Monday, March 5, 2012

HE ALSO HAS THE POWER TO RECOGNIZE ANY SONG WITHIN FIVE SECONDS:  DC Comics is reviving Billy Batson's superhero alter ego under the name Shazam, abandoning "Captain Marvel" as a nom de guerre.

12 comments:

  1. isaac_spaceman11:06 AM

    Because I am a million years old, my first reaction was "that's stupid -- Shazam is what you say to turn into Captain Marvel, not what you call yourself."  But Captain Marvel doesn't make much sense anyway.  He's not the captain of anything.  He isn't in charge of a ship, and he's not in the military, and even in a metaphorical way it doesn't work (like it would if he were a captain of industry, etc.) because he works alone and superintends nothing.  "Shazam" is a stupid name like "Abracadabra" or "Open Sesame" or "Accio Wand" would be stupid names, but it's no more stupid than "Captain Marvel" or "Admiral Bitchin'."   

    But since when does DC own Captain Marvel?  I thought that Captain Marvel/Shazam was some off-brand imprint like Plastic Man. 

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  2. Will he run into trouble in describing himself to others?  If he's still Batson, but says to someone else "Sorry, I don't know who Shazam is," does he, in fact, turn into Shazam?  Or does he have to intone it a certain way?<span> </span>

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  3. Plastic Man is actually also a DC character, as is Captain Marvel--both have showed up in big events (Kingdom Come, Dark Knight Strikes Again).  My guess is that the rebranding likely has something to do with trademark issues, since Marvel obviously has an interest in MARVEL/CAPTAIN MARVEL, and now that Marvel's owned by Disney, they're likely to get even more aggressive.  Marvel and DC have a very weird relationship, because even though they're rivals, they co-own the SUPER-HERO mark in the US, which is a bizarre thing.

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  4. Love the post heading.

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  5. DonBoy12:44 PM

    Time to rename another trope:

    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IAmNotShazam

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  6. Joseph J. Finn12:51 PM

    Isaac, Captain Marvel was originally a Fawcett Comics creation.*  They ceased using the character in the 1950's due to a trademark infringement suit that DC brought claiming Captain Marvel was a ripoff of Superman.  In 1972, DC licensed Captain Marvel and the rest of the Marvel family and gradually brought them into the fold of the DC universe (at one point they were on a parallel Earth-S, one of the things cleared up by Crisis On Infinte Earths).  However, in the interim Marvel had started running their own Captain Marvel (and trademarked the name) so DC was never able to use that title, hence why the comic was called Shazam! (Interestingly, though it's never been one of the better selling Marvel titles, it keeps getting published occasionally so Marvel can maintain the trademark.)

    *A nice nod to this is that these days Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family all guard Fawcett City.

    (Plastic Man was from Quality Comics, which DC bought in 1956.)

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  7. Dan Suitor12:58 PM

    Can I just say that this is totally bullshit? There was a time when Captain Marvel was more popular than Superman, and now we're going to call him by his catchphrase? We might as well rename The Thing "Clobbering Time", change Spider-Man to "Tingling", call Wolverine "snickt".

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  8. Alan Sepinwall1:32 PM

    Plastic Man and Captain Marvel were originally published by other companies (Quality and Fawcett, respectively), which DC scarfed up sometime after the initial superhero boom died at the end of the '40s. Those characters were later worked into the DC Universe proper.

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  9. isaac_spaceman1:38 PM

    I see all that on Wiki, but my recollection from my comic book days (mid-1970s until the point in 1982 when I discovered both girls and that girls didn't read comics, at which point I made the poor tactical decision to shift my resources to obscure heavy metal bands, not really understanding that for all practical romantic purposes comic books and independent oft-foreign heavy metal were the exact same thing) is that neither Plastic Man nor Captain Marvel were (yet) fully integrated into the DC universe.  Wiki tells me that Plastic Man lived in an alternate universe until the late 1980s, and I surmise that DC was flat-out embarrassed by Captain Marvel, its cheap Superman knock-off whose name was practically an advertisement for DC's chief rival. 

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  10. Watts3:04 PM

    But, Dan, I totally love "Spoon" and "Not in the Face" as character names.

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  11. Craig6:41 PM

    Kinda like renaming Hulk to SMASH. However, Spider-man should be "thwip" if we're calling Wolvie "snikt."

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  12. isaac_spaceman8:24 PM

    So Nightcrawler, "Bamf"? 

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