Captains All!

Some of you will rec­og­nize this as a re-cre­ation/rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the cov­er of Whiz Comics #2, first appear­ance of the orig­i­nal Cap­tain Mar­vel in the Gold­en Age.

This was inspired by a sto­ry a friend told me a few weeks back. Like me, his default set­ting when some­one says “Cap­tain Mar­vel” is to think first of the Faw­cett Comics orig­i­nal. His wife does­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly read a lot of comics, but she’s famil­iar with the char­ac­ter through him. Recent­ly, he and his wife were out at the movies. They were look­ing at the posters for com­ing attrac­tions. One was for Mar­vel’s Cap­tain Mar­vel film. My friend’s wife looked at the poster and was puz­zled. “Um, why is Cap­tain Mar­vel a girl?”

Look­ing around online, there seems to be more than one per­son out there who’s a lit­tle con­fused as to why these dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters have the same name. I’ve seen forums where this ques­tion’s been asked. Peo­ple who know what’s going on try to explain, only to per­haps go into too much detail, caus­ing the eyes of those who asked the ques­tion to glaze over and regret their hav­ing asked. So I’m not going to get into all that here.

This just appealed to my sense of fun to make this swap. It’s not like I haven’t made a char­ac­ter swap like this before! I’ve even swapped pub­lish­ers on this one. In my mind, this would’ve been pub­lished by Timely/Marvel. I even gave the Cap­tain a new/old logo, in line with the kind of logos they used back then.

And like many of you, I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what Mar­vel has done with their Cap­tain Mar­vel in the movie!

5 thoughts on “Captains All!

  1. John G. Pierce

    Tremen­dous idea, Mark, and well-ren­dered here (of course). Lots of cars are totaled when super-heroes (and for that mat­ter super-vil­lains) are in action. Per­haps one of these days you can do some­thing sim­i­lar with Mar­vel­man. Just a thought.

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      I’m glad you like this, John. Yeah, when you have these char­ac­ters from dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies whose creation/inspiration is sort of inter­twined, it makes fod­der for pieces like this. I actu­al­ly have some more ideas along these lines, so we’ll see if those show up here too.

      Reply
  2. Lyle Alan Dodd

    This is a nice recre­ation. It’s fun­ny how Super hero’s in the for­ties liked to “rough up” auto­mo­biles (think­ing of Action comics one). 

    Did you like the movie? 

    My con­cern is that the films are so suc­cess­ful, they are going to dri­ve the con­tents of cur­rent comics. It’s one way bad ideas, or poor­ly con­ceived edi­to­r­i­al deci­sions get made, my opinion.

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      I thought the movie was good (Gave it three stars on Net­flix). I liked it, but not as much as I’ve liked so many of the oth­er Mar­vel movies. To my frus­tra­tion, I’ve not been able to put my fin­ger on any real big con­crete rea­sons for why this one did­n’t seem to hit me with the same impact as the oth­er films. I even end­ed up see­ing it twice in the the­ater, and still can’t fig­ure it out. But again: I did like the film. It’s just a ques­tion of how much. When I’ve talked to oth­ers or looked around online, this film seems odd­ly to be some­what polar­iz­ing. Peo­ple seem to either real­ly love it, or not care much for it. My being kind of in the mid­dle puts me in what’s appar­ent­ly a rare posi­tion for opin­ions on this film.

      Reply
  3. John G. Pierce

    Lyle, here is some­thing which might inter­est you. Years ago Roy Thomas said some­thing to the effect (rough­ly para­phras­ing here from mem­o­ry) that he hoped that super-hero movies would­n’t come to dom­i­nate, because that would­n’t be good for comics. And I think that time has proven him cor­rect, not only in terms of what you sug­gest, but also in terms of just the very medi­um of comics. Why both­er to read a flat, sound­less book when some­thing sim­i­lar but far bet­ter can be expe­ri­enced in live action, 3D in some cas­es, with plen­ty of sound? In years past, the adap­ta­tion of a comics fea­ture into oth­er media helped dri­ve the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the comics them­selves. They’re still doing that — only this time they are prob­a­bly dri­ving it DOWN, not up!

    Reply

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