You Know, For Kids!: Justice League #21 Review

Captain Marvel occupies a strange place in the superhero comics world, in that he is a character that occupies about a thousand places in a million different fans’ hearts.

He is simultaneously the Big Red Cheese who fought talking mescal worms with his gentleman tiger Tawky Tawny, while he is also the generic 1970s superhero who rode around the desert in a Winnebago punching dudes and talking to a big nipply globe on the dashboard, and at the same time he is the horribly damaged and tragic character who beat Superman to a standstill before sacrificing himself to save the world in Kingdom Come. Hell, there are times when I can’t think of the character without remembering my early 2000s drunken tirade that Dan DiDio should give Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham a million bucks a piece to complete their Miracleman story using Captain Marvel, since Miracleman was never anything but a royalty dodge on The Big Red Cheese anyway.

My point is, each version of Captain Marvel means something to somebody, and paying service to one means that you stand a real chance of alienating fans of the others. Slap a big C. C. Beck smile on Captain Marvel’s face and the Kingdom Come fans think you’re yanking their chain. Make him tortured over the adult horrors he’s witnessed as a superhero and you piss off the fans of the childlike original. Put him in a Winnebago out in the middle of the desert with a creepy old dude and you’ll never see the outside of a jail cell again.

This was the line that writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank were trying to negotiate with their Shazam backup story in Justice League for the past several months. And to be honest, when it started, I thought they botched it; Billy Batson was a petulant little bastard who I would have rather seen get scabies than superpowers. But that, however, was a while ago. This month’s Justice League #21 is devoted to the conclusion of the Shazam story… so the question is, not that it’s all said and done, who did Johns and Franks piss off?

Really, probably nobody. There’s enough elements of the classic kids’ Captain Marvel here to at least pay service to those fans, and enough modern realism so that he doesn’t stick out from the New 52 continuity. And the conclusion is, in fact, really pretty good. Not perfect, but fun enough to be worth the ride.

Although the people hoping for RVs and “Mentors” are gonna be furious… but seriously, fuck those people.

Black Adam has found Captain Marvel (and yes, I know he’s “Shazam” in the post-New 52 world, but old habits die hard), and is holding his friends from the orphanage hostage with a single demand: Shazam offers up his power to Adam, or the kids die. Adam tells Shazam that he can offer up his power to family, and Billy, being an orphan, gives them up to the only family he’s got: the other kids, turning them into a familiar looking Shazam Family. And it’s just in time, because the Seven Deadly Sins made personified have found a host, and he / they are fucking shit up. So while the other kids go off to flex their new muscles saving the city, Billy fights Adam to a standstill before realizing they are too evenly matched for Billy to be able to beat him. So Billy says the word and change back to his child self, and challenges Adam to fight him on the same terms… with unexpected results for Adam.

Okay, I’ll start by addressing the more adolescent, power fantasy parts of the issue because frankly, the story hits that part hardest and most effectively. While this clearly never hits the childish level of a bipedal tiger in a bow tie and better taste in wine than I have, what Johns has created here is a story about kid superheroes that you actually probably could give to a kid.

Let’s start out with the characterizations: Billy and his friends are clearly and recognizably kids, at least based on the understanding of a middle-aged man who has no kids, wants no kid, hates kids and couldn’t care less about your kids. Until the very end of the story, these are characters with no plans and no strategy, illustrated perfectly by Shazam’s big planning panel reading, “Uh… Get him?” with a classic baffled expression by Frank. Further, these kids, when they become parts of the Shazam Family, all become adults the way kids see them: perfect hair, perfect bodiies, and big full beards where socially, racially and sexually appropriate. Even the powers are sometimes what a kid would imagine; Eugene, the gadget geek, can suddenly hear and command every piece of electronic machinery in the city. If these kids were about four or five years older, they’d all be packing Ron Jeremy-level equipment, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that Johns gets the feeling of being a kid with superpowers… at least from the point of view of an old dude reading about kids. Now, it’s possible that an actual 12-year-old might read this comic book, probably accidentally, having grabbed the wrong torrent while looking for Mary Marvel-Tits Takes Adam’s Black… too much? Yeah, probably, but anyway: this book at least feels like it stars, and could appeal to, actual children. And that’s not a feeling you get from too many books these days. And frankly, that’s a large part of where this issue hits the sweet spot: it features believable kids, it seems like it could appeal to kids, but the story isn’t about childish things. Sure, the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins taking over the body of your dickish teacher to run riot over the city ain’t exactly Cormac McCarthy, but it also isn’t a sentient intestinal parasite planning to rob the city of happiness by making lollipops taste like asparagus.

And as a child of the 80s, this story features the most important element of a good kids’ story: the kid outsmarts the bad guy. It ain’t brawn, it’s brains that matter in a good kids’ story. Look at WarGames, The Manhattan Project, and even Home Alone; these stories only work because the kid winds up being smarter than the villain at the end, when it counts, and Johns seemingly knows this, because in a story full of guys who can throw buildings and a monster that can breathe fire, it’s cleverness that ends the story. It reminded me of the stories that affected me when I was a kid, and it made this story feel right to me. Captain Marvel didn’t beat Black Adam, Billy Batson did. And that, as a guy who grew up with Ferris Bueller, that matters… and it works.

So it’s a good kids’ story, but it still fits into the greater, more adult DC Universe. Black Adam isn’t in town to take away Shazam’s candy, he is there to kill Shazam if he doesn’t give up his power to allow Adam to continue the mission that he started with a certain amount of child genocide. In the background, we have Dr. Sivanna shattered by magic and ready to make a deal with anyone who can come up with the magic to save himself and his family, and one again: Black Adam, who if he wins will become twice as powerful as Shazam and who, in the pre-New 52 Universe, was last and best known for being the start and primary superpower of World War 3. So there are high enough and dark enough stakes here for any current comics fan, while that underlying kids’ story will keep tugging at anyone who remembers The Lost Boys.

Gary Frank does really good superhero comic art, with a good amount to realism to go with the big, iconic splash pages (and there are at least a couple of full-page splashes here that will go for beaucoup dineros if he shops them at SDCC this year), but a story like this is going to live and die on its facial expressions. After all, the primary character are adults who are really children, and if we are going to buy them as kids, we need to see that in the faces. And Frank delivers, with wide-open expressions that can be read from a mile away. His lines are fine and his details excellent, without going beyond his normal near-photorealism, and with reasonable pacing and panel layout. This is beautiful stuff, and it is the right stuff for the right story.

Look, I will cop to the idea that this final chapter of Shazam only appeals to me as a kids’ story because it reminds me of the kid stories of when I was, well, a kid. And that maybe that, combined with the adult stakes and complex art, are blinding me to the faults here. But Goddammit, this was just fucking fun. We had kids with superpowers trying to act like superheroes, marveling in the wonder of having those powers, and in the end, triumphing because the kids are just more clever than the adults and their learned habit. The final chapter of Shazam is E.T. with superpowers instead of BMX bikes, and I think I’m gonna wrap this review up and toss WarGames into the Blu-Ray player.

I had a lot of fun with this issue. It asked me to be a kid without asking me to get into the Winnebago. Give it a shot.