UTHEORY OF : Whiz Comics 2

 

Every little kid running around yelling “Shazam!” in the 70s and looking for a lighting bolt to come down and make him a superhero has this comic to thank. Whiz Comics 2 from late 1939, cover-date Feb. 1940.

It’s here that Captain Marvel made his first appearance. That’s the name of the superhero. The TV show and the DC comics of that era had to use the name Shazam because by that time Marvel owned the name “Captain Marvel,” even though Fawcett was the original publisher.

Fawcett was a magazine publisher that like several others got into comics in the 1930s. Whiz was the company’s first title, beginning a run that would last til the early 1950s and see Fawcett become a top comics publisher.

Bill Parker heroically wrote all seven features in the first issue of Whiz, with CC Beck and Greg Parker each drawing three and Bob Kingett drawing one. This limited number of creators gives the comic a consistent feel different from many other debut issues. The layout style also makes more use of large panels which plays to the strengths of the stories.

Capt. Marvel kicks things off with the tale of newsboy Billy Batson gaining superpowers from an ancient wizard in an abandoned subway. Beck’s art here is straight adventure, not the cartoonish style he would use with the character for many years. In his first few stories, Capt. Marvel was drawn to resemble actor Fred Murray, who was a fairly serious actor before playing a sitcom dad on My Three Sons later in his career.

In the story, cap breaks up a radio sabotage ring run by his eventual nemesis, Dr. Sivana, a classic mad scientist. Beck creates great images of Cap smashing a machine, leaping, jumping through a window and pulling up an elevator by its cable. He also drew the great cover of Cap tossing a car, a kind of echo of Superman lifting a car on the cover of Action 1 from the year before.

Cap’s debut adventure is followed by Beck on Ibis the Invincible, a resurrected Egyptian prince turned magician by his all-powerful Ibistick, a kind of magic wand. Ibis travels from America to Egypt to Europe looking for his lost love, Taia, performing multiple miracles along the way. It’s a very busy eight pages.

Golden Arrow is up next, an orphan raised by a prospector in the West, developing outdoor skills including archery along the way. Solid adventure art by Greg Duncan. No idea how Duncan hasn’t been written about more. He was an early Fawcett artist who like many was drafted in the military and was killed in action in 1944. I’ve read quite a bit about early DC artist Bert Christman being killed in action as a war pilot but had never heard of Duncan.

Beck is back with Spy Smasher in the next story. Wealthy sportsman Alan Armstrong becomes a crimefighter. Lots of nice silhouette art by Beck and fluid depictions of his gyrosub vehicle. Spy Smasher confronts the Mask, a villain who had stolen war plans.

Duncan returns to draw Scoop Smith, a reporter who investigates a villain named Dr. Death. Scoop gets the doctor to use a machine to resurrect two men he had killed as an experiment. Hard to top that in a debut story.

Swashbuckling sailor Lance O’Casey is next, drawn by Bob Kingett. White cap, white pants, blue shirt with black stripes, and a pet monkey named Mr. Hogan. Red-headed Lance was a fashion plate. Kingett’s looser, cartoonish style fits the material. Lance battles a bad guy named Barracuda Brent, who gets killed by a tiger.

Whiz 2 wraps up with Duncan drawing the exploits of private detective Dan Dare. Dan breaks up a drug smuggling ring featuring bad guys named Seminole Sam and Portugese Pete.

Capt. Marvel became a massive star for Fawcett, at one point outselling even Superman. But the similarities between the characters – capes, superpowers, chest symbols – was too much for DC, which battled Fawcett in lawsuits until Fawcett had enough in 1953.

Ibis and Golden Arrow would have long runs in Whiz, with Ibis in all 155 issues and GA in every issue but that last one. They couldn’t have done one more GA story? Scoop would be gone after issue 6, with Dan Dare departing after issue 22. Spy Smasher would have a peak in popularity including his own solo title and a well-done movie serial but would be off the scene shortly after the end of the war. Lance would leave and then come back again.

The open layouts – rarely more than six panels per page – and well-developed sense of action really help these stories and likely had kids coming back the next month looking for more.

DC would get the rights to Capt. Marvel in 1972, bringing the character back in a much-ballyhooed series. That title had its ups and downs, due in part to Beck’s style not fitting in with the more gritty realism of that era.

The Shazam title was kind of skidding until the character appeared in a hit live-action Saturday morning cartoon from 1974-76. These 28 episodes introduced the character to a whole new audience and rekindled the magic of the possibility of a magic word and a lightning bolt creating a wonderful transformation.