Shazam! (2019)

Shazam! (2019): Shazam (aka Captain Marvel) created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck; written by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke; directed by David F. Sandberg; starring Zachary Levi (Shazam), Mark Strong (Sivana), Asher Angel (Billy Batson), Jack Dylan Grazer (Freddy Freeman), and Djimon Honsou (Wizard): 

Shockingly enjoyable movie about the original Fawcett Comics Captain Marvel (ie. THE Captain Marvel), moved to the present day and made somewhat goofier than the great 1940's version whose adventures were no worse than second-best in terms of superheroes in the 1940's (Jack Cole's Plastic Man was first; Will Eisner's Spirit didn't have super-powers).

Shazam is an acronym for Solomon (Wisdom), Hercules (Strength), Atlas (Stamina), Zeus (Power), Achilles (Invulnerability), and Mercury (Speed). Well, when it comes to Captain Marvel (now Shazam), anyway -- Mary Marvel and Black Adam, to name two, have the same acronym but different names from mythology.

The whole thing is a 'low-budget' by superhero standards ($90 million) movie aimed solidly at mid-teens. Billy Batson is invested by the wizard Shazam with the powers of, well, Shazam because DC gave up on using 'Captain Marvel' because they didn't trademark it back in the 1950's or 1960's. Shazam is now Earth's defense against magical menaces, sort of a jollier Dr. Strange. 

Billy Batson, a sort-of orphan, has to learn to accept his supportive new foster family led by Freddy Freeman, once a disabled newsboy in the 1940's and now, not working, just as Billy no longer works as a radio host. Child labour laws, am I right, guys?

Zachary Levi is the result of Billy saying 'Shazam.' In the comics, he was generally written as a sort of adult version of Billy with super-powers -- they didn't share a consciousness. Taking a cue from Big, Shazam now possesses Billy's 13-year-old consciousness in a super-powered adult body. Hijinks ensue as Billy and Freddy test out the beer-buying powers of Shazam, among other things.

Much revisionism is heaped on the villain of this piece, Sivana, originally a diminutive mad scientist and now a large, imposing Mark Strong wielding magical powers derived from long-time Shazam foes The Seven Deadly Sins. And I don't mean the Traveling Wilburys song! But Strong always makes an, um, strong villain. 

I'm not a huge fan of all the revisionism heaped on Captain Mar... er, Shazam... in the recent Shazam miniseries by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. And all of those revisions seem to get info-dumped into this movie, especially over the last 45 minutes. Oh, well. Things play a lot jollier here than in that miniseries, and Billy is much more likable.

The whole thing is nonetheless light and entertaining and often quite visually inventive. It's clearly marked throughout as part of the DC Movie Universe, and the end credits foreground this. Superman does cameo in the live-action stuff, but not Henry Cavill either because he refused or because DC is pivoting away from the dark days of David Goyer and Zack Snyder's DC movies to something more earnest and light. 

Hopefully being freed of the demands of an origin story will allow a second Shazam movie to soar and not crash. There's also a brief (unnamed) reference to the 'first,' fallen Shazam champion, Egypt's Black Adam. Dwayne Johnson has been attached to a Black Adam movie for years; the box-office success of Shazam! seems to have jump-started that movie, or at least a Black Adam role in the next Shazam! film. Recommended.

Captain Marvel (2019)

Captain Marvel (2019): based on characters created by Stan Lee, Arnold Drake, Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, and many others; written by Nicole Perlman, Meg LeFauve, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet; directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden; starring Brie Larson as Carol Danvers /Captain Marvel, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Ben Mendelsohn as Talos, Jude Law as Yon-Rogg, Annette Bening as Supreme Intelligence/Mar-Vell, Gemma Chan as Minn-Erva, Lee Pace as Ronan, Mckenna Grace as Young Carol Danvers, Djimon Hounsou as Korath, and Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson:

What's weird about Captain Marvel is that it's more like a Joss Whedon project than Whedon's two Avengers movies. Relentlessly light in tone, Captain Marvel is basically a buddy comedy featuring Carol 'Captain Marvel' Danvers and a young, mid-1990's Nick Fury, played by a CGI-youthanized Samuel L. Jackson. 

Disney seems to have spent all the de-aging CGI money on Jackson, as a de-aged Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) often looks like a nightmare from the Uncanny Valley.

This is the first Captain Marvel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though the Carol Danvers Captain Marvel is the third or fourth so-named hero in Marvel history (and not the original Captain Marvel -- that is the 'Shazam'-uttering Fawcett Comics hero soon to appear in a movie called Shazam; after DC acquired the rights to that Captain from Fawcett, they forgot to trademark the name, thus leading to Marvel debuting their then-male Captain Marvel in the late 1960's).

It's a mostly fun, light snack. It's overly long in the climax department, as pretty much every blockbuster now is these days, relentlessly ticking off items on a Checklist of Closure. Brie Larson is fine as the good Captain, though she's not given much to work with beyond a surface jokiness. Jackson seems to be delighted to be doing comedy work, as do Jude Law as Marvel alien Kree mentor Yon-Rogg and Ben Mendelsohn as the alien Skrull leader Talos. Recommended.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (2007)

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (2007): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Stuart Immonen and Wade Grawbadger: Warren Ellis' brilliant, fractured satire of all things superhero somehow got 12 issues from Marvel in 2007, possibly because Ellis was and is such a popular, ostensibly sort-of mainstream writer of superheroes.

With Stuart Immonen on art, best known for fine work on Superman and other DC characters, Ellis crafts a Marvel book that feels more like a revisionist DC book -- Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol most specifically, from the late 1980's and early 1990's. Nextwave is a bit more Juvenalian in its satire, though -- the heroes are pissier and the metacommentary doesn't show much love for the weirdness of the characters it lampoons.

A lot of those weird characters -- Machine Man, Fin Fang Foom, Devil Dinosaur -- are oddballs from one of Jack Kirby's stints at Marvel. Some are riffs on 'real' Marvel characters from the pages of Dr. Strange. H.A.T.E. parodies S.H.I.E.L.D.. Ellis even brings characters previously seen only in the pages of Marvel's short-lived superhero parody comic Not Brand Ecch! on stage, with ridiculous results.

The Nextwave team itself consists of has-beens and never-weres, most prominently Monica Rambeau, Marvel's second Captain Marvel, then Photon, now just going by her real name. Machine Man also now goes by his civilian name. The Captain is one or another or possibly all of those lesser-known characters who used 'Captain' in their superhero monikers. There's a minor X-Men/X-Force superheroine with a major shop-lifting habit and the ability to make things explode by pointing at them. And there's Lady Bloodstone, daughter of a really minor 1970's Marvel monster-hunter and Doc Savage knock off.

It's funny and nasty if you know all the characters and situations Ellis chooses to pummel. It's hilarious if you don't. As Ellis pummels many of his own superhero writing tics, it all seems fair among the figurative and literal blood-letting. Immonen is an able collaborator, looser and more cartoony than I remember him, shining especially in stretches that parody the art styles of others and in a series of two-page action spreads that are both dynamic and completely ridiculous. Tik tik tik BOOM! Highly recommended.

Thanocide

The Infinity Gauntlet (1991/ Collected 2000): written by Jim Starlin; illustrated by George Perez, Ron Lim, Josef Rubinstein, Tom Christopher, and Bruce Solotoff: An enjoyable Marvel-cosmos-smashing tale written by Jim Starlin, whose super-villain Thanos will be assaying some similar plan in the Marvel Cinematic Universe some day soon. There's a lot of super-hero battles here. A lot. 

Possessed of the universe-controlling Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos can do pretty much everything and anything he wants. Thankfully, old (and seemingly deceased) nemesis Adam Warlock assembles a variety of Marvel heroes, villains, and cosmic entities to defeat Thanos. But can they?

The great George Perez pencils the first three-and-a-half issues of what was originally a six-issue miniseries. And those chapters are swell. Ron Lim takes over to finish, and while he's a more-than-competent superhero artist, he lacks the often insane detail of Perez, especially when it comes to the differentiation of characters. 

Along the way, Perez's art makes one long for a Perez Dr. Strange or Silver Surfer story: his work on these characters he's rarely drawn is superb and suggestive of great things that have never happened.

Starlin's cosmic tale hangs on a hook that's clever but articulated too soon in the narrative. But it lends Thanos a level of poignance that's refreshing in a super-villain. Starlin portrayed cosmic battles against Thanos back in the 1970's with Marvel's original Captain Marvel and Warlock as Thanos' chief opponents (and Starlin drawing everything). Both those sagas, much more quirky and personal than this Big Box Superhero Crossover Epic, were superior to this one and perhaps should be read before tackling this. Recommended.

Against Infinity

Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel: The Complete Collection (1968-82/ Collected here 2016): written by Jim Starlin, Gary Friedrich, Steve Engelhart, and Steve Gerber; illustrated by Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Dan Green, and others: The 1970's were a quirky age of growth for mainstream American comic books, with much of that growth occurring at the margins in a way we just don't see any more. Some of the greatest writers and artists mainstream comics have ever produced worked away on series that were mostly far from the big hitters like Spider-man and Superman. 

Names to conjure with included Bernie Wrightson, Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, Don McGregor, Steve Gerber and many others. And the great series of mainstream comics at DC and Marvel were either limited-run back-up strips (Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's brilliant, beautiful Manhunter at DC) or strange, genre-bending series located safely away from the normal mainstream universe (Don McGregor, P. Craig Russell and company's sprawling, poetic Killraven). 

And then there's Jim Starlin, a writer-artist who staked out his own peculiar corner of cosmic adventure. The only thing all that similar to Starlin's early 1970's Marvel work on Captain Marvel and Warlock was writer-artist Jack Kirby's gigantic, unfinished Fourth World saga over at DC. But where Kirby was ultimately obsessed with life (really, LIFE), Starlin was obsessed with death (DEATH). 

Starlin would cut his cosmic, thanatophiliac teeth on Marvel's version of Captain Marvel, a not-particularly-popular superhero from the alien race of the Kree. Starlin would give Cap cosmic awareness (whatever that was) and, most importantly, a new villain: Thanos, the "mad Titan," which is to say, a crazy member of the race of demi-god-like Titans living on, well, Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

Starlin initially intended Thanos to be an evil riff on Kirby's Fourth World demi-god Metron, which explains why Thanos spends so much of his early life sitting in a chair just like Metron in his Mobius Chair, a tendency that seems to have persisted into Thanos' early appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But Thanos soon grew into the Marvel Universe's biggest threat. Well, a big enough threat that Captain Marvel would have to enlist Iron Man, the Avengers and others of Marvel's mainstream heroes to thwart Thanos' plans.

In the Captain Marvel volume reviewed here, Captain Marvel and friends battle a number of Thanos' stooges before taking on the big man himself. The original Drax the Destroyer appears for the first time -- he'll be much mutated by the time the world sees him played by Dave Bautista in Guardians of the Galaxy. The object of Thanos' quest this time around is a Cosmic Cube, a doohickey from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1960's Captain America comics that confers nigh-infinite power on its user. It's no Infinity Gauntlet, but it's helladangerous.

Besides the assorted comic space adventures and battles inside the mind that Starlin deploys to generally enjoyable effect, Captain Marvel also allows for a lot of superhero philosophizing. Starlin doesn't script a lot of these stories, so that philosophizing hasn't reached its apex yet. But Warlock is coming, and it will. Boy, will it ever. 

An omnibus of the Starlin Warlock and Captain Marvel stories would make a certain amount of chronological sense. The last piece in this volume is a reprint of Marvel's first 'graphic novel,' 1982's The Death of Captain Marvel. It's really a coda to Starlin's Captain Marvel and Warlock. Captain Marvel, retired to Titan for years, discovers that he has incurable super-cancer. Fun stuff!

The graphic novel does illustrate, literally, that with Starlin, less is more. Given more time to render the art in a more painterly style, Starlin's work ossifies into curious, stilted poses at certain points. One of his tics -- posing characters knees partially bent in an anatomically puzzling partial stoop -- becomes distracting whenever it shows up. Given more time to work on the faces, Starlin elongates everything below the eyes, another distracting oddity.

Still, The Death of Captain Marvel is a fascinating piece, especially in its early 1980's context. It's not about fist-fights, which for Marvel remains a rarity. If one has purchased both of these Starlin volumes, leave it to the last -- otherwise, you're going to have the fate of Thanos spoiled. Well, the temporary fate of Thanos. In superhero comics, death is always conditional. Highly recommended.

Born Kree

Marvel Boy: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by J.G. Jones (2000-2001; collected 2012): One of superhero-comics super-writer Grant Morrison's projects from his relatively brief stint at Marvel Comics in the early oughts, Marvel Boy seems like a perfect example of how Morrison was always more suited to DC Comics and to his own creations than he was to Marvel. 

Marvel Boy is a lot of fun. But it's fun in the post-modern, DC-Silver-Age manner that Morrison made his own, with breathless plotting, weird events, alternate universes, and an anti-Establishment vibe. There's none of the angsty characterization that made Marvel Marvel. There's barely any characterization at all. And in the beginning of the NuMarvel era of 'decompressed storytelling,' Marvel Boy is instead as dense as neutronium.

'Marvel Boy' was the name of a Marvel Comics hero in the 1950's -- a time when Marvel wasn't even called Marvel yet. He's never called that in this miniseries. He's the last survivor of a super-powered Kree diplomatic team. But they're not the alien Kree who've been around since the 1960's in the Marvel universe. They're from an alternate universe where the Kree seem to be a lot more helpful to other alien races. 

His crew killed, his ship crippled -- all by a new trillionaire super-villain who seems to be wearing a really old set of Iron Man armor. Weird new things continue to happen. SHIELD disastrously deploys genetically engineered superheroes created specifically for the United Nations. An escapee from the Kree ship's prison threatens all life on Earth, forcing 'Marvel Boy' to save the planet: but the escapee is an intelligent idea, a living corporation. How do you punch that? And so on, and so forth.  It feels like a great DC Comics miniseries in which the postmodern and the gonzo, hyper-caffeinated Silver Age collide as they so often do in Morrison's 'mainstream' superhero work. 

The art by a relatively young J.G. Jones is very good (he and Morrison would later and very successfully collaborate on DC's Final Crisis). Jones may occasionally have the over-rendering tendencies of modern superhero artists, but he's also got a real sense of page design and an old-school, Neal Adams/ John Buscema hyper-realism to his pencils. He's one of a handful of contemporary superhero artists who can handle the bombast and the epic ridiculousness of a superhero epic such as Marvel Boy. Only 'Marvel Boy' himself remains somewhat inert, a character always in motion without there being much interesting about his character other than his stubborn refusal to give up, give in, or drop dead. Recommended.

Talking Heads in Space

 Jim Starlin's Warlock: written by Jim Starlin with Bill Mantlo; illustrated by Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Steve Leialoha, Josef Rubenstein, and others (1974-1983; reprinted 1992): Writer-artist Jim Starlin's relatively brief run on Warlock represents one of a handful of the weirdest mainstream superhero comics of the 1970's, in an era when virtually all superhero comics were mainstream -- they were all sold on the newsstands, and all held to sales standards of more than 150,000 copies sold a month, at least.

By sales standards, Starlin's Warlock was a dud -- his entire run spanned about two years, with intermittent later appearances in other titles finishing the initial Warlock saga. But what a weird, ambitious, purple-prosed epic this was. DC and Marvel were a lot more inclined to allow for weird projects in their mainstream universes back then. It's impossible to imagine a story and a hero this odd crossing over with Spider-man, the Thing, and the Avengers today.

Adam Warlock's curious origins began in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four in the 1960's, as a genetically engineered superman who ultimately destroys his power-hungry creators and takes to the stars. Back then, he was known only as Him. Guest shots in Thor led to his own book, written by Roy Thomas, in which Warlock became a Christic figure, trying to save Counter-Earth (oh, look it up) from the Satanic machinations of the malevolent Man-Beast. That book was soon cancelled, with the Man-Beast saga wrapping up in the Hulk's book.

Then along came Starlin, fresh off an odd and abortive run on Marvel's Captain Marvel title, to resurrect Warlock in the pages of Strange Tales. The resurrection would lead to another resurrection, of Warlock's own book. That lasted another 6 issues. It would take seven years for what seemed to be the final stages of Warlock's story to be told in other superhero comics, culminating in a battle alongside the Avengers against the mad space-god Thanos and his plot to extinguish all the stars in the universe. As Thanos is now the lurking villain in The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy movies, I'd guess Warlock won't be far behind. His iconic cocoon has already showed up in Guardians of the Galaxy and one of the Thor movies.

Starlin's Warlock is a cosmically subterranean work, obsessed with death and the self-doubt of a somewhat pompous, cosmic man-child who wants to save the universe but isn't entirely sure how. Warlock is also compromised by the Soul Gem embedded in his forehead, a stone of strange power which can suck the souls out of people. Fun times!

Various cosmic shenanigans occur, along with more hand-wringing and soul-searching than you can shake the saddest Spider-man in the world at. There are points at which Starlin seems to be going for My Dinner with Warlock, as talking heads and lengthy conversations dominate the proceedings. Warlock's consciousness seems to be constantly under attack, as is his sense of self. The comic-relief companion Pip the Troll lightens things up for awhile, but this is Jim Starlin's world: Death is the only constant. Well, and resurrection. Possibly followed quickly by more death, more resurrection, and possibly some lengthy conversations about death and resurrection.

Starlin's writing can be painfully clunky and overblown at times, but he's still the best person to write his own stuff. The art, with all its tics, nonetheless strives for, and sometimes achieves, a weird grandeur not often found in superhero comics of any era. Introduced herein is Gamora, Zoe Saldana's green-skinned warrior in Guardians of the Galaxy. Can Warlock and Pip be far behind? And how boring will Marvel Studios make them? I'm guessing we're not getting a Warlock movie in which the characters talk, to themselves and others, for 2 1/2 hours. More's the pity. Recommended.

The Mightiest Man in the Universe

The Shazam! Archives Volume 3, written by Bill Parker, C.C. Beck and Rod Reed, illustrated by C.C. Beck, Pete Costanza, George Tuska and Mac Raboy (1941-42; collected 2002): Another dandy volume of Golden-Age Captain Marvel (Shazam!) stories, though a bit light on the epitomal 1940's version of Captain Marvel as drawn by C.C. Beck. Blame the good Captain's popularity for that -- Fawcett Publications was rushing out Captain Marvel material in response to fervent public demand, and that required artists and writers other than the then-standard Bill Parker/C.C. Beck team.

George Tuska supplies a surprisingly light line in the stories he illustrates here, and the writers keep the fantastic adventures -- always more fantastic than those of Superman during the 1940's -- rolling along. There's some surprisingly metafictional stories here, along with attempts to mesh the mostly inconsistent worlds of the comic book and the recent Republic Captain Marvel serial, which offered an origin for Captain Marvel much different than that of the comic book.

We also get what is probably the first in-story 'franchising' of a superhero, as Captain Marvel 'drafts' the three similarly powered Lieutenant Marvels. This stuff is all so much more fun than most modern superhero comics, it isn't even funny. Michael Uslan supplies a pointlessly continuity-obsessed introduction. Yes, it's true, Michael -- there's a certain lack of consistency in the presentation of a variety of things in the Captain Marvel stories. That's because no one gave a shit about that stuff in 1941, though one day an obsession with continuity would begin to crush the life out of superhero comics. Highly recommended.