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Back in 2019, there were 2 Captain Marvel movies out in theaters. One from Marvel Studios, one from DC Studios. Though one continued with the name Captain Marvel, the other Shazam! But how exactly did we end up with two Captain Marvel movies from different studios? And why did one change their name to Shazam?
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Prove to me
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I have nothing to prove to you. This is Captain Marvel. Oh, right
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Hey, yo, back! Off! And this is Captain Marvel. But you probably know him as... Shazam
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In the summer of 2019, something unprecedented happened. Marvel and DC both had characters with the same name
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starring in major motion pictures, debuting at Cineplexes everywhere. So what happened
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One of them blinked. Oh, hey. What's up? I'm a superhero. Yeah, his name is Captain Sparkle Fingers
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No, it's not. No, it's not. It's not my name. The name Captain Marvel has a long and illustrious history on the four-color printed page
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However, many characters have donned the mantle over the course of the publications of these comics
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and the story is anything but straightforward. The first Captain Marvel, created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck for Fawcett Comics, was published in 1939
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He first appeared in the now-iconic Wiz Comics No. 2. The comics tell the story of Billy Batson, a.k.a. a normal kid, who befriends a wizard
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and unlocks the power of Shazam. All he needs to do to embrace otherworldly powers and the body of an adult is to say
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the wizard's name. Shazam. Wait, for real? Say it, okay! Almost overnight, the Big Red Cheese, a blatant ripoff of Seagull and Schuster's Superman
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was tearing up the sales charts. With an expansive cast of iterative characters like Mary Marvel and Freddie Freeman, a.k.a
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Captain Marvel Jr. being introduced by Otto Bender and Beck, Fawcett Comics was giving the
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big blue Boy Scout a run for his money. In fact, in the mid-40s, Captain Marvel and his associated
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titles were the highest-selling comics in the entire industry, which, of course, pissed off
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Superman's owners' national publications, who would soon rebrand as DC Comics. Earth's Mightiest
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Mortal was so popular that in 1941 he received a Republic Pictures serial titled The Adventures of Captain Marvel Repeat my name Shazam This serial was so successful that it along with the overwhelming sales of the Marvel family of comics
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caused DC to sue Fawcett, attempting to get them to stop publishing everyone's favorite magical superhero
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National Comics Publications vs. V. Fawcett Publications, Inc., officially went to court in 1948
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National's main argument was that Captain Marvel was so similar to Superman that he was intellectual property theft
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Despite the judge presiding over the case leaning in favor with DC initially
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the case went in favor of Fawcett after the court was presented with the fact that Superman's
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copyright was allowed to lapse due to a few newspaper strips that did not bear the proper
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copyright information. But just like you can't keep a good villain down, this case was far from
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over and after multiple back and forths, Fawcett eventually settled with National out of court
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agreed to stop publishing Captain Marvel and paid national upwards of $400,000 in damages
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Fawcett Comics soon went out of business, and many of the key creative figures were conscripted
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to working across the street at DC in their Superman department. Oh, the irony. While there
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Otto Bender, the chief architect of Captain Marvel's success, employed many of the same
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derivative approaches that had worked with Captain Marvel to build out the Superman family
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Here's looking at you, Superboy, Supergirl, and Beppo the Supermonkey. Eventually, DC ended up buying out the Fawcett assets at auction
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if for no other purpose than to sit on them, to make sure that no one else started giving the big blue Boy Scout a run for his money
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The name Captain Marvel was ostensibly abandoned at this point. I'm just going to chill here for a little while if that's okay
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It laid dormant for nearly a decade after Fawcett called it quits
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until 1967 when, after realizing that the copyright for the name Captain Marvel had been freed up
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Stan Lee and Gene Colan introduced a Kree soldier named Mar-Vell into the Marvel Universe
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This character's superhero name? Captain Marvel From here on out we get into a virtual arms race of Marvel and DC each publishing characters named Captain Marvel Marvel throughout the 70s and 80s had multiple characters named Captain Marvel
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Monica Rambeau, Janice Vell, Faye Lovell, and Kinnear have all used the title
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But not to be outdone, DC wasn't going to take this sitting down
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During the process of luring iconic writer and artist Jack Kirby away from Marvel in the 1970s
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DC gave a green light to a project that would have brought back Billy Batson
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and have had Kirby write the new adventures of the character. The plan was to recruit CeCe back to once again draw the project
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as Kirby insisted that he was the greatest Captain Marvel artist to ever do it
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and that no other illustrator could come close. This time, the title would be named with one magic word
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Shazam, the original Captain Marvel, due to the fact that DC had lost the copyright to the title Captain Marvel
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but not the character name. Who are you? His name is Thundercrack
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hero to the people will have the power and speed of lightning all in one
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Dude, that sounds like a butt thing. By the time Kirby did join DC Comics, however, the timing wasn't right for him to be given
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Captain Marvel due to his substantial new gods and Jimmy Olsen commitments
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Therefore, the title was still launched, but their longtime writer-editor Denny O'Neill
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on scripting duties. Unfortunately, O'Neill and Beck had a falling out fairly quickly, but the title continued
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now with a vital piece of the puzzle in place, the word Shazam
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This word, having been popularized in the 40s by the original comics
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had now entered the popular lexicon. And it only increased invisibility in 1974
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when Billy Batson received the small screen treatment with a TV show that lasted three seasons and was officially titled Shazam
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A word which transforms him in a flash into the mighty Captain Marvel
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This would permanently muddy the waters as the character's name, while the character inside the show and books was still called Captain Marvel
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with every passing year the powers that be struggled to reinforce the branding that Shazam was the name of the wizard and the protagonist magical catchphrase not his name And with each successive decade and Marvel putting out more and more comics
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with the same Captain Marvel on them, this situation just got more and more confusing
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Eventually, in 2012, during the New 52 publishing initiative, Billy Batson's superhero persona was
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officially renamed to Shazam. Why would they do this? Were they overwhelmed with fighting the
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cultural tide? Sort of. Honestly, it was mostly in order to differentiate Earth's Mightiest Mortal
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from the wildly popular character that Marvel had begun publishing in July of the same year
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Longtime Marvel heroine Carol Danvers, aka Ms. Marvel, had been rebranded and relaunched by
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Kelly Sue DeConnick and Dexter Soy as Captain Marvel. Don't invoke her name. Smash cut to almost
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10 years later, and both Billy Batson Captain Marvel and Carol Danvers Captain Marvel are
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tearing it up on the big screens across from each other. Wait, what
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And yet only one of them actually has the name Captain Marvel. And changes like these are going to happen more and more often
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as we push deeper and deeper into the publishing catalogs of these companies
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This competition between Marvel and DC is only going to continue and get bigger and more pronounced
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DC hasn't had the best track record with Superman on the big screen. And there have been multiple rumors for years
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that Marvel is prepping the Century, Squadron Supreme, and Blue Marvel projects
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Could Marvel make a great Superman movie before DC does? How weird would that be
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Ultimately, the tale of two Captain Marvels is one that's quintessentially comics
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Greedy publishers, weird outgrowths of court trials, long stretches where what is being published
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is ignored by the general population, and then that one idea just hits and changes everything
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The fact that Captain Marvel's name is now Shazam, canonically, is something that's simultaneously understandable
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from a business perspective, and very infuriating for longtime fans. but here we are
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In a world where we're so blessed with a ubiquity of big-budget superhero projects
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that we not only have a great Captain Marvel movie, but we also have a great Captain Marvel movie
#Comics