Captain Marvel Adventures #124-130

Captain Marvel Adventures #124-130

Originally released in 1951

Written by Otto Binder

Art by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza

I wanted to read some older Captain Marvel comics today, and I know I'm in for an entertaining time when it starts with this:

It's a delightfully goofy image, like the comic equivalent of clickbait - you see the cover, and you see the first page, but you don't know how it could get from point A to point B so you want to keep reading to find out. Captain Marvel exists in a wonderfully wacky world where all of the bad instincts of people can be locked away in a chest by some old man, only breaking loose when the chest gets thrown out accidentally.

It winds up in the hands of Billy's boss, who sees a warning label saying "do not open" along with an explanation of what's inside and throws it open anyway.

The instincts turn out to be animal instincts, like migrating, hibernating, or swimming out to sea to die. Luckily, Captain Marvel's instinct to help others is enough to overpower the hibernation instinct... most of the time.

This is an anthology series; there are other stories in here, though they don't seem as interesting as Captain Marvel. (One is about a character named Tightwad Tad, where the joke is that he's incredibly cheap) Thankfully, there's enough variety in the Captain Marvel stories - he encounters a lost city where the streets are paved with gold, visits a time travelling circus, and encounters an ancient enemy of mankind named King Kull.

Issue 125 has a story that involves Dr. Sivana, Captain Marvel's arch-nemesis, and a man who looks exactly like Dr. Sivana.  Given the nature of these comics, I have no idea if this is going to be an innocent doppelganger, a clone, a robot duplicate, a time traveling version of Sivana from five minutes in the future, or if Dr. Sivana discovered a mathematical formula that can make an exact copy of himself. All of these are equally plausible at this point.

As it turns out, it's the first one, as there's more than one three foot tall man who looks like a gremlin in Captain Marvel's city. As it turns out, if an innocent professor is shaved, then he looks exactly like Dr. Sivana. (Though I'm not ruling out that the professor is actually Sivana from the future as part of an elaborate plan to mess with Captain Marvel)

Sivana plans to have his doppelganger killed in his prison cell, framing it as a suicide - rather than using this as an opportunity to turn his life around, he plans to use the professor's fortune to finance his plans to take over the world.  Captain Marvel manages to deduce the truth through some flawless logic:

The stories are short but entertaining. Some of them have straightforward messages, such as basically telling the audience to clean up after themselves:

It's funny to look back on these older comics and see how different things were back then. In one story, Doctor Sivana comes up with a plan to humiliate and defeat Captain Marvel when he reads through the dictionary in the prison library (no, seriously).

The voodoo works, though when Captain Marvel turns the situation around in the end, he explains how he survived, casually mentioning his secret identity in the process.  Maybe Sivana already knew (he knew that making Captain Marvel say the word "Shazam" would make him vulnerable), and maybe Captain Marvel and Billy Batson were considered separate people back then, but it seems weird for him to casually tell his arch-nemesis that he's Billy Batson when it seems like it would be extremely easy for Sivana to act on that information.

I love the sort of "anything goes" mindset of this era.  It's the sort of world where a real estate salesman tinkers with mad scientist devices in his spare time and, when he could use it to end world hunger, chooses to use it to give himself more land to sell instead.

Even when a character gives an explanation that's complete gibberish, I could shrug my shoulders and think "yeah, that seems plausible in this universe." (Dr. Sivana used math in order to walk through prison walls once)

It feels a little strange that, despite characters like Tawky Tawny (a humanoid tiger) and a robot with the unfortunate name of Timmy Tinkle being part of Captain Marvel's supporting cast at this point, the Marvel Family (particularly Mary Marvel and Freddy Freeman, a.k.a. Captain Marvel Junior) are nowhere to be seen.  I'm not sure when they were originally created, but I know that Captain Marvel Junior was around during Elvis's childhood since that character inspired some of Elvis's outfits.

Rather than telling one continuous Captain Marvel story, each issue has at least three separate stories featuring the character.  I won't be summarizing all of them, but it makes for some entertaining or unusual out-of-context panels.

The final issue that's on the DC app, issue 130, has Doctor Sivana and King Kull appear in the same story after they were recurring separate threats in the past few issues.  Demonstrating a downside to Captain Marvel's enemy knowing his secret identity, Dr. Sivana walks right in to the place where Billy works and zaps him with a mute ray.

Billy foils Sivana's plan by knocking the machine out of Sivana's hand and smashing it, only for them (and the rest of the world) to be caught up in King Kull's plan to shrink the Earth so he can crush it.

This leads to a classic villain-versus-villain conflict - Sivana's eager to see Kull beat Captain Marvel, but he wants to rule the Earth, and that can't happen if Kull destroys it.  Despite Sivana taking pride in how evil he is, he has to team up with Captain Marvel if he wants to save the Earth so he can rule it later.

While nowadays, a villain calling themselves evil can feel a little weird (everyone's the hero in their own story, and villains usually have some twisted justification for doing what they do, like Lex Luthor's envy of Superman and his belief that relying on Superman holds humanity back), it feels fitting for how cheesy Captain Marvel can be as a series.  Plus, it leads to some entertaining back and forth between the two villains as they try to one-up each other. (Though I'm pretty sure Mister Mind has them both beat - Hitler was one of his minions, and he was killed via electric chair for, among other crimes, murdering over a hundred million people)

While some aspects of this were outdated (particularly the depiction of Native Americans and Asians, though the former was a time traveler and the latter could have been much worse considering how they were portrayed in World War 2), it was a silly and light-hearted romp for the most part.  It makes me wish that DC's app had a more complete set of comics from the era, so I could see how zany the adventures of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman got back then. (though I understand why they don't; I imagine they aren't in high demand)  It was simplistic but charming, which was about what I expected going into these issues.