Otto Binder and Captain Marvel: a match made in heaven.
8.
LIGHTNING STRIKES!
Why do some comic book characters vault to greatness, and others—the vast majority—either fail miserably or make up the vast, mediocre middle ground?
A plethora of publishers tried their best to capitalize on the sudden success of Superman and Batman. That’s certainly what the Fawcett brothers wanted. Why did they succeed, when so many others fell short?
The Fawcetts were fortunate when they selected staff editor Bill Parker to invent their lead character. Parker knew that the hero would need some instantly identifiable qualities, and proved inspired in coming up with the origin of the character, who was first to be called Captain Thunder. At the last minute, Marvel was substituted for Thunder—no one remembers exactly why or by whom—but it was probably Parker who made the change. The other characters he invented for their foray into comic books were Spy Smasher, Golden Arrow, Ibis the Invincible, Lance O’Casey, Scoop Smith, and Dan Dare.
The origin story of Captain Marvel is remarkable for both its economy and its ingenuity. One night, a homeless newsboy named Billy Batson is summoned by a shadowy figure who entreats him to follow him into a subway station. They board a futuristic-looking underground train that whisks the two of them to a hidden station. They walk past a series of statues, each personifying one of “the seven evils of mankind.” Then Billy sees an old man with white hair and beard, garbed in robes, sitting on a throne. “Welcome, Billy Batson,” the man intones. “I am Shazam!” He points to a nearby wall with a display showing that each of the letters in his name stands for a particular attribute: the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. He commands Billy Batson to speak his name.
Seminal page from Captain Marvel’s origin in Whiz Comics #2 (February 1940). Note that CM’s origin was magical, not scientific. Story by Bill Parker. Art by C. C. Beck. ™ and © DC Comics.
“Shazam!” Billy quavers. A sudden flash of lightning and Billy has become Captain Marvel, a full-grown man clad in a dashing red and gold outfit.
“Captain Marvel, I salute you,” Shazam says. “Henceforth it shall be your sacred duty to defend the poor and helpless, right wrongs and crush evil everywhere.” Old Shazam tells him that he can become Billy simply by speaking his name again. Then a granite block that was suspended over Shazam’s head by a slender thread falls on the ancient wizard, ending his three-thousand-year existence. Back up on the street, a stunned Billy Batson says, “Gee! It all seems like a dream!”
Young C. C. Beck. Art by P. C. Hamerlinck.
Indeed. The story reads like something that might have come to Parker in his sleep, with its heavy use of shadows, the weird elements like the mysterious stranger, the statues in the hidden tunnel, and the odd touch of the futuristic train (which was dropped from later recaps of the tale).
Soon the character of Billy Batson comes into focus. We find out that, although he was thrown out of his home by a cruel uncle, Billy has plenty of pluck and nerve. When he finds out that a mad scientist known as the Phantom is threatening all radio stations with obliteration via a “radio silencer,” and accidentally overhears information on the whereabouts of that scientist, Billy barges into the office of radio mogul Sterling Morris of the Amalgamated Broadcasting Company and tells what he knows. Naturally, Morris doesn’t believe him. Billy asks for a job as a radio announcer if he can find the Phantom. Morris agrees.
All this leads into an action-packed sequence pitting Captain Marvel against the Phantom, who is really the evil scientist Dr. Sivana.
Upon thwarting the plot, Billy returns to Sterling Morris. “How about that job you promised me? Do I get it?”
Morris is as good as his word. “The job is yours! From now on you are Billy Batson, radio reporter!”
Two main things made Captain Marvel stand out from the crowd: the basic concept of the character, and the artwork that made up the visual component.
The idea of a boy who can become a mighty hero merely by saying a magic word allowed children easy entry into the world of Captain Marvel. He wasn’t an alien from another planet, or an adult somehow transformed into a super human. Billy Batson was a normal twelve- (and later fourteen-) year-old boy.
An examination of the origin story reveals that, while the artwork is simple by later standards, it’s well conceived and executed. The storytelling is clear and direct. The pages are well composed, with excellent use of blacks. This well-designed quality distinguishes it from the art in 99 percent of the comics published in 1940, better in some respects than Joe Shuster’s art on Superman at first, and head-and-shoulders over the early efforts of Bob Kane on Batman.
The artist, Charles Clarence Beck, was born June 8, 1910, in Zumbrota, Minnesota. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and later the University of Minnesota. At the time, Fawcett Publications was based in Minnesota. Beck got a job as staff artist for them in 1933. He drew cartoons for Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang and other magazines. When the firm relocated to the East Coast in 1936, Beck moved with them. His art style was clean and somewhat cartoonish. Although this was his first comics work, Beck quickly developed strong opinions about what was right for Captain Marvel. He was a great admirer of Roy Crane, whose art for the Wash Tubbs (Captain Easy) comic strip in the early 1930s had found the perfect synthesis of iconic simplicity and realism. Soon C. C. Beck gained the title “Chief Artist” on the Captain Marvel feature. (“Al Allard gave me that title instead of a raise,” Beck groused in later years.)
By the time Otto Binder was given his first Captain Marvel comics script assignment, about seventy-five adventures of the red-suited hero had seen print. Binder’s first stories appeared in Captain Marvel Adventures #9 (“Captain Marvel Saves the King”) and Whiz Comics #38 (“Captain Marvel Wins the Grand Steeplechase”).
The previous Marvel scripts, before Binder, were mainly written by Bill Parker. He coined “Holy Moley,” an expression that became almost as well known as Cap’s magic word. Even after he was drafted in October 1940, Parker had banked enough stories to keep Captain Marvel busy for the next year or so. Ed Herron graduated to full editor of the comics line after Parker left. When more scripts were needed, Rod Reed and Ed Herron wrote them. By 1941, Captain Marvel was fully formed, and Herron had also originated Captain Marvel Junior, who debuted in Whiz Comics #25.67 68
From the origin of Captain Marvel Jr. Art by Mac Raboy. ™ and © DC Comics.
Much has been made of the whimsical tone of the Captain Marvel strips. In the early days, Beck was already bringing humorous touches, as did some of the scripts. But, as comics historian R. C. Harvey pointed out in his introduction to the second Shazam Archives book from DC Comics, “Captain Marvel wasn’t, at first, as comical and whimsical as all of us remember him.” Even as late as the summer of 1941 (a good eighteen months after Captain Marvel’s debut in Whiz Comics), most of Captain Marvel’s adventures were told more or less straight. But gradually, often through Beck’s art itself, humorous touches were introduced. For example, in “Crusher of Crime” from Whiz #20, the door to Sivana’s lab bears the name “Nefarious Research Inc.” on the door. Probably the humor came in with the new scripts by Rod Reed (who had a penchant in that direction), and was emphasized by Beck who by this time was really coming into his own.
Whiz Comics #38 (December 25, 1942) features an early Binder script on Fawcett’s premier hero. Art by Marc Swayze. ™ and © DC Comics.
Otto recalled, “Actually, the Captain Marvel and Marvel Family stories [at their peak] aren’t humor in the strictest sense but rather satire and parody of life situations and the doings and shortcomings of humans. The secret of it all was that Cap and Billy were dead serious and never made a joke at all. It was how we played up the slapstick and puns and situation comedy that made it all funny. But remember this: young kids usually don’t get the joke at all. They take it serio
usly, namely, the battle between good and evil with the good guy (Captain Marvel) always winning.
“In a sense, Captain Marvel was like Jonathan Swift’s satires of political situations … also like Alice in Wonderland which to the adult is a study of human nature. I always felt I was exploring and exploiting human nature too, digging out its zany aspects to show that much of life was a joke and full of craziness.”69
It was whip-smart Ed Herron who brought the formidable team of Beck and Binder together near the end of his tenure at Fawcett. By this time, Beck had moved out of the Fawcett editorial offices in the Paramount Building to a small studio at Broadway and Fortieth Street, working there with Pete Costanza and a growing staff of what would become the Beck-Costanza studio. He was given as much Captain Marvel work as his shop could handle, though Fawcett continued to produce some of their lead character’s adventures with their in-house bullpen, most notably drawn by Marc Swayze.
When the Fawcett brothers found out staff editor Herron was also paying himself as a freelancer when he wrote scripts—“double-dipping”—he was discharged on March 1, 1942. By this time, Binder had been writing for Fawcett for a year, and had already proven to be extremely productive. True, he had only recently graduated to the Captain Marvel feature. Nevertheless, when Herron left, Otto Binder and John Beardsley, who had been co-editor under Herron, took over the editorial reigns.
“I edited Wow Comics, and read scripts for all the Marvel characters,” Otto wrote in the early 1960s.70 He was at the helm when a talented new writer was brought aboard, a man who would become one of his closest friends: William Woolfolk.
Bill Woolfolk had become interested in writing as a profession while attending NYU. When he graduated in 1938, he continued living with his father in Brooklyn and aimed his sights at breaking into the short story markets. By the time he got into comics, Woolfolk had sold to some of the secondary slick magazines. “None of the good comic book writers had been able to sell to the slicks,” he recalled in a recent interview. “Otto could not, and neither could Manly Wade Wellman or Joe Millard. So when I first got to Fawcett, it made a big impression. ‘Oh, you sold to slick magazines!’”
First he had served an apprenticeship with MLJ Publications. “I was looking around for something that would supply a regular weekly income, and then I heard that [Harry] Shorten, who had been a football star at NYU, was editing comics for MLJ.” Soon he was writing comic book stories featuring the Shield, the Hangman, and the Black Hood.
One day in early 1942, an MLJ artist named Warren King said to him, “I went up to Fawcett and showed some Black Hood pages to try to get some work. They weren’t interested in me, but they liked the script of my sample story.” It had been written by Woolfolk. Fawcett editor John Beardsley asked to see the writer. “I was having financial troubles, and Harry Shorten was not about to yield a penny without rubbing a nickel off the back of it. So I saw John Beardsley.” When Woolfolk appeared in the Paramount Building offices, he met not only Beardsley, but also Rod Reed and Otto Binder. “Beardsley claimed me as his prize … but then he left when Busy Arnold at Quality Comics promised him the sun, moon, and stars. Then, Otto Binder sort of inherited me.”
Theirs was a mutual admiration society. Otto admired the fact that Bill had sold to slick magazines, and Bill had been a fan of Eando Binder’s stories in Amazing and elsewhere. They hit it off from the start. “Otto wasn’t an introvert or an extrovert,” Woolfolk recalled. “He was a middle-vert. Friendly and stable, and it gave you a feeling of solidity to be with him.” Otto and Ione began regularly socializing with Bill and his new bride Terry. They would go to plays together, or movies, or just go out to dinner. “After a good deal of conversation, it came out that Otto had been responsible for my first writing sale, to one of those little literary magazines. This was when he was an agent with Otis Adelbert Kline.”
Binder was an editor for only six weeks. He quickly realized he could make much more money as a freelance writer, and returned to that status in May. When Beardsley left, Rod Reed was selected to edit the entire Fawcett line, which proved to be a sound decision.
Reed was an affable fellow whose personality meshed perfectly with that of Binder and Beck. It was under Rod Reed’s editorial stint that Otto’s work on Captain Marvel really flowered. By the time Reed left—June 15, 1943, expecting to be drafted into the armed forces—he’d written as many as one hundred of the best Captain Marvel scripts, though Reed didn’t get paid anything more than his regular editor’s salary to write them.
“Rod Reed was a diplomatist of the first order,” Woolfolk remembered. “I asked [him] at one stage, after writing for them and getting good acceptance, how did I rank in the hierarchy? And he said, ‘You are the very best of our junior writers.’ I thought that was a very diplomatic thing to say until it occurred to me there were no other writers around. They were all being drafted!”71
Other than scripts by Bill Woolfolk and Joe Millard on Captain Marvel and others, Otto Binder wrote virtually the entire line of Fawcett comic books from January 1942 to June 1943. Something about the comic book medium had unleashed his creativity, and it couldn’t have been just the pay. Clearly, Binder’s imaginative gifts proved perfectly suited to this form of fanciful storytelling. Because the medium was young, it was elastic enough to permit Otto to make it fit his own quirks: his interest in science fiction, his penchant for stories about social responsibility, and his gradually emerging ability to write tales with satirical elements.
In 1943, OOB was asked to develop a fuller background to the Captain Marvel Junior series. Herron’s creation was beautifully rendered by Mac Raboy, but hadn’t been fleshed out story-wise. Thus far, Freddy Freeman had only been seen standing on unidentified street corners hawking newspapers. He needed supporting characters who would lend themselves to story ideas and create continuity. Binder established that Freddy has a room in a house owned by Mrs. Wagner. He put Freddy in a specific neighborhood, and at an established newsstand at the corner of Oak and Main. This development did the trick, and helped ensure Junior’s longevity. Like Cap, he was able to carry two titles (Captain Marvel Junior and Master Comics) through his entire life in comics, battling foes like Captain Nazi, Mr. Macabre, Sabbac, Captain Nippon, and the Acrobat.
Mary Marvel’s origin in Captain Marvel Adventures #18 (December 11, 1942) was written by Otto Binder and drawn by Marc Swayze. ™ and © DC Comics.
When the decision was made to add another member to the Marvel Family, Binder penned the first story introducing Mary Marvel in Captain Marvel Adventures #18 (December 1942). Mary’s appearance was designed by Marc Swayze, although it was the Jack Binder studio that would produce most of the Mary Marvel stories after that. (Swayze’s rendition of Captain Marvel was so close to the Beck model that many people to this day have difficulty telling their work apart. He played an important, sometimes overlooked part in keeping the quality of the artwork high.)
In Mary’s debut story, it turned out that Billy Batson had a long-lost twin sister named Mary, who (despite the illogic of it) shared his powers by saying “Shazam!” by virtue of being his twin. (This was not, of course, news to omniscient old Shazam, who was still hanging around that mysterious tunnel in ethereal form.) Then Mary took over the lead feature in Wow Comics, relegating Mr. Scarlet to backup status.
As if this division of the Shazam magic wasn’t enough, yet another Marvel was added, in Mary’s strip in Wow Comics #18 (October 1943): Uncle Marvel. But Uncle Marvel was really a lovable old fraud who looked something like movie comedian W. C. Fields, but who actually did love kids. He only feigned super powers. The rest of the Marvel family indulgently pretended not to notice when, after shouting “Shazam!,” he tore off a breakaway suit to reveal a makeshift Marvel costume underneath. Uncle Dudley—never more than a supporting character—appeared most often in the somewhat gentler adventures of Mary Marvel.
Naming Mary Marvel had much to do with alliteration, but may also have partly been a tribute
to Binder’s mother Marie. Courtesy of Jan Tabert.
One odd testament to Mary’s popularity in the 1940s was the starring role she played in some of the anonymously produced “Tijuana bibles” of the era. They showed well-known comics characters like Dick Tracy, Popeye, and, yes, Mary Marvel, in pornographic situations.
The only costumed hero whose popularity rivaled that of Superman in the 1940s was Captain Marvel. He was an instant hit, and his sales grew by mighty leaps and bounds. Soon he was approaching the million-plus sales of the Man of Steel, and he would go on to surpass the DC headliner by this measure in 1946, reaching a peak circulation of 1.3 million in his self-titled comic book. As chief scribe of the Big Red Cheese (as he was dubbed by his nemesis, Dr. Sivana), Otto Binder found himself writing for a vast audience: millions of children and teenagers, as well as large numbers of servicemen who were within reach of a PX. (In addition, it was commonplace for comic books to be passed from hand to hand, so the number of readers was always many times the number of copies that were sold.)
Remember Pearl Harbor (1942). ™ & © respective copyright holders.
Fawcett captured lightning in a bottle with Captain Marvel. The air in their offices in the Paramount Building was charged with energy and enthusiasm. The staff of writers and artists had all the work they could handle, and many of them put in twelve-hour days. By all accounts, they were an upbeat, genial group of people who had few serious complaints with the management or the work. The comic books they produced were selling like crazy!
Unlike the relatively conservative way National Comics exploited Superman in its line of comics, a great deal of the Fawcett line was built around Captain Marvel and his extended family. The Marvel Family headlined (or would headline) in Whiz, Master, Wow, Captain Marvel Adventures, Captain Marvel Jr, The Marvel Family, and Mary Marvel, as well as numerous specials and other titles over the years like America’s Greatest Comics and Gift Comics. (There was even Hoppy the Marvel Bunny, who debuted in Fawcett’s Funny Animals #1 in 1942, although Binder never wrote the feature.) But Fawcett’s second-string characters had their own triumphs: Spy Smasher got his own magazine and movie serial. Bulletman starred in his own comic title too, as did Ibis the Invincible. Otto Binder wrote many of the scripts for these characters, too.
Otto Binder: The Life and Work of a Comic Book and Science Fiction Visionary Page 9