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Marvel, Mar-Vell, Genis, and Recycling

When Marvel Comics began, way, way back, it bore the name Timely, then Atlas, and shortly after it started doiing superheroes again - setting the standards of the Silver Age that DC had started by refurbishing old Golden Age superheroes - it took the name Marvel.

This name fit their more vigorous, virile, and vital approach to comics better, and represented a fair piece of marketing on the part of Stan Lee, a man who has made a pitch or two in his day (if his day ever ended as a pitchman). Some research, interestingly, brought up a peculiar fact that no one in the industry seemed to know: The name "Captain Marvel" had lapsed as a copyright after DC Comics sued Fawcett Comics to death in 1953 over the real but probably inevitable similarities between Captain Marvel and Superman, who predated Fawcett's flying hero by enough years to establish a clear priority.

This research postdated the dreadful incarnation of a second character named "Captain Marvel," a robotic character who could make his body fly apart like a broken doll by yelling "Split!" and could reform by yelling "Xam!", but one doubts that that particular low-budget dreadful even involved a query to copyrights in his deservedly ill-fated creation.

"Marvel Comics should have the name 'Captain Marvel," thought Stan Lee in the narratized version of the story. So, with Gene Colan doing the original design and the art for the first stories of the character, Stan Lee launched a new Captain Marvel, who in appearance and origins didn't really have anything at all to do with Fawcett's red-suited hero.

Convergence of Characters

Early in the existence of Captain Marvel - "Mar-Vell," as his driver's license would have read - he received a visual makeover at the hands of the excellent Gil Kane, who put him in a red, yellow, and blue outfit that suggested Kane still had some of the same feel for costumes that he used designing them for the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom (the latter whom Kane created entire).

While this new costume did not suggest Fawcett's character, it did bring him into the mainstream of Marvel's super-heroes in look and away from the fifties costume themes that Colan's design suggested. With the visual element working toward a superheroic direction, the hero seemed more likely moving in stories that represented the superheroic more than the space operaic.

It took the sneaky designs of venerated comics scribe Roy Thomas to fully bring the character to echo his Golden Age namesake. Roy Thomas, one might recall, had a history of trying to drag everything he could from the Golden Age into the Silver. His attempt to revive the green- faced Vision of the forties led to the creation of the red-faced version that has graced Avengers stories for slightly over 30 years. His conclusion to the memorable "Kree-Skrull War" arc in Avengers involved Rick Jones summoning up tangible visions of Timely's heroes, including some who had made it into Marvel's modern stable: The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, the Angel, the Blazing Skull, the Fin, the (original) Vision, and probably a few others that time has blurred in my own memory. Later, Thomas would pen stories in books like Invaders and All-Star Squadron that would work with the first generation of superheroes, on a modern-day interpretation of their home turf.

Roy Thomas wouldn't let an opportunity like working some original Captain Marvel into the adventures of Mar-Vell go by.

Captain Marvel, in his original incarnation under Fawcett, had a special appeal to kids in that this hero changed in form from the comics equivalent of a regular kid (originally, a paperboy) to a superhero whom lawyers proved could duplicate any of Superman's stunts that mattered. Billy Batson had only to say "Shazam," the name of the wizard who invested him with his power, and he would become Captain Marvel.

Slightly over twenty-five years later, Roy Thomas took Marvel's chronic sidekick, Rick Jones, and paired him with Mar-Vell. Rick had originally served as a companion to the Hulk; plot developments ultimately separated them and Rick therefore spent a short period as an apprentice working with the recently-revived Captain America, even wearing the costume of Bucky Barnes for a story or two, before that went sour. As a sinner returns to his folly, he found himself connected to Mar-Vell, and a mishap involving a pair of cosmic wristbands - the "Nega-bands" - left him stuck sharing a persona with Mar-Vell, who traded places with him by banging these wrist-bands together. The inactive member of the pair had to idle his time away in the Negative Zone, a Kirby-era place from Fantastic Four where chunks of matter floated around and monsters, including the villanous Annihilus, sometimes preyed upon intruders.

This change left enough there for a lawyer to make a claim at least as solid as the one that had sued the original Captain Marvel into oblivion. The characters had the same name ("Captain Marvel," versus the unquestionably similar "Captain Marvel"), and each had a youthful counterpart (the prepubescent Billy Batson versus the teen-aged Rick Jones), with whom he traded places by a dramatic burst of energy (via lightning bolt when Billy Batson said "Shazam", versus via a more Silver- Age generic energy discharge when Rick Jones banged the nega-bands together).

Other Directions

Probably the Rick Jones era of Marvel's Captain Marvel represents the "classic" version, even though the Colan-Lee appeared before it and the Starlin "cosmic" version followed and lasted longer (indeed, until the death of the character).

In Starlin's hands, however, the character lost some of the derivative baggage that represented an amusing inside joke to those who didn't care for the concept of the dual-identity version of the superhero. Starlin bloated the character's importance on the scale of the cosmos as a whole, sometimes involving him in conflicts with villains that represented incarnate versions of abstract concepts.

Mar-Vell had never reached the status of first-stringer, which kept him from ever really becoming a presence in some team book like Avengers or Defenders, but his success seemed adequate to Marvel Comics for them to spin off a dreadful female equivalent ("Ms. Marvel," who lacked the panache of the more likely "She-Hulk" and "Spider-Woman," who both roughly dated from the same period in the mid-1970s). The whole notion of cosmic heroes, perhaps, held some inherent trait that alienated the common reader - how does a writer, even an excellent one, relate a man who saves the universe in his role as cosmic defender in slugfests with mad extraterrestrial godlings, to a reader who watches "Gilligan's Island" and eats TV dinners? Some of the concept had become a bit too abstract, failing to work from a formula that had made characters like Spider-Man connect to his readers.

Starlin, who had done much to define the character, got to write him out of the Marvel universe in The Death of Captain Marvel, an interesting piece in which the main character had to face an unheroic demise from cancer. In not allowing him to fight to death after the fashion of other superheroes (say, Elektra or Wonder Man), Starlin did fabricate one of the departures from cliche that sometimes make him very interesting to read.

Marvel Comics left Mar-Vell dead in a rare piece of self-restraint. That a character does not have a commercial following that can support his own title does not prevent him from reappearing in mainstream titles (see, for instance, Wonder Man in Kurt Busiek's Avengers).

A Shadow of a Reflection

Marvel might have recognized something, ultimately, in Roy Thomas' vision for Mar-Vell, because it has cast Mar-Vell's implausible son Genis (once known as "Legacy") in his father's footsteps. This includes the whole business about switching places with Rick Jones, though the relationship works from a more equal basis - Genis provides power, and Rick Jones provides insight about how the world works, an insight he sometimes uses to abuse his superpowered counterpart for providing a vulneribility to cruel jokes.

Marvel Comics has defined this concept differently than the classic Captain Marvel of the Gil Kane and Roy Thomas era, though; the approach most resembles early Impulse, a book that dealt with its plots on a humorous backdrop of the clash of incompatible personalities. Genis, in gaffes like the one to the right where his words have another meaning when spoken from within a toilet bowl, represents the straight man role that Max Mercury has played in Impulse, with Rick's occasional misdeeds towards the new Captain Marvel providing most of the humor.

In a way, this adds yet another element of the Fawcett prototype, since the Captain Marvel of the forties and fifties appeared in light-hearted stories with a good deal of humor in their concept. Those books refused to take themselves so seriously as the comics of the post-Silver Age era, and, for their day, they worked. Perhaps today the humorous formula will work as well, in a day when readers may have become tired of gloomy, dark, serious, depressing self-important content in a medium presumably representing escapism. Escapism doesn't work unless one escapes from something worse to something better.

That Marvel would revive the Captain Marvel concept - with all the borrowed elements from Fawcett's character - suggests something enduring in the premise that did not make the spacefaring soldier or the cosmic defender work. Derivative creations that build on Fawcett's paragon work best when they remain truest to their prototype.