DC Comics and Marvel have a long tradition of thinking up weird and wacky names for their heroes and villains, with DC most often coming out on top (Hello, Mr. Mxyzptlk and Granny Goodness). The most weirdly named hero that DC ever created, however, was Captain Marvel.
The name has also appeared in Marvel Comics, of course, with the most common figure to use it being Captain Mar-Vell, an officer with the Kree Imperial Militia. We have, however, seen other Marvel characters take on the title, such as Monica Rambeau, Genis-Vell, Phyla-Vell, Khn’nr and Noh-Varr. Still, that’s just pointless trivia for now; It’s the DC Comics version that we’re interested in today.
Captain Marvel ... Shazam!
Over there, Captain Marvel is the alter ego of Billy Batson, a youth who works as a radio news reporter and was chosen to be a champion of good by the wizard Shazam. Whenever Billy speaks the wizard’s name, he is struck by a magic lightning bolt that transforms him into an adult superhero empowered with the abilities of six archetypal figures. Due to a number of lawsuits, DC Comics has been unable to promote and market Captain Marvel under that name since 1972, and use the trademark Shazam! as the title of their comic books instead. Consequently, Captain Marvel himself is frequently erroneously referred to as “Shazam”.
It seems they’re now officially moving in that direction, dropping the name Captain Marvel, giving the character a new costume design, fitting him into the rebooted DCnU and potentially making a movie out of it all. In a recent interview with Newsarama, Geoff Johns spoke at length about the character, saying that his relaunch will start in Justice League #7:
Well, there are a lot of reasons for the change. One is that everybody thinks he’s called Shazam already, outside of comics. It’s also, for all sorts of reasons, calling him Shazam just made sense for us. And, you know, every comic book he’s in right now has Shazam on the cover. So I think just by embracing that and calling him Shazam.
I definitely recommend the interview, which has a lot of great nuggets of information about Captain Ma … Sorry, about Shazam … and has a couple of interesting pieces of information about the future issues of Justice League and a couple of thoughts about a possible movie adaptation of Shazam!
(via Newsarama)