BC: SHAZAM #6

I was still making my way through the complete run of SHAZAM that I had borrowed from my grade school friend Donald Sims. SHAZAM #6 featured the series’ second photo cover, and it was a bit less successful and convincing than the prior one which had run on issue #2. But there was something appealing about the fact that it was set up as an “infinity cover”, with the cover appearing within the image as the cover of the comic book that Captain Marvel is reading. The kids in this image are the grandchildren of DC production man Jack Adler, whose skills are what made doing a photo-cover of this sort possible in the first place. DC continued to experiment with this approach here and there from time to time.

As before, this issue was also set up to feature three stories, two new ones up front and then a vintage reprint in the back. The opening story was written by Denny O’Neil, who still didn’t seem to quite click with the property, and illustrated by C.C. Beck, Captain Marvel’s co-creator who was becoming more and more vocal concerning his dislike of the scripts that he was getting. Beck felt, correctly as it turns out, that they weren’t capturing the tone and whimsey of the Captain’s original adventures, that they were silly and stupid and often talking down to the readers. Editor Julie Schwartz, however, knew Beck as a curmudgeon and so backed his writers, refusing to permit Beck to change things on the fly like he wanted to.

And it’s true that Schwartz and company did seem to be targeting a much younger audience with SHAZAM. The short story lengths didn’t allow for much in the way of character development or even intricate plotting. In this opening story, for example, Sivana tricks Billy Batson into donning a watch with a core of Suspendium, which paralyzes him for two minutes whenever he tries to say his magic word. This is enough to give Sivana an edge for a time, but Billy winds up over-winding the watch, causing it to destroy itself, and then Captain Marvel takes care of business. So Billy and the captain don’t win out through anything that they’ve done deliberately, it’s pure fortune that this happens, which is a bit unsatisfying as a resolution. But Denny only had 8 pages to work with.

The second story was written by Schwartz’s recent find, Elliot S! Maggin. It’s about how genius inventor Dexter Knox’s grandmother accidentally gets zapped with a massive jolt of electricity while she’s tidying up Dexter’s lab. This turns her into a living dynamo that causes anything she touches, such as her vacuum cleaner, to run wild. Even Captain Marvel can’t stop the supercharged vacuum cleaner until its used up all of its charge. So this is a bit of a problem.

And once again, the solution comes from a total coincidence. It turns out that Miami, Florida is suffering from a brown-out, so Captain Marvel takes Dexter’s grandmother there (by train rather than flying because grandma is afraid of flying) and she lights up the entire city until the power can be restored. And this effort exhausts the electrical energy that she was charged with to begin with. So everything comes out okay. But again, Captain Marvel and Billy Batson are practically incidental in the story and the wrap-up. It’s hard to imagine that Schwartz or his writers were working especially hard on these short tails. There’s an ineffable sense that they were looking down on the material and on those who might like it, feeling it not worth their best efforts. Whether that’s projection or reality, the fact remains that the story work in SHAZAM at this time was weak stuff.

One fun thing about reading these older comic books for me was getting to see vintage ads for other titles, even if, as in this case, they were all mostly of limited interest to me. This issue also included a BEHIND THE SCENES page that talked about the impending construction of a Superman amusement park in Metropolis, Illinois and the special commemorative Treasury Edition that was being published to commemorate the initiative. The park wound up never happening, but that Treasury did see print. But as a young reader, I didn’t know that the park project went bust, and so I wanted to go there.

The best things in most issue of SHAZAM during this revival was usually the reprints, and this issue is no exception. But for some reason, the choice was made to reprint a somewhat longer Marvel Family story, breaking it in two and running it across two issues. This really isn’t the best way to experience this tale, especially since it isn’t all that long in its entirety. it was written by Captain Marvel uber-scribe Otto Binder and illustrated by Kurt Schaffenberger, who had been working for DC for years at this point.

The story only really starts to get going at the point where it needs to get broken. It’s about a benevolent scientist who is worried about overcrowding and the state of the world’s resources. His solution is to build a device that will shrink every human being on Earth, therefore making the planet proportionately ten times larger and capable of sustaining the growing population longer. Of course, as people begin to shrink haphazardly while they’re driving cars and the like, chaos occurs, and the three Marvels are called into action to help save people who have inadvertently been put into jeopardy. And that’s where this first half is To Be Continued.