50 Years Ago, Superman First Fought Captain Marvel…Well, Almost

In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head back to March 1974 to see the first time that Superman fought Captain Marvel. Well…ALMOST, at least.

After the introduction of Superman in 1938, National Comics (now DC Comics) was extremely protective of its new hero. The company sued Fox Publications and its Wonder Man character…

And (likely BECAUSE it had just recently succeeded in its lawsuit against Fox over Wonder Man), National had gotten Fawcett Comics to drop its first attempt at a Sueprman-like character, Master Man…

(Almost feels like National did Fawcett a favor there. Master Man isn’t the best superhero name). However, it is important to note that while Master Man was sued right away, National did NOT sue Fawcett when Fawcett launched Captain Marvel in 1940’s Whiz Comics #2…

It is clear that Fawcett was regularly wondering when they would get sued by National, but Captain Marvel not only did not draw a lawsuit, he even got his own ongoing series and National still did not sue. Fawcett, of course, believed that the character was different enough from Superman that it SHOULDN’T have been sued, even if it clearly WAS trying to knock Superman off with the character (just with, you know, a magical twist with Captain Marvel being a 12-year-old boy who turned into Captain Marvel, Earth’s Mightiest Mortal, whenever he said the word “Shazam!”). Fawcett believed he was different enough for it to be okay, but it was also quite wary.

Amusingly, the other shoe finally fell not because of the comic book itself, but because, following a contract snag that prevented Superman from becoming the first comic book superhero to star in his own film serial, the film company turned to Captain Marvel, instead, and in 1941, Captain Marvel became the first comic book superhero to star in a film serial. National was NOT happy, and finally, after first sending a cease and desist letter, it sued Fawcett over Captain Marvel “infringing” on Superman’s copyright. By the time that the case wrapped up, years had passed (Republic had settled years earlier, and was dropped from the suit. Thanks to Tom Brevoort for the info about the settlement). The two sides went back and forth on appeals until finally Fawcett decided that it was no longer selling enough Captain Marvel comic books for this to be worth it, so they settled the suit in the early 1950s and ceased making Captain Marvel comics. But that wouldn’t be the end for the good Captain, but would he get to fight the Man of Steel?

How did DC treat Captain Marvel when it acquired his license?

In the late 1960s, a few things happened. One, there was a bit of a nostalgia boom for Golden Age comic books that led to an increase in back issue prices, and even temporarily led to a period in Wonder Woman’s comic book where the comic book returned to the Golden Age.

The other major change was that in 1967 and Marvel quickly jumped in and introduced its own Captain Marvel, securing the Captain Marvel trademark for Marvel Comics…

This meant that Marvel now had the sole right to use the term Captain Marvel as the title of a comic book series. This didn’t mean that you couldn’t also do a comic book ABOUT a character named Captain Marvel, you just couldn’t use the name as the title of the comic. Well, in 1972, DC decided to cut a deal with Fawcett to cash in on the Golden Age nostalgia boom by returning Captain Marvel to comics, and since it couldn’t use the title “Captain Marvel” for the new comic, the choice was to use Shazam!, the magic word that Billy Batson said to turn into Captain Marvel…

DC’s most famous hero, Superman, would reintroduce his old rival, Captain Marvel, back to comics on the cover. Initially, DC also included a small mention of Captain Marvel’s name on the tittle, as well, until Marvel told DC to cut it out and so the company dropped all mentions of Captain Marvel on the cover.

Here’s the thing, though. DC felt that the character only worked because of the Golden Age nostalgia, and as a result, it made a point of NOT updating the character, insisting that the character only worked when done in the style of the original comic books. DC even hired Captain Marvel’s co-creator and original artist, C.C. Beck, to draw the book. Beck hated the new scripts from Denny O’Neil and Ellott S! Maggin, and eventually quit the books. I owe Maggin a bit of an apology here, as I’ve written about Beck hating the scripts, and I thought that Beck’s attitude was implicitly ridiculous, as a number of his complaints were clearly unreasonable, but I guess it was still technically just from Beck’s perspective, and naturally, Maggin had a different view of things at the time, of Beck basically being a unreasonable jerk to work with. So, my apologies for just writing about it all from Beck’s perspective!

In any event, the key thing here is that even as DC was putting out new Captain Marvel comics, it wouldn’t actually allow Superman and Captain Marvel to MEET. The fans, however, wanted the two heroes to meet and, of course, fight. So Maggin came up with a clever idea. Talking to TwoMorrows’ The Krypton Companion, Maggin explained, “We were trying to do the traditional Fawcett-style Captain Marvel in the Shazam! book in those days. The style of artwork was different from Superman’s. The degree of suspension of disbelief in the two story threads-Shazam! as opposed to Superman-were different. I never really believed that Superman and Captain Marvel belonged in the same story and neither did Julie. The Captain Thunder story was a piece of speculation as to what Captain Marvel might be like if he lived in the “real world.” I think Metropolis in the ’70s was what we thought of as the real world at the time.”

Maggin is referring March 1974’s Superman #276, with an outstanding Nick Cardy cover showing Superman and “Captain Thunder” (which was an early alternate name for Captain Marvel, by the way) facing off…

In the comic (written by Maggin and drawn by Curt Swan and Bob Oksner), Willie Fawcett (Billy Batson) shows up on Earth-1 and explains how he got there. First, he explains his origin, which is, of course, a very clever play on Captain Marvel’s origin by Maggin…

And here, we see Willie turn into Captain Thunder…

Captain Thunder was fighting the Monster League of Evil (a reference to the Captain Marvel foes, the Monster Society of Evil) in 1953 in another dimension (1953 is when Captain Marvel was canceled), and now he is free from the other dimension, but he has been brainwashed into becoming a villain now!

The two heroes battle it out, but Superman figures out a way to force Captain Thunder to say the magic word…

Finally, Superman succeeds in getting Captain Thunder to say his magic word…

Superman then holds him tight and breaks the brainwashing by repeatedly making him say the magic word and transform again and again until he breaks free of their conditioning.

It was a very cool story and likely whet the appetite of the whole DC Comics fanbase, leading to the REAL meeting of Superman and Captain Marvel two years later! Maybe I’ll get to that in two years, if the Earth is still around then, of course.

If you folks have any suggestions for April (or any other later months) 2014, 1999, 1974 and 1949 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.