned the Marvel Family (just like if they owned Wonder Woman) we would see the Marvels with their own merchandise (for all of them). Mary would be back front and center to get the young girl market (which was her role in the Golden Age and which DC no longer cares about) and there would be both animated and live-action versions of the characters flooding the Disney pipeline. WB, on the other hand, the company that brought up Harry Potter (and it was Diane Nelson, President of DCE, who was in charge of that). They want "edgier". They want Black Adam.

You know, you're right about that. I have a 20 year old daughter who's very into gamer stuff, cosplay, etc., and she's gotten interested in Marvel comics recently through the movies. I asked her about DC and she said they clearly don't want her money. The only DC hero she really likes is Superman, because she thinks superheroes should be clean, straightforward and heroic, but she "think[s] Superman's dead now or something. There's a different guy, and a different Batman, and [she] can't get interested in any of it." So that's what a 20-year old female potential reader is getting out of the current DC line. (I told her that's really Clark Kent, and she said, "No, who is it really?") Marvel has a lot of strong women in different age groups, which matters a lot to her. She thinks Batgirl is trying so hard to be hip that it's actually condescending, while Kamala Kahn achieves hipness effortlessly through being a geek. I think she'd love a straightforward Shazam-Captain Marvel book or movie. But DC is not bringing it.

[jaybee3]

Gail Simone has often said (well she used to often say it) that her favorite superhero was Mary Marvel (and that Mary had a lot of untapped possibility) and that she really wanted to write the Marvel Family. Gail has been at DC (formerly exclusive) for years and was one of their most well-known and regarded writers. As far as I can tell (someone correct me) in all these years she has never written Mary or Billy or Freddy (and I doubt its for lack of trying on her part). The only Marvel DC seemingly would let her write? You guessed it. Black Adam.

It kills me sometimes as a Marvel Family fan to see that not only has DC given up basically the name of Captain Marvel but that Marvel Comics has run with it and not only made Carol Danvers one of their top-tier heroes under that name (a character who just a few years ago in Dark Reign was pushed out of her title and replaced with Moonstone) but that the new Ms. Marvel is basically everything Mary Marvel could be (minus the Muslim part) - a teenager who loves being a superhero and wants to do good in the world and is inspired by the heroism of others. In other words, a role model for girls (and boys, but especially girls).

This is the role that Mary Marvel played in the Golden Age when she sold hundreds of thousands of comics under the "Mary Marvel" banner. We will never see that again (heck in the DCnU she's still not even called "Mary Marvel") and as for an optimistic heroic "nice" girl as a role model? That's not going to happen either. If Countdown, Final Crisis, JSA (three years worth of humiliating storylines and sex jokes about an underage girl, who is the second oldest female heroine in DC's library after WW) shows us anything is that they regard Mary as a joke? And Billy is not far behind (he is literally still the butt of jokes in-universe).

I can only say just based on how they've treated the Power Pack and the Richards kids, and how they've recreated the "Captain Marvel" line, that if Marvel/Disney owned the Shazam franchise they would know better than to go the dark edgy route and they market the heck out of the Marvel Family to THEIR companies target audience (kids/tweens, not males 18-40 like DC).

[shingi70]

You mean the same marvel that barely markets to young girls even replacing widow with cap in one of their toys. By contrast Wonder Woman seems to be a huge part of the BVS merchandise plan and Harley,Katana and enchantress are full focuses on suicide Squad.

[redmagpie]

Yeah, there's a weird disconnect between the comics and the merch. Marvel has faaaar more variety in comics, but DC is smarter at selling everything else.

[astrakhan42]

DC and WB made a fatal mistake by not releasing a film between Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. When MoS came out, the Marvel movies were at their weakest point--Iron Man 3 was divisive, Thor 2 was meh, and Agents of SHIELD was actively awful. Had they fast-tracked a Batman movie or something for mid-2014, they'd be on equal footing.

Instead, Captain America 2 was able to transfer its forward momentum to Agents, leading to a much better end of season 1 and constant improvements ever since. Guardians of the Galaxy and Big Hero 6 sealed the deal with older and younger fans. Ant-Man could have been the franchise killer, but it ended up doing some good box office business and came away with really good reviews.

And meanwhile... no movies from DC for just about three years. Their cinematic output in 2014 was limited to Batman starring in The Lego Movie. Yes, Arrow and the Flash have growing fanbases and Supergirl might end up being decent if only through the charm of the lead actress, but those actors aren't going to be in the films (the dumbest move of all).

The battle was over once Batman v Superman was moved to avoid conflicting with Civil War. A movie that fans have waited seventy-five years for was rescheduled because a threequel (!) was a bigger draw.

[astrakhan42]

A lot of that seems to be on the shoulders of Ike Perlmutter, the guy that they just pushed out of the loop when it comes to the movie (and also the guy who put the X-Men and Fantastic Four in their current publishing and merchandising situation). Disney doesn't have the best record--look how much outcry it took to get Princess Leia released in the 12-inch Disney Store line--but they also have decades of experience selling to little girls.

Give them a few years with unfettered access to the characters and I think they'll go far. I'd love for them to do a Ms. Marvel (Kamala) series or animated film.

[laughing_tree]

"What really strikes me about this is that it's utterly symptomatic of the way that DC has spent actual decades unable to figure out that Captain Marvel is a children's character (to a greater extent than most superheroes) and ought to be written as such."

I think this is only true if you take the approach that only the "real" DC Universe counts, but those selfsame children you mention aren't going to have that kind of fannish attitude. Outside the DCU, DC's done a bunch of kid-friendly Shazam comics: Jeff Smith's Monster Society of Evil, Thunderworld, that series by the Herobear guy, the recent Convergence two-parter, etc.

[lordultimus]

Well, Billy sure thinks he did. And when he brings it up, Adam doesn't deny it.

[sagrada]

It's even an actual, technically correct tragedy, since there's a fatal flaw which is endemic to Detective Comics Comics Entertainment and every rung up its rotted old wooden ladder. MARVEL's is made of hollow plastic, but at least it isn't falling apart.

[q99]

There *is* a new DC Super Hero Girls line/cartoon, with a bunch of heroines at a superhero school (Wonder Woman seems to be the main character), it's just separate from the main comics.

The main comics? Yea, they mostly don't care.

[mrstatham]

Yeah, you would have thought that given Marvel's success in linking film and TV franchises together, DC would have followed that blueprint, given they're clearly pretty desperate to have their own MCU. They have suggested there may be some links between the TV shows and the films, but the bigger TV shows like Arrow and the Flash get, the less resources the films have, especially Arrow, which is gobbling up characters typically outside Ollie's own book like crazy.

As for moving it to avoid Civil War.. I can understand that; Winter Soldier is pretty much THE Marvel movie alongside Avengers and Iron Man 1 - a film that people seem to almost universally like, although I can take or leave Avengers (Whedon is blegh to me) - but given the amount of time they've had making this one, I would have timed it for the New Year, so it isn't really crushed by Star Wars.

[trooper924]

And Marvel's got a little more color to it, unlike DC which seems to have forgotten that there are other colors beside brown, black and gray.

[stubbleupdate]

Doesn't a lot of the lack of Marvel merch for girls come from the Disney idea of "Marvel is the company we bought so we could sell things to boys"?

[jaybee3]

The people running the TV DC Universe should be running the movie version as well. I have ZERO interest in Green Arrow or Ollie Queen in any shape or form. But so many other DC characters that I do have interest in are appearing in that show that I feel I must check it out.

Likewise I know they hired some other actor to be the Flash for the movie universe but at this point just make Grant Gustin the Flash in the movies (and Melissa Benoist, Supergirl in the Superman films alongside Cavill). Not only would it give the shows themselves more hype but it would remove the need to give origin stories or explain who these characters are. The TV shows could be an extension of the movie universe and vice-versa (especially if you keep the movies the only place where you can see Batman, Superman and WW).

[laughing_tree]

Try some of the DCYou books.

[junipepper]

I will grant you that toy thing made me furious. But I'm not twenty, my daughter is; it's clear that the Big Two aren't looking for MY money (which is sort of stupid, since I have way more of both disposable income and free time than she does). I'm just reporting her reactions to what's coming out of the Big Two.