Review: The New Champion of Shazam! hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

New Champion of Shazam! is an auspicious start. Josie Campbell’s going to be writing the Mary Shazam for at least a little while, and based on this, we’re in good hands. The story is about what one might expect but also wholly what this “origin” story needed; I appreciate too Campbell re-introducing some additional classic elements to the modern Shazam mythos. In all this volume was more tuned in and relevant to the ongoing DCU than I expected, and Doc Shaner’s art of course always hits the mark.

[Review contains spoilers]

The hook for Shazam Billy Batson (nee Captain Marvel) — what differentiates him from Superman and etc. — has been that Billy not just gains abilities but also becomes an adult; his is the fantasy for the reader not just of super powers, but for a child who no longer has to be under the thumb of the grown-up world. Such hasn’t always been the case with “Mary Marvel,” however; in some incarnations she’s an adult, but in others she remains her same age plus powers.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

As such, as Mary heads off to college here, I vacillate whether a college-age Shazam is quite the right thing for the Shazam! franchise as a whole. It helps immeasurably that we generally know that by the end of this we’ll have both Mary and Bill as co-Shazams; I’ve no compunction about a college-age Shazam just so long as one of them is still kid-as-grownup Shazam. And obviously Mary’s Shazam! movie portrayal has no small influence on the whole thing.

Campbell’s “sensational character find of the 2020s” is clearly Hoppy, the irrepressible magic-endowed bunny with a constant hankering for carrots. No small amount of the early parts of the book would just be Mary narrating to herself without playing straight man to a talking bunny; it’s a credit to Campbell that she can make this wackiest of Captain Marvel concepts palatable for a modern audience, and funny to boot. If Mary should continue on without Hoppy, I wouldn’t be near as excited.

Seeming more randomly, Campbell also reintroduces Dudley H. Dudley, the former Uncle Marvel, and now cleverly renamed “Uncle Marv.” As opposed to Hoppy, I’m not sure New Champion would be wholly different without Dudley in it, letting alone that the story seems to just forget about him in the end. I know Dudley has a long history specifically with Mary and it’s certainly possible Campbell is setting up something for down the road, but here this just seemed a cameo (not at all unwelcome) for cameo’s sake.

Too, of course, that the book’s villain couldn’t and shouldn’t have been anyone but a Sivana (plus crocodile creatures). Campbell’s book clearly follows directly from Geoff Johns' latest Shazam! series, but I didn’t expect a mention as detailed as name-checking the Magiclands. And though finishing Christopher Priest’s Black Adam series, I cynically predicted we’d never see his protege Malik “Bolt” White again, Campbell brings him back in the Lazarus Planet short, using his connection to his family as established in Priest’s book as motivation for Malik to help Mary. Again, all of this centered New Champion much more in the DCU than I thought.

“Doc” Shaner is clearly the right artist for the job here; it’s not so much as that his work looks specifically retro, a la the late Darwyn Cooke, so much that his pages — not too complicated, not too flashy — evoke the pure innocence associated with the Shazam family overall. Caitlin Yarsky has the unenviable position of following for the Lazarus Planet story, though I thought she did particularly well with faces and gestures for the comedic interactions between Mary and Malik. If not Shaner, I'm glad to see Yarsky following Mary into some of her subsequent appearances.

I have enjoyed recent Shazam! books and I’m a fan way back of Jerry Ordway’s Power of Shazam! series. But between all the kingdoms within the Rock of Eternity and everything that happened to it between Future State and Teen Titans Academy, Captain Marvel has begun to feel a little complicated even. Josie Campbell’s New Champion of Shazam! is not complicated, maybe to a fault, but within it shines the plucky spirit that reminds me of what I like about this franchise. For the first chapter of this incarnation, we’re off to a great start.

[Includes original and variant covers, character design]

Rating 3.0