Number 2475: Captain Marvel is all shook up

Today’s posting came from a 1946 Captain Marvel Adventures comic book available to readers who bought two boxes of the breakfast cereal, Wheaties. The comic included this story, “The Man Who Made Earthquakes.” (On a personal note, the area in which I live had an earthquake a few months ago. As earthquakes go it was a pretty good shaker, enough to give us many aftershocks. There was some damage to the Pappy abode. So I have had earthquakes on my mind.)

The Captain Marvel stories isn’t great, but it’s not bad, either. The character, geologist Horace Shakum, is in an abandoned well and finds the “keystone of the world. The very stone that holds all the others in place!” Horace claims to fellow geologists that one tap on the keystone can bring earthquakes, and hitting it with a hammer could destroy continents. Of course he is not believed, so he has to prove it.

The Grand Comics Database credits the script to Bill Woolfolk, and artwork to Pete Costanza.

Number 2302: Captain Marvel and the space dragon

I have always assumed that Captain Marvel stories were done for youngsters, probably ages eight to twelve years. The drawings are usually fairly innocuous for comic books,* and Otto Binder, who wrote most of them, had a sense of humor so they can’t be taken seriously. This is also a story where someone says they can defeat a space dragon by gathering up “atomic rockets” and Captain Marvel does just that. He collects 1,093 atomic rockets, which if aimed at Earth might end all life on the planet. It never ceases to amaze me when I read in comic books — I have shown the phenomenon before — where the hero is handed nuclear weapons to use at his own discretion to end a threat.

The dragon is discovered by prison inmate Bozo Smith. I like that Captain Marvel works toward Bozo’s rehabilitation, even though his capture by Captain Marvel sent him to prison.

The story originally appeared in Captain Marvel Adventures #104 (1950). I scanned it from a 1953 Captain Marvel Annual from the UK. The whole annual (all 32 pages) is in color, which is unusual for reprints from the UK.

Grand Comics Database does not guess the writer and artist, so I’ll take a (hopefully educated) guess that it was written by Otto Binder, and drawn by the C.C. Beck studio.

*About 1953 Captain Marvel turned to horror for some of the stories, when horror comics became the vogue. Here is a link; just click on the thumbnail.

Number 2241: Captain Marvel abducted by aliens

Otto Binder wrote over 900 stories for Fawcett Publications featuring Captain Marvel and members of the Marvel Family. He began his long career with the Big Red Cheese in 1941, and “The Sky People” is an early entry in the saga. I can usually spot a story by Binder, especially for Fawcett, by his use of humor. Like most Otto Binder scripts, the story is light. It reads to me as a humorous alien abduction story.

It would be two or three decades before so-called “alien abductions” became part of the overall UFO/Flying Saucer story. Today on cable television and streaming video services there is an entire industry of UFO sightings and conspiracy theories about the government withholding “the truth about UFOs.” Outside of comic books Binder wrote extensively of UFOs, although he used the older term, flying saucers, for the unknown objects in the sky. His book, What We Really Know About Flying Saucers, was published in 1967 at the height of a UFO flap. But “The Sky People,” shown here, was published five years before the sightings by pilot Kenneth Arnold that kicked off the flying saucer mania in the late forties-early fifties. In the story, published in the year America joined World War II, aliens not only abduct everyday American citizens, but also Hitler!

Grand Comics Database has a guess that the artwork is by C.C. Beck. I am not sure, but believe it is more likely a product of C.C. Beck’s studio, drawn by diverse hands. It is from Captain Marvel Adventures #17 (1942).

Number 2149: Pappy gets back to business, and Captain Marvel gets swamped

Pappy is back. No confetti and no "welcome home" banner, but yes, I have returned to this blog.

Now that I am resuming a regular schedule, first up is a Captain Marvel tale which has some features I thought newsworthy. Billy Batson does not get conked on the head, or tied up and gagged so he can’t yell out the magic word. He does his reporting job, and lets his alter ego, Captain Marvel, do the muscle work.

It is an early story, published in Captain Marvel Adventures #5 (1941). The Grand Comics Database credits “Fawcett staff” for the writing and drawing.

Captain Marvel went on to become one of the great successes of the Golden Age, which was probably his eventual undoing. The GCD has circulation numbers for issues from 1944, and they are over one million per issue. The broad appeal and large numbers surely got DC Comics in a suing mood. That suit and a glut of comic books on newsstands in 1953 caused Fawcett to call it quits, shutting down not only the Marvel Family, but their whole comic book division.