Shazam returns in a new ongoing by Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham.

[Jim Kelly]

The cool thing about old old Billy is he lived on his own. At first he was a street kid (essentially in the Great Depression), but then Shazam's magic allows him to get the means to have his own place and a good job. And he can be his own guardian as Captain Marvel.

He also has an extremely offensive stereotype as his butler--but let's not talk about that.

I think Billy's emancipation plays into childhood fantasies of living on your own. You might not want to kill your parents literally--but there's an Oedipal desire to be rid of the controlling parent and have your own life. So Billly got to do that (Mary didn't).

The foster home takes that agency away from him.

[MajorHoy]

Please! No more nazis!!! They are sooooooo overused!

But, you don't offend anybody worth listening to when you use Nazis as the bad guys!

Besides, how "overused" are they these days? I thought Marvel had pretty much retroactively made most of their Nazi bad guys into HYDRA agents?

[Jody Garland]

I wonder how they'd explain that today.

A) Sliding timeline
B) Captain Nazi has recently broken free from suspended animation
C) Changing it to being a non-powered Neo-Nazi (this would probably work the best for the movie or a more realistic Earth One GN)
D) Fawcett characters are brought into the future (like they did when they relaunched a long time ago)
E) Time spell
F) Dropping the origin altogether, like it seems they did with the New 52.

I think B would be the best option.

B would be most likely, considering its what they did Pre-Flashpoint, and it works just as well now as it did then. If anything, it could be worked even better now with some slight tooling, like the JLU episode "Patriot Act" did.

Slight quibble, though. The Fawcett characters weren't really brought into the future pre-Crisis so much as placed in suspended animation themselves. The explanation in Shazam #1 was Sivana had invented artificial time known as Suspendium, which folks may remember from 52. Suspendium had suspended the whole of Fawcett City in time until the early 70s, when Cap breached the barrier.

Personally, I think Captain Nazi makes a great antagonist for Captain Marvel & Jr. The contrast between their blistering purity of soul (Remember, Captain Marvel's soul was poison to demons it was so pure) with the utter depravity and hatred of Nazism can make for powerful stories.

[Agent Z]

Literally NO ONE is calling for Billy to act "like Christ himself" or like a "Pollyanna" as someone earlier claimed. There are plenty of people calling for Billy to act like he did before the reboot. Billy never acted like Christ or like a Pollyana before the reboot. Old Billy was no more or less unrealistic than New Billy. I've worked with underprivileged kids for 18 years now, and I've seen kids that acted like Old Billy, kids that acted like New Billy, and kids that acted like neither.

If you prefer New Billy, that's fine. You're entitled to your opinion. But there are plenty of us who like Old Billy, and we have a right to express our opinions, too.

Read my post again and you'll see it is not applying to you. I'm not against you preferring the old Billy, it's the people being irrational over new Billy I have an issue with.

[Rod G]

Pre-Flashpoint Billy Batson may never have acted that way. But fandom certainly paints him as such when the version of the character who gets angry and depressed sometimes due to his circumstances (but comes around fairly quickly as well) gets painted as some extremely angsty, dark gritty edgelord in comparison.

I never said individuals who are genuinely like that shouldn't exist in real life. But Billy is a fictional character, and he was created as an idealized orphan by adults who wrote the kid a certain way and depicted his behavior a certain way to be an escapist fantasy. If we want him to appeal to modern kids and not just old school fans, the new approach might be necessary.



New 52 Superman is not overly dark though. The guy who was concerned with finding a home for two hamsters? What and edgelord that guy is. The guy who is very close to the original version of the character and the core concepts that went into his creation. And DCEU Superman is nothing like him or New 52 Billy. Even he, as often as he's forced to mope and be put in dark situations, is not that dark.



It's being a jerk, but Mary immediately called him out for it, he felt shitty for making Darla cry, and stood up for his foster siblings from bullies a few pages later, and made sure to hide Freddy from the bullies and lure them away because he couldn't escape with his leg. And we saw a flashback of him saving a girl from a foster home that was abusing her.

Are any of these things OOC for pre-Flashpoint Billy, and was he immune from making mistakes?



Nobody is denying he behaved like a jerk for a little bit, but it's not like we saw his good points late into the story. As a trade, it's one volume. How little patience do readers have that they cannot even get a quarter of the way in (if that) before they see Billy's facets as a human being?



Let's not even pretend that New 52 Billy is anything like Batman at his worst. C'mon, you can't be serious.

And it doesn't excuse his behavior, but holding said behavior against a 13 year old boy is pretty ridiculous. It should be called out, but I've hear some fans claim the kid was no longer "innocent." That's the kind of comments I find kind of disturbing.

That, IMO, is putting it mildly.

[ERON]

Read my post again and you'll see it is not applying to you. I'm not against you preferring the old Billy, it's the people being irrational over new Billy I have an issue with.

I did read your post, and others on this thread and other threads like it saying people want Billy to be "like Christ himself" or a "perfectly pure Pollyanna," and that "kids like that don't really exist." I'm saying A) no one really wants Billy as "pure and innocent" as these posters claim, and to claim they do is beating a strawman, and B) there are plenty of kids like that who exist, and it's not unrealistic to prefer Billy that way.

[leo619]

Not really. That’s like saying that original Billy was a representation of how all people reacted to hardship. Remember, that Billy wasn’t the only orphan in the book and they didn’t act like him.

There's a lot more characters who deal with hardship and ended up being rough around the edges then those who had hardship and ended up being a boy scout. So your statement about the original billy being how people react to hardship can't apply, because Billy wasn't the only one who experienced major hardship. He WAS, however, one of the only ones that experience major hardship and still was a kind, considerate person. So yes, it does apply.

Actually they did. Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Amethyst, Bunker etc.

The only one that even comes close to the boy scout of the group you mentioned is Wonder Woman. And she did not experience the hardships that Billy has gone through.

There is a huge middle ground between “boy scout” and “punisher”. Billy fell in that middle ground.

Of course there is, but that doesn't change the fact that currently there is almost no boy scout characters, let alone boy scout characters who has gone through difficult hardships and still retain their kindness.

There are people in this thread and numerous others discussing New 52 Billy that go way beyond calling him a jerk. For a lot of people, if Billy isn’t acting like Christ himself, he’s no better than a villain. KurtW95, for instance, flat out calls him unlikable.

Unlikable is subjective, there's nothing wrong with calling a character Unlikable if you don't like that character. As long as you're stating that his current personality traits are unlikable to you, there's nothing wrong with that. No character is going to be likable to everyone and I've never seen anyone claim he's like a villain. Essentially, people label him as a jerk and depending upon how much they can tolerate that behavior determines if they are interested in the character.

[Snakeeyes]

Just out of curiosity instead of calling him Shazam why couldn’t the have just dropped the Marvel from Captain Marvel and referred to him as The Captain? Has a nice ring to it still and I’ve always wondered if they would ever start letting Billy age. I’d be curious to read Billy tackling other life issues that come with age. To my knowledge minus some flirtatious behavior with Sivianas daughter and seems like he dated stargirl, Billy hasn’t had much of a love life which is hard to do when your main character is a 13 year old in a 30 year old body. Since the trailer dropped I’ve been reading some comparisons to Billy and Peter Parker, much like seeing Peter grow up is like to see Billy grow as well

[astro@work]

The way I look at it, we've only gotten ONE Shazam story so far since the nu52 started. One origin story. The rest have been team member appearances of Cap in JLA.
(No backstory or character development or supporting cast appearances).

Many of the things people are wanting to see could very well occur over time in the series, since we've only had one story. Mary Bromfield could very well turn out to be Billy's sister. Billy could move out on his own. I'm personally hoping for the Black Adam/Isis relationship to come into play. I don't mind the other Shazam kids, but I would like to see Billy be the primary power holder and Freddy/Mary be elevated in importance somehow. Uncle Dudley could also come into play as Darla's Uncle or something. All of these things are possible. It's been a long 6 year wait since that one backup series in JLA gave us an origin. And it's been an even longer wait since the 90's and the last time Shazam had a legitimate ongoing (20 years or so?)

I'm really looking forward to some new stories. Or frankly, a SECOND story.

[MajorHoy]

Just out of curiosity instead of calling him Shazam why couldn’t the have just dropped the Marvel from Captain Marvel and referred to him as The Captain?

Marvel's been there, too.





Back in late 1987, when Steve gave up his identity as Captain America (AGAIN!) and John Walker took over that role, Steve later assumed the identity of . . . "THE CAPTAIN".
(Yeah, not as original as when he became "Nomad" back in the 1970s.)

When Steve later resumed the role of Captain America, John Walker used his "The Captain" outfit and started calling himself "U.S.Agent".

[Frontier]

The way I look at it, we've only gotten ONE Shazam story so far since the nu52 started. One origin story. The rest have been team member appearances of Cap in JLA.
(No backstory or character development or supporting cast appearances).

Many of the things people are wanting to see could very well occur over time in the series, since we've only had one story. Mary Bromfield could very well turn out to be Billy's sister. Billy could move out on his own. I'm personally hoping for the Black Adam/Isis relationship to come into play. I don't mind the other Shazam kids, but I would like to see Billy be the primary power holder and Freddy/Mary be elevated in importance somehow. Uncle Dudley could also come into play as Darla's Uncle or something. All of these things are possible. It's been a long 6 year wait since that one backup series in JLA gave us an origin. And it's been an even longer wait since the 90's and the last time Shazam had a legitimate ongoing (20 years or so?)

I'm really looking forward to some new stories. Or frankly, a SECOND story.

It'd be interesting to think if a lot of the issues people had with Johns' Shazam would have been resolved if he had actually gotten down and wrote the book instead of leaving the character in limbo for so long.

[Agent Z]

There's a lot more characters who deal with hardship and ended up being rough around the edges then those who had hardship and ended up being a boy scout. So your statement about the original billy being how people react to hardship can't apply, because Billy wasn't the only one who experienced major hardship. He WAS, however, one of the only ones that experience major hardship and still was a kind, considerate person. So yes, it does apply.[

Not really as I’ll explain below.

The only one that even comes close to the boy scout of the group you mentioned is Wonder Woman. And she did not experience the hardships that Billy has gone through.

I’d say having your people turned to snakes, your mother turned to stone, being bullied as a child and discovering all manner of horrible secrets about your people qualify as pretty tough hardships. As for the others, are you at all familiar with them? Amethyst, Cyborg and Bunker did not have it easy.

Of course there is, but that doesn't change the fact that currently there is almost no boy scout characters, let alone boy scout characters who has gone through difficult hardships and still retain their kindness.

Again, see above. There were such characters.

Unlikable is subjective, there's nothing wrong with calling a character Unlikable if you don't like that character. As long as you're stating that his current personality traits are unlikable to you, there's nothing wrong with that.

Which is not what the people I was talking about were doing. They were calling him unlikable in an objective sense.

[leo619]

Not really as I’ll explain below.


I’d say having your people turned to snakes, your mother turned to stone, being bullied as a child and discovering all manner of horrible secrets about your people qualify as pretty tough hardships. As for the others, are you at all familiar with them? Amethyst, Cyborg and Bunker did not have it easy.


Again, see above. There were such characters.


Which is not what the people I was talking about were doing. They were calling him unlikable in an objective sense.

No one said their life was peaching easy. I'd say there's almost no superhero that hasn't gone through trials and tribulations, but there's a difference between experiencing hardships and almost their entire childhood growing up founded on hardships.

Again, none of the four characters fit that bill. And none of the four characters listed are boy scouts. Again, the closest is Wonder Woman, (and bunker to a certain extent, though he was more goofy and eccentric then boy scout) but none were boy scout based like pre 52 Billy was.

Now if you view those characters as boy scouts, that's your prerogative, but I surely don't.

[Agent Z]

No one said their life was peaching easy. I'd say there's almost no superhero that hasn't gone through trials and tribulations, but there's a difference between experiencing hardships and almost their entire childhood growing up founded on hardships.

Again, none of the four characters fit that bill. And none of the four characters listed are boy scouts. Again, the closest is Wonder Woman, (and bunker to a certain extent, though he was more goofy and eccentric then boy scout) but none were boy scout based like pre 52 Billy was.

Now if you view those characters as boy scouts, that's your prerogative, but I surely don't.

What exactly is your definition of a boy scout?

[MajorHoy]

It'd be interesting to think if a lot of the issues people had with Johns' Shazam would have been resolved if he had actually gotten down and wrote the book instead of leaving the character in limbo for so long.

But, when he did show up again, wasn't Geoff Johns writing him as a character in Justice League?