11/7 The Multiversity annotations Pt 7

LIBRARY artefact #039

THUNDERWORLD #1

Our look behind the scenes at The Multiversity continues unexpectedly with a moment’s reflection on this attempt to create a definitive, for-the-ages Captain Marvel book! 

This was our take on the original and best Captain Marvel, the Fawcett Comics character created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck in 1939.

I was pleased with how this one turned out at the time and of the range of one-shot superhero stories I’ve done, this is an all-time favourite. It had a clean narrative simplicity but structurally it was up there with Pax in a less demonstrative and more relaxed way.

The definitive Captain Marvel artist C.C. Beck described his own approach thusly – ‘When Bill Parker and I went to work on Fawcett’s first comic book in late 1939, we both saw how poorly written and illustrated the superhero comic books were. We decided to give our reader a real comic book, drawn in comic-strip style and telling an imaginative story, based not on the hackneyed formulas of the pulp magazine, but going back to the old folk tales and myths of classic times.’

When we started Thunderworld in 2012, there were numerous exceptions to the first part of Beck’s statement, but we took the second part to heart!

I knew Cameron Stewart would be the perfect artist for this and it was the first story written and completed before all the others. Stewart updates the traditional smooth finish and elevated drawing ability of the traditional C.C. Beck style with a refreshingly modern line and killer storytelling. The gorgeous bright colours of the great Nathan Fairbairn add an expansive openness.

There’s not a great deal to unpack here. It’s pure story and what subtext exists is explained by the Wizard on several occasions!

The brief was an easy one; I read through a ton of Golden Age Captain Marvel adventures with the intention of doing something that distilled the imagination, invention and wit of those stories but came with some contemporary trappings and humour. My intention was to show how a modern Marvel Family book could work without too much tweaking while still retaining much of the whimsy and charm of the originals. Updating without modernising!

Wrapped up in a neat time travel twist, (watch the rapid passage of the sun across the sky in this one) the plan was to feature the whole Marvel Family, their supporting cast and significant villains in one epic length story with the mad fairy-tale feel of the original Marvel adventures!

In the original stories, the Rock of Eternity was represented by a towering rocky peak, but we wanted something which looked like the central floating needle on a compass dial. A structure at the heart of the multiversal Orrery, existing in 52 universes simultaneously.

The Wizard Shazam is a mainstay of Captain Marvel adventures since the character’s origin story from Whiz Comics #2 in 1940, and it’s he who provides the Marvels with their magic word. His physical form is pulped by a falling stone cube in that first story, but his spirit form remains to guide his champion.

Billy Batson is now a roving online reporter for WHIZ Media equipped with some kind of battery pack transmitter in an attempt to subtly retro-update his original job as an underage radio reporter! These are the bulky Apple products of a world with a clunkier aesthetic.

We see Freddie Freeman, Captain Marvel Jnr., here at his job on the newsstand. We can see Society of Super-Heroes along with a Batman title, reminding us of how comic books provide the bridges between parallel universes in DC’s schema.

I loved the idea of Mary Bromfield’s ‘Good Deeds Ledger’ from the old stories. It seemed such a charming outrageous notion to revisit in cynical times. We should all keep a Good Deeds Ledger and update it regularly!

Traditionally, ‘Shazam!’ is Billy Batson’s magic word, while Freddie and Mary yelled ‘Captain Marvel’ to effect their thunderous changes. This seemed a little counter-intuitive – and meant that every time the young heroes mentioned their senior partner in conversation, they would trigger another explosive transfiguration, making a stress-free social life well-nigh impossible.

We streamlined it here on Earth-5, so that all three Marvels say the same magic word, the Wizard’s name Shazam, to summon their superhero identities.

I always preferred the white costume given to Mary Marvel by creator Jerry Ordway in his Power of Shazam series and felt it suited her character better than the red. Here we ratify the red (Cap), white (Mary), and (Jnr.) blue scheme which gives each of the Marvels their own distinctive look for the long shots and team formations.

The writer and critic T. Hedge Coke, whose insightful work I’ve been reading and enjoying for many years, (Coke’s ‘Patricia Highsmash’ columns at the Comic Watch website are well worth your time) has spoken of their disappointment that Mary Marvel doesn’t get to throw a single punch in this story. This piece gives me a long-awaited opportunity to point out that Mary punches the super-powered Georgia Sivana and is allotted the same number of strikes as Captain Marvel Jnr., who also hits his counterpart once!

I’ve mentioned before that there’s an undercurrent to the Fawcett reconstruction work here and there’s something about the sunlit shadowless simplicity of Earth-5 that recalls those post-apocalyptic suburban paradises that used to illustrate Jehovah’s Witness magazines like The Watchtower and Awake! Where lions lay down with lambs on shorn Midwestern lawns with white picket fences, mailboxes, and garages, where the saved in this synthetic earthly utopia all looked like 1950s travelling salesmen and their white picket Stepford families. Earth-5’s retro-America is someone’s idea of a perfect world…

I’ve always loved the family life of the villainous Doctor Sivana and the dimension it gives him that other solitary mad scientists lack; this stunted, hateful and embittered dwarf is twice married and divorced with four children which appeals to my love of the absurd. Clearly, Sivana’s a virile and active bedroom gymnast in between his many near-successful attempts to establish himself as ruler not of Fawcett City, New York, the USA, or even the world, but the entire universe!

Here, he uses his scientific prowess to duplicate the effect of the Marvels’ magic thunderbolt, transforming three of his children, boneheaded, handsome Magnificus, and sneaky genius teens Jnr. and Georgia, into superhumans.

Some readers thought it was a little cruel to have Captain Marvel Jnr. pretend to be smitten by Georgia’s new sexy appearance only to trick her into saying the word - ‘Sivana’ in this case - that transformed her back to a powerless geek with an overbite.

As we saw it, Georgia’s the spoilt, super-rich, super-smart brat of a masterfiend with designs on the entire universe, and she’ll likely blossom into evil Kylie Jenner given the passage of those awkward years, some braces, contacts, and a little surgical intervention. Georgia Sivana is supervillain nepo royalty who truly believes ‘WHO NEEDS BRAINS WITH A BODY LIKE THIS?’ when she shifts to her super-self – of course she undermines her own confident assertion by immediately doing something stupid!

Was she humiliated unnecessarily by the young Marvels, as some concerned fans felt?

Or was she checked in her hubristic, privileged assumption that a sexy makeover would be enough to conceal her unpleasant personality and make everyone fall in love with her?

I find it heartening that many readers took Georgia’s side on the grounds that, in her ‘secret identity’ she’s never drawn as attractively as the superheroic Marvels and seems therefore the underdog… but let’s remember that Jnr.’s alter ego Freddie Freeman walks with a crutch, while Mary Bromfield, although adopted by a wealthy couple, began her life in an orphanage! Can either be accused of punching down when it comes to privileged Georgia Sivana?

The debate rumbles on like distant thunder…

The multitude of parallel world Sivanas depicted here include:

The handsome, conflicted Sivana who looks like the philosopher Ken Wilber did in the ‘90s and describes himself as ‘…A NOBEL PRIZE WINNING SCIENTIST WITH SOME PERSONAL PROBLEMS IS ALL…’ is from Earth-3, where Good and Evil are flipped, with familiar heroes in villainous roles and vice versa.

Lady Sivana hails from Earth-11.

There’s a black Sivana from Earth-23.

Doctor Hissivana the snake from Earth-26.

Baby/Super-Deformed Sivana from Earth-42.

Vampire Sivana from Earth-43.

Serial Killer ‘Lecter’-Sivana is from Earth-13

Mecha-Sivana from Earth-44.

Luchador-Sivana – your guess is as good as mine! I’m going with SivanaBane from Earth-32…

There’s also a sort of Earth-G(oatee) gangster Sivana, with no assigned home, along with a few others - Punk Sivana can go to Earth-47 to cause trouble there. Muttonchop Sivana is Earth-18 or perhaps 19, or both. Businessman Sivana (anybody’s call) and a Hooded Pulp Sivana Earth-20. There’s also Nazi Sivana from Earth-10 who appears in Mastermen but I don’t see him here unless he’s ‘Businessman’.

We decided that the Marvel family would have a back-up team and combined the three Lieutenant Marvels (Hilly, Tall and Fat, as they were known, here without the superpowers they gained in the old stories) with comedy foil Uncle Dudley, and the magnificent Tawky Tawny, the talking tiger, to create a squad of Challengers-style science adventurers, ever-ready to tackle any problems that might arise when the Marvels were otherwise engaged!

The monsters here are inspired by the original Monster Society of Evil – the most unabashed villain team name ever, or at least until The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants!

From left to right, the post-metamorphosis ‘hyperfly’ version of Mr. Mind from 52. A towering version of one of the Crocodile Men from planet Punkus. Mr. Atom. Oom the Mighty. The villainous thundercloud is our own invention (inspired by Carmine Infantino’s eerie, evil cumuli from The Flash #111 March 1960) the result of an unshakable conviction that an angry sentient storm seemed exactly like the sort of enemy Captain Marvel might attract.

The subway station should have been on Beck Plaza, as mentioned in The Just and named for Captain Marvel artist C.C. Beck. I forgot to mention it in the script!

I’ve always loved the weird jazzy modernism of the plausibly sentient subway train that brings Billy Batson to the Rock of Eternity. By showing multiple versions of the train hurtling through hyperspace, we were suggesting that these vehicles (or is there only one living creature seen at different points in time?) travel through the dimensions, recruiting shamanic superheroes with magic words from multiple parallel worlds, perhaps including our own!

Sivana uses his own scientific formula to transform himself into the hulking Black Sivana, complete with tusks. His costume is reminiscent of Black Adam, the monstrous proportions recall Captain Marvel’s ‘beastman’ foes like Ibac and Kull.

The time travel loop plays out as pages 6 and 34/35 echo one another. When Billy discovers the mined time crystals he catches up and becomes the future self’ we saw on page 6 sending his urgent warning back through time. Having already seen his future self using this method to contact him, Billy figures out what to do. Radio kid that he is, he guesses the time crystals work like radio quartz and sends a broadcast back to himself hours earlier!   

When Mary says – ‘I’D LOVE TO MEET ME FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE. I WONDER IF I’D BE VERY DIFFERENT at all…’ - it’s a wry reference to the ‘main Earth’ Mary Marvel as she appeared in Final Crisis.

The creators of the weekly Countdown series that preceded Final Crisis introduced a running thread where sweet, innocent Mary Marvel is turned to the dark side by Black Adam and equipped with a shiny black mini-skirted costume a new dedication to wickedness and a new name, Black Mary. The creators of Countdown intended to have her redeemed but we decided to explore some of the implications of a bad Mary Marvel.

For me at least, the sexing up of Countdown’s Black Mary Marvel had a real-world analogue in the sexualisation of Disney starlets like Britney, Christina, Miley, and the rest. Presented to the audience as wholesome kid entertainers and role models for girls – then given a ‘dirty’ makeover to attract a whole new following…

Final Crisis showed the horrific, corrupting onslaught of a cosmic suicide capitalism - ‘WORK! CONSUME! DIE DIE DIE FOR DARKSEID!’ - that reduces all life to its market value, to commodity, no more than the disposable instruments of a singular tyrannical will to power.

In that vein, we twisted the Countdown plot thread further to reveal a Mary Marvel possessed by Jack Kirby’s torture god Desaad, (standing in for middle aged male comic book writers or music execs), and pornified into a monstrous caricature of cosmetically and surgically enhanced synthetic femininity. Her hair was chopped down to stubble and a few dyed purple tufts as a call-back to those ‘crazy Britney’ headlines, hinting at the toll on her mental health such performative saleable sexuality might imply (there are also deliberate echoes of Mary Marvel’s UK counterpart Kid Marvelman, who became in the hands of Alan Moore the apocalyptic and terrifying epitome of the superhero kid gone bad trope).  

The savage satire sounded great on paper, but in the end, I felt bad about putting Mary Marvel through all that just to make a point about people putting her through all that.

Thunderworld gave me the opportunity to make amends by writing Mary Marvel as I prefer to imagine the character, more in the vein of my Supergirl, as an ultra-competent, compassionate, clever teenage girl with fierce principles – while emphasising the distinctive qualities suggested by her acronymic magic word – Selene for grace, Hippolyta for strength, Ariadne for skill, (later changed to Artemis but Ariadne is much better), Zephyrus for flight Aurora for beauty (later Artemis but again Aurora is better), Minerva for wisdom.

I loike this story a lot – and as a kind of All-Star Captain Marvel it’s one of the most perfectly constructed single issues and summations of a brand that I’ve done.

I can usually see all kinds of glaring mistakes in my published work but this one is remarkably error free!

Coming soon – The Multiversity Guidebook and Mastermen!