Fawcett Comics Overview

[Adminenkainen]

Fawcett had no A-list superheroes outside of the Marvel Family, but when your top A-list superhero is Captain Marvel you don't need other ones. All the promise for high adventure in Superman was fulfilled in Captain Marvel and his adventures in Whiz Comics were remarkably good. What sold, at one time, seemingly impossibly well was Captain Marvel Adventures, a title which began with one amazing issue by Simon and Kirby before lesser hands took it over. Even these "lesser hands" (like a young George Tuska) would sharpen their skills and hone their talents by the time of the rightfully famous "Monster Society of Evil" storyline. Continuing serials had been done in comics before, but none with the feel of the movie serials until then.

And Fawcett had good reason to embrace that aesthetic. Where other companies could not attract the movie companies with their properties, or floundered when they did, Fawcett got a pretty good serial for Captain Marvel and decided to make the most of it. The serial became canon (sort of) in the comic book universe and Whitey crossed over from the serial to the comic books, as Jimmy Olsen had done for Superman from radio.

As I said, outside of the Marvel Family (Captain Marvel Jr. and Mary Marvel would join Captain Marvel in subsequent years, successfully), much of Fawcett's properties languished in the B- or C-range of characters. After awhile they figured they had a good enough concept in Bulletman, who had languished under lesser hands, and hired comic book art virtuoso Lou Fine to improve his sales, but it seemed to have no lasting effect. I have always been partial to Minute Man, though he never rose off that B-list. Mr. Scarlet still has his fans, decades later, though I found that to be one of Simon & Kirby's weaker characters.

[Adminenkainen]

I recently had a conversation with the Atom's player in my current JSA campaign about Fawcett and thought I would publicly share my observations from it.

Although Superman's earliest adventures had elements of pulp fiction to them (before they seem to have been squashed by editorial fiat), it was the early adventures of Captain Marvel that had more of a sense of fantasy and high adventure to them. In many ways, Captain Marvel was a better prototype for the grand-scale adventures of the Silver Age of Comics than anything going on at DC or Timely back in the Golden Age.

I failed to mention Ibis the Invisible last August, a character who debuted right away with serialized adventures. While initially promising, Ibis soon languished in the hands of lesser artists, with less and less interesting scripts to work from. Which is a shame because, in the hands of someone who cared about the character as much as C.C. Beck did about Captain Marvel, Ibis could have really shone.