With A Magic Word: REBOOT! I Mean: SHAZAM!

DC’s Justice League panel at the New York Comic Con was held earlier today – well, they called it the “Justice League” panel, but it pretty much had every creator on the New 52 except for Scott Lobdell, who rumor has it was unavilable due to a prior commitment to be in a fetal position, rocking, crying and ignoring the constant ring of the telephone.

There were a ton of revelations in the panel, one of which being that DC didn’t open the panel to questions from the audience until more than halfway through, which is a MAJOR departure from the DC panels we’ve see at SDCC since 2006, where Dan DiDio has historically said, “This is a panel about INSERT SUBJECT HERE! Let’s take questions!” Thanks again, San Diego Batgirl!

But one of the other bigger revelations was that DC is rebooting and relaunching Captain Marvel.

It’s not clear yet exactly when it will be debuting, but The Curse of Shazam is gonna be a backup feature in Justice League at some point in the future, written by Geoff Johns with pencils by Gary Frank, who previously worked with Johns on Action Comics a few years ago, as well as on the Secret Origin miniseries that rebooted Superman’s origin story in 2009. You know, before they rebooted it again a month ago.

Frank has a decidedly realistic style – his Superman looked exactly like Christopher Reeve, and his Jor-El was Brando’s spitting image…

…well, spitting image with one exception. Let’s just say that Gary Frank not only makes you believe a man can fly, but that a man’s father didn’t eat every hoagie in Philadelphia. So unless Frank’s looking to slum with some cartooning, we can probably expect a more straight-ahead, not-for-kids superhero story than a C. C. Beck homage with dapper tigers.

The key word being “probably.” If Superman’s backstory’s been rebooted a lot recently, it doesn’t hold a candle to The Big Red Cheese, who will have been re-envisioned no less than four times… since 2005. They’ve made him an old-school kids story, they’ve had Captain Marvel Jr. take over, they’ve had Mary Marvel go S&M, and they split the powers of Captain Marvel over a bunch of different kids in FlashPoint… and now this. Whatever this is.

I have been a fan of Captain Marvel since I was about six years old, when I bothered Ed the counter guy at Ebbs’ Corner Store in Dipshit, Connecticut every day for a month, asking him if the JLA issue pictured to the right here had hit the spinner rack yet.

But historically, DC’s had a hard time figuring out what to do with Captain Marvel; pretty much none of the tacks they’ve taken has really hit since they got the rights to the character back in the early 1970’s. They’ve never been able to find whatever it is that makes people respond to the character they way they did when they were kids.

But with Geoff Johns on the book, and particularly Gary Frank, who we’ve seen knows how to take iconic adaptations of characters and successfully translate them back into the comic books that originated them, I think we’re going to see what’s been missing from Captain Marvel for all these years and all these versions:

A motherfucking Winnebago.