Shazam! Volume 1

Young orphan Billy Batson has bounced from foster home to foster home, but he's far from the ideal child.But after a fateful night on a subway car, that all will change. 

Brought to the feet of the magical wizard Shazam at the Rock of Eternity, Billy is imbued with powers beyond any mortal man. Now given abilities that make him Earth's Mightiest Mortal at the utterance of a simple phrase, will Billy make the right choices and do what it takes to become a hero?

Writer:

Geoff Johns

Artist:

Gary Frank

Publisher:

DC Comics

The moral of this story is trust in Geoff Johns. From the start, relaunching Shazam to the extent that it would reach mass appeal was going to be difficult. The character used to be known as Captain Marvel (but never to be published as such due to a copyright issue with a Marvel character) and was one of the first superheroes, at one point being more popular than Superman himself. Captain Marvel was completely aimed at children and had a lot of more fantastical elements, such as a Tiger in a suit called Mister Tawky Tawny and an intelligent evil caterpillar called Mr Mind. Captain Marvel's alter ego was even a kid called Billy Batson

Though eventually meshed into the DC Universe after the company bought the rights to him, he's never quite sat well with it, even after some great work done by writers like Judd Winick. For at heart, Captain Marvel is a character that makes Superman say 'what a boy scout'. How do you make that appeal to a modern day audience who are a bit more cynical and want a bit more darkness to their heroes? All the while keeping the fans of the traditional interpretation of the character happy?

Johns appears to have found the answer by charting a path right down the middle. This version of Billy Batson is still an orphan, but his life has been anything but lovely. Passed from one foster home to another he's combative, rude and overall not very trusting of others. Yet when he moves into a home of a couple who have adopted multiple other children he slowly finds himself discovering what a family is. All the while, trying to discover more about the powers he has been gifted as Shazam and fend off the attentions of Black Adam, the last man to take up the Shazam mantle.

What makes a pretty rote story work is that John's injects it with a somewhat childish sense of glee, whilst making sure everything rattles along at a quick enough pace that you never really see the cracks in his construction. When Billy first gets his powers and uses it to foil a robbery he genuinely loves doing it. When he's gifted by a few quid by someone too as a way of saying thanks, the way his face lights up perfectly captured the concept of a boy within the body of a man. I wasn't the greatest fan of Gary Frank's artwork, but it's the small details like that that he get perfectly.

John's is the master of managing to tell stories that are economic and that have all these branching paths that come together when needed (as anyone watching the Flash TV show can attest) and it's in  full flow here, Black Adam's, and to a lesser extent Doctor Svanna's, storyline weaving in and out of Billy's, who has his own problems to deal with. This does present some problems in the eventual big showdown at the end as it just becomes one fight after another, but even then the variety of twists and turns throw in means it's entertaining enough.

Overall, Volume 1 of Shazam is a success. John's manages to resolve the main storyline in six issues, whilst leaving plenty of open ended plot points to be picked up on at a later point. I'm not sure if we quite needed the Shazam universe back in our lives, but now he's here I'm glad he is.

Cover image courtesy of DC Comics.

Shazam! Volume 1 is available from Amazon or your local comics retailer.