I was continuing to work my way through the complete run of SHAZAM that had been lent to me by my grade school friend Donald Sims, and I was up to issue #23. As the cover indicates, by this point the character was the star of a popular Saturday morning live action series, which is the only thing that kept the title from immediate cancellation. But it was performing so poorly that it had been relegated to only running reprints and was being released quarterly, an almost unheard-of thing in the 1970s. Better days were coming, but they were still in the future at the point where this issue came out.
Making SHAZAM into a reprint series had one benefit, and that’s the fact that the best stories in the magazine had always been the reprinted material from the character’s Golden Age days. This particular issue reprints a full-length Marvel Family adventure that’s quite good. It was the work of writer Otto Binder, who wrote over half of all of the Marvel adventures done in the character’s initial run, and artist C.C. Beck, here working twice-up rather than 1 1/2 times up as contemporary comics were being done, so his artwork appeared crisper and more fully realized.
The story is a good example of the whimsical fantasy that was embodied in the best of the series. it opens with the Marvel Family receiving an urgent distress call from the center of the Earth. Burrowing through the ground to reach it, they discover an expansive underworld civilization a billion people large, being ruled over by the tyrannical King Klaggor. The Marvels swiftly put an end to the King’s rein, but they find they now have another problem: the people of this civilization used to live on the surface, and they’ve been kept down here so that Klaggor could maintain his power over them. They want to return to the surface, but there’s so many of them that they would overpopulate the globe!
A swift pause here for this issue’s SHAZAMAIL letters page, which features opening remarks from future science fiction author and comic book writer Adam Troy Castro. It also features a separate letter talking about the 1950 movie “The Good Humor Man”, which features references to Captain Marvel aplenty.
After considering the possibility of relocating the underground inhabitants to either Mars or Venus and deciding that the conditions there would be too inhospitable for them, the Marvels resolve to build them another Earthlike planet to live on. They head out into space, seeking out a lifeless world that they can transform–the “World’s Mightiest Project” of the title. In the meantime, the vengeful King Klaggor, who was able to escape with his Prime Minister Olo detonates a Helium Bomb in the ocean as an act of revenge, causing lava to burble up into the waters, causing an environmental disaster. However, it’s a disaster that the Marvel Family copes with in under a page, much to Klaggor’s frustration.
Klaggor learns that the Marvel Family is creating a second Earth for the underground population to emigrate to, and he resolves to stop the project. The Marvels moved this planet into our solar system so that they could use the genuine Earth as its model, so while Cap builds a massive space ark to carry he citizenry to the new world, Mary and Junior work to reshape its land masses and seas into a duplicate of the actual Earth. Klaggor tries to stop them by enveloping Mary and Junior individually in spheres of utter blackness, in which they cannot see. But the two young Marvels foil this by calling out to one another and ramming the two globes together at incredible velocity, destroying them both.
With the new planet ready for colonization, the Marvels resume their human forms to christen the space ark at the debarkation ceremony. But this gives King Klaggor the opportunity he needs. He clobbers the three kids, then ties them all to another gigantic Helium Bomb which he launches at the new Earth, intending to destroy it completely before his subjects can migrate there. Fortunately, the friction from entry into the New Earth atmosphere burns away the kids’ gags and they’re able to resume their superhuman identities in time to catch the falling Helium Bomb and send it instead hurtling out into space, where it can explode harmlessly.
But now it’s time to take the space ark to the new planet. The thing is so massive that it doesn’t have any built-in engines. Rather, the Marvels themselves propel it through space. King Klaggor makes one final attempt to disrupt this voyage, surrounding a massive meteor with a black sphere so it can’t be seen and sending it hurtling at the ship. But Captain Marvel notices the impending danger and destroys the meteor–and thereafter crashes through Klaggor’s fleeing ship to put a final stop to his shenanigans. With the undergrounders now safely on their new home, the Marvels tell them that their final act will be to push the new planet back to another solar system (!!!) so that it doesn’t interfere with the balance of ours, and not to worry–it will only be cold for a short time. This is literally accomplished between panels, despite being perhaps the most impressive and unlikely thing to take place in this tale. But that brings the adventure to an end, with the undergrounders now happily on their new home and the situation resolved.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 