Review: Shazam! Vol. 1: Meet the Captain! trade paperback (DC Comics)

There’s a lot I liked about Mark Waid’s Shazam Vol. 1: Meet the Captain!. It’s kicky and exciting and fun; Waid makes the book believably kid-friendly (which is probably the bar between what is a Shazam story and what is a Superman story), while pleasing older fans, I think, with deep (and zany) cuts from DC lore.

I would say this book feels much like setup, a prologue to the first real story. I struggle yet to know what Waid’s Shazam is about, some sense of the central conflict and who the supporting cast is (besides the obvious). With Waid leaving after the next book and then Josie Campbell coming on, I wonder if it’s going to be a while before this book has a real foundation. I’ve no doubts about Campbell, but that much can-kicking down the road is sometimes an ill-portent for a book.

But let that be a small bit of naysaying for, again, a good book overall. Taken simply as a graphic novel, it’s hard to go wrong with Waid and artist Dan Mora writing the World’s Mightiest Mortal.

[Review contains spoilers]

There’s a lot of talking animals in Meet the Captain. Anthropomorphic tiger Tawky Tawny continues in his current iteration from Geoff Johns' Shazam! series; also talking alien dinosaurs and talking gorillas. If there’s an aesthetic to Waid and Mora’s Shazam!, this is it — it’s a book where the heroes are perpetually palling around with talking animals.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

That’s germane to the Shazam nee Marvel franchise, of course — Tawky Tawny and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and so on. Waid is leaning in to what makes the Captain (Marvel) franchise what it is — as fantastical as modern-day Superman stories might get, there’s a line between fantastical and skewing young, and that line is probably when Superman talks to Krypto, whether Krypto talks back. Shazam!, however, has its dinosaur accountant and the gorilla Ted and more space dinosaurs on the way, and that gives the whole thing a family-friendly feel. That’s closer to Captain Marvel’s original roots, I think, more so than runs that included the fantasy elements but were more mature, like Johns and even to an extent Jerry Ordway’s legendary work.

This extends to the book’s conflict. Surely we’ve seen “Captain (Marvel) run amok” stories before, but I was struck by the bloodlessness of the inciting incident; the Captain is saving people from a collapsing building when suddenly, taken over by the Shazam pantheon … Billy begins yelling at people. It’s precious, really, veritably a child’s mistake — not like the Justice League has to come along and hold the Captain back, just that he shouts a lot — but works perfectly well with the young-skewing motif.

At the same time, neither as a adult reader did I feel I was being talked down to. In Waid’s heyday, he could be counted on for a pulse-pounding action sequence of the kind I think, counterintuitively, mainstream superhero comics struggle with; here, Billy Batson sucked out into the vacuum of space was just one such sequence. The Who’s Who of the book’s antagonists include Garguax, a Doom Patrol villain not much seen in modern times (short of in the recent TV series); Zazzala, the Queen Bee, in her Grant Morrison-era JLA appearance; and the mythical Atlas is done up in the armor of the Jack Kirby character rather than a George Perez-esque tunic. All of this suggested Waid had dual audiences in mind; further, Waid’s slang for the “Shazam kids,” like “bet” and “sus,” is far more realistic and palatable than Dan Jurgens' “Oh my gawd” in the contemporaneous Superman and Lois: Doom Rising.

There’s clearly a personality divide between Billy and the Captain present and growing. Cap is super-strong, but has Solomon’s ever-present morality driving him to do even little things like “eat more vegetables,” which causes Billy not to always want to be the Captain — and Billy finds himself referring to “him” and “me,” as if they’re not wholly the same being (more Jason Blood and Etrigan than Prince Adam and He-Man). To overpower the errant Shazam pantheon, Billy agrees to take on more of the wisdom of Solomon, but he’s warned it may in time “only heighten the division.” That’s interesting, though I don’t wholly know what it means — and then the question is whether Waid will be able to see it through to explanation before he leaves.

Indeed, I’m not sure what Waid’s Shazam! is about, and as he pivots to Black Adam for the second volume, it seems increasingly just like a tour of the current Shazam landscape. Billy’s a podcaster, and he goes to school and hangs out with his foster siblings, and he’s the Captain. There’s nary an unrelated cut-scene in the book, no new characters introduced (besides the dinosaur), not like Billy is trying to get his podcast off the ground or the new gym teacher might be an alien or anything along those lines. When you read Ordway’s Power of Shazam! series (and, even, this could be a sign of the times), you had the sense of building storylines for a run of issues; while Meet the Captain is enjoyable, I don’t see much here to last beyond precisely the amount of time Waid is giving it.

There’s a tough line that Waid has to walk in that the Shazam family that Johns introduced are both great characters and bring much-needed diversity to this DC franchise (and appeared in two motion pictures), but also that all DC things trend toward the middle and DC was never going to have six Marvels perpetually when they traditionally had three. Kudos to Waid then for an exceptionally clever solution, rebranding the Marvel siblings as the new “Squadron of Justice,” a once-and-current clearing house for the other Fawcett Comics properties owned by DC. As such, Darla becomes Bulletgirl, Pedro becomes (former villain) Mr. Atom, Eugene becomes Ibis the Invincible, and Spy Smasher is (for some reason) Mr. Dinosaur. If it is not exactly the same as being a “Captain,” it gives the kids a prominent place with the Shazam franchise, and keeps some DC IP properties in play to boot.

In all, Shazam Vol. 1: Meet the Captain! is a fine reintroduction of “the Captain” to the DC Universe by Mark Waid and Dan Mora, in line with what I perceive to be Dawn of DC’s kinder, gentler intentions. I certainly feel more comfortable with this iteration of Cap than I did with Geoff Johns' rebellious teen Billy Batson or the Magic Kingdoms concept that got more complicated as it went. I’m reminded just now of Waid’s masterful use of Captain Marvel in Underworld Unleashed, but I don’t even get the sense here of Waid gearing up to give Cap a big role in Absolute Power, for instance (unless I’m way off base) — this is a good Captain Marvel story, but that’s really all it is.

[Includes original and variant covers, but not even a Dan Mora sketchbook? Shocking!]

Rating 2.25