My sense is that Geoff Johns' New 52-era Shazam! series tended too dark, and Mark Waid and now Josie Campbell’s Shazam! series is tending too light. If there’s a happy medium, it was probably Jerry Ordway’s Power of Shazam! series, and — knowing now that this current series will be cancelled after Campbell’s fourth collection — it remains to be seen if Captain Marvel’s inevitable next iteration can strike that better balance.

Waid and Campbell’s Shazam! Vol. 2: Moving Day doesn’t acquit the Shazam family of characters poorly, but the by-the-numbers storytelling and sitcom-esque plotting isn’t compelling for the modern reader. Where the story gets interesting, it’s overshadowed by zaniness and melodrama that undercuts what forward progress might be made.

[Review contains spoilers]

To “Moving Day”’s credit, I thought Waid offered some real-seeming dilemmas of a foster family set against the fantastical landscape. The Vasquezes have taken in kids that need homes, but that means money and space are tight. They are able eventually to save enough to buy a new house with their old house as collateral, but when “the Captain” Billy Batson destroys it in a fight with Black Adam, that not only means they can’t buy the new house, but that the kids have to be re-placed since the Vasequezes' don’t have a permanent residence. Later on, Campbell writes a brusque, angry representative from Child Protective Services that seemed more stereotypical than real, but Waid started things off well.

Waid’s final issue, midway through the book, teams the Captain with Creeper Jack Ryder, who’s discerned Billy’s identity and needs his help capturing Shadow Thief.¹ This was one of the more cogent portrayals of the Creeper I’ve seen, with Ryder as an opportunistic wheedler a la John Constantine, and his madcap Creeper persona mostly a feint to make villains more compliant. Metamorpho cameos too, giving the whole thing shades of the Silver/Bronze Age mod aesthetic that Waid’s channelling in his Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 3: Elementary. I’m not as enamored with it all as Waid is, and I wouldn’t have minded a little more about the Captain and his cast in Waid’s last issue, but a good use of the Creeper irrespective.

At the end of Waid’s Shazam! Vol. 1: Meet the Captain!, he teased a growing rift, even personality split, between Billy Batson and his alter ego. I was interested to see this explored in the second volume because it’s such an upending of the Captain Marvel concept. What makes Captain Marvel not Superman is that Billy is a kid, and even when Billy is Captain Marvel, there’s still a child’s sensibilities driving this superhero. Having Billy and the Captain be separate entities foils this; that makes Captain Marvel less interesting, though I recognize it’s all intentional from Waid for the purpose of exploring these very concepts.

In the latter half of the book, Campbell brings this to a crisis. With some enhancements to the wisdom of Solomon, Billy and the Captain have been operating independently, though Campbell’s extent of it is the Captain hiding letters from Billy’s birth mother to protect Billy from “big emotions” that cause some other-dimensional upset. That seems juvenile, unfortunately; the Captain is supposedly the wiser, but his approach is to lie and obfuscate, and it’s clear to the audience that he’s the “bad guy.” Billy, meanwhile, is around his mother and her new family for mere seconds before he runs out of her house, saying he doesn’t “understand” how his mother has her life on track now but not when he lived with her, which equally seemed a naive presentation of Billy.

Campbell’s plotting further falls apart in that if Billy’s mother is alive, living nearby, and has enough knowledge of him to be sending letters and calling CPS, then assuredly the Vasquezes would be contacted when Billy didn’t respond to the mother’s copious letters. Not to mention, CPS would have set up some sort of visitation program and/or CPS would have re-placed Billy with his mother since she’s clearly stable now.

There’s also a scene where Billy’s foster sister Darla finds a box of, apparently, “burned letters,” though why burned letters would be kept in a box and not be ashes in the fireplace is another of the book’s slip-ups. It nearly seems an art mistake by Emanuela Lupacchino; though her Creeper issue is stellar, in later issues when it’s Lupacchino and Mike Norton, the Captain looks so youthfully like Billy that it undercuts the pervading idea of them as separate people. Early in the book, Goran Sudzuka draws nicely thin, spare figures, though the faces at times have an absurd rictus to them.

There is some cool monster play among Campbell’s stories, including the dimension-hopping dragon serpents, whose mouths contain panels within panels like an Escher image. Campbell also recasts classic Captain Marvel villain Jeepers as a horde of Man-Bat-esque creatures that erupt periodically like cicadas. But none of it is particularly suspenseful when set against the antics of the kids trying to keep their caseworker from noticing anything’s amiss — slamming doors, shutting windows, pretending Tawky Tawny is a “non-moving, tiger mannequin.” Obviously anthropomorphic tigers lend themselves a bit to this kind of slapstick, but I felt I was as much in a sitcom episode where the kids try to keep their puppy a secret as I did in a superhero comic.

I will be curious to see how Josie Campbell resolves all of this, presumably restoring the Billy Batson/Captain Marvel partnership to its status quo, though that must mean the now-sentient Captain “dies” in some sense. I don’t mind Shazam! Vol. 2: Moving Day’s meta-interpretive tendencies, though I equally wouldn’t mind a more straightforward Captain Marvel story — between Geoff Johns and now, we’ve had a lot of years of thinking and rethinking the Captain. Notably no one in this book has a storyline beyond helping Billy, and with so many characters, that seems wasteful, especially since we know this title’s end is in sight.

[Includes original and variant covers]