Shazam! #1 // Review
Billy Batson may not be doing the best in school, but he IS having tea with intergalactic space dinosaurs. And he’s alive, which is really cool considering all that he had to live through in the Lazarus Planet crisis, which passed into a satisfying conclusion last month. Now, the Captain is on to new adventures in a whole new book with Shazam! #1. Writer Mark Waid opens a new chapter on the life of Billy Batson in an issue drawn by Dan Mora. Color graces the page courtesy of Alejandro Sánchez. It’s a reasonably fun opening to a new series.
Magic has been kind of wonky since the Lazarus Planet incident. The Captain has had a bit of a challenge juggling his life with his superheroing, but he’s been keeping it all together quite well. Billy’s even started a podcast talking about the Captain and everything that he’s been up to. There are dark forces at work, though. There’s something that’s looking to make life difficult for him. The biggest problem might be...himself. But is it him, or is it some dark and sinister force that’s come over him? Maybe he’s trying to do too much...
Waid solidly establishes what’s going on with Billy Batson in an issue that actually doesn’t feature a lot in the way of a central conflict. There’s a single scene with a single pair of villainous people in heavy shadow, but there isn’t much menace for the first issue of a new series, which could prove to be a bit of a drag as the series gets going. To his credit, Waid does a splendid job of updating the Golden Age Captain Marvel to the current era in an establishing issue that makes a kid in the body of a mesomorphic superhero seem remarkably real and earthbound.
Mora gives the Captain a cleverly childlike demeanor that occasionally shoots forward into more of a traditionally iconic superhero look. It’s a fun dichotomy in characterization that not every artist has managed with Captain Marvel over the years. Mora balances the power of traditional action of…say...saving people in a natural disaster in California against the weirdness of a group of intelligent Tyrannosaurus rexes that have popped in on a flying saucer. It all feels so well-balanced, even when it’s being weird. While Mora IS given the opportunity to draw a variety of different situations, the first issue has been SUCH a close-up on Billy that the artist hasn’t had the opportunity to give life to a whole lot of supporting cast just yet.
It has all the hallmarks of a Golden Age story, but Waid fuses the feel of an old-school comic book hero with a more contemporary perspective that serves the story quite well. The Billy Batson/Shazam premise has always been an interesting one. Waid is going to have a challenge keeping it fresh in the long run, but everything seems more or less entertaining in the debut issue of a potentially good series.
