I've Come from The Future to Rescue You.

“Where Superman’s cape was plain, 

adorned with only his S-brand, 

Marvel’s was flamboyantly decorated 

with gold trim and fleur-de-lys. 

He was wearing 

The Military Dress Uniform 

of A Regiment of 

Future Men and Women.”

KRYTEN: 

Sir, we really must get down to the storage bay.  

Now, remember my message to us -- 

that is where we meet the Inquisitor 

for the final confrontation.

CAT: 

That's your plan?  We go out there and face him?  

Nice plan. Shall I paint a bullseye on my face?

LISTER: 

Listen, Kryten, I've been thinkin' about this, 

I've come up with  somethin'.

KRYTEN: 

Yes, sir?

LISTER: 

I'm gonna use my brains 

for the first time in my life.

KRYTEN: 

Considering the circumstances, sir, 

do you really believe that's wise?

LISTER: 

Gimme the time gauntlet.

KRYTEN gives it to him.

KRYTEN: 

But you don't know how to use it, sir!

LISTER: 

You'll have to shout out instructions, won't ya?

KRYTEN: 

Wouldn't it be simpler if I wore it?

LISTER: 

You can't wear it, Kryten!

KRYTEN: 

Why not?

LISTER: 

You're programmed not to Kill.

“Billy Batson, Good and True, has been selected to take the place of the retiring wizard, who has used his powers to protect humankind for the last three thousand years and wants a break. The transfer of power is accomplished when Billy speaks the wizard’s name — “Shazam!” — triggering a thunderclap and flash of lightning. In the swirling smoke of the ultimate conjuring trick stands a tall man in a cape. He wears a red militarystyle tunic with a chunky yellow lightning bolt on the chest. His cape is white with a high collar and braided yellow trim. He has a yellow sash around his waist, red tights, and yellow boots. (He wisely steers clear of the underpants-on-the-outside look.) With his slicked-back brilliantined hair, he looks like the boy Billy grown up, perfected. He looks, in actual fact, almost exactly like the actor Fred McMurray, upon whose features Charles Clarence Beck based those of his hero. His final task complete, the wizard slumps back in his throne, and the immense block of stone drops to smash his body flat. His spirit form haunts the panel like Obi-Wan Kenobi dispensing postmortem advice to the fledgling superhero.

  It’s a heady brew and it extends the potential of the superhero in the way that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” pushed the prevailing idea of popular music into something unforeseen.

  The magic word was a concept that connected the hero to the basis of human speech; language, storytelling. Captain Marvel’s power came not from years in the gym or from his alien biology or his royal blood. His power came from a spell. He was a magician.

  I remember walking alone as a child, chanting every word in the dictionary in the hope of finding my own Shazam! 

Eventually, everybody searches for his or her own magic word: the diet, the relationship, the wisdom that might liberate us from the conventional into the extraordinary. That eternal human hope for transcendence gave the Captain Marvel strip rocket fuel.

  Shazam! has entered the culture as an Abracadabra or Hey Presto!—an all-purpose magical incantation. It was a word of enlightenment and personal transformation that accomplished, in a white-hot instant, what decades of Buddhist meditation could only point toward. His powers were the siddhis claimed by ultimate yogins. In the language of ceremonial magic, Shazam! summoned the holy guardian angel— the exalted future self — to come to one’s aid. When Billy’s natural curiosity got him into trouble, the word could summon Captain Marvel to deal with any and all consequences”

INQUISITOR: 

(In The INQUISITOR Voice) 

Enough!

The INQUISITOR opens 

The Mask again to reveal 

LISTER's face.

INQUISITOR: 

Well! Get out of THIS one, smeghead!

LISTER: 

What're you talkin' about?

INQUISITOR: 

You know what you coulda made 

of Your Life, if you tried.

What you coulda become.

LISTER: 

So?

INQUISITOR: 

You've got brains, man! 

Brains you've never used!

LISTER:

So?

INQUISITOR: 

So, then justify yourself!

LISTER: 

Spin on it!

The INQUISITOR closes his mask again 

and returns to his own voice.

INQUISITOR: 

The Inquisition is over. 

I have reached My Verdict.

LISTER, RIMMER, KRYTEN and CAT 

are now back standing together in The Hall.

INQUISITOR: 

Two of you have failed to become 

that which you might so easily have been. 

You have lived without merit, 

and so not lived at all!

The INQUISITOR zaps RIMMER and CAT 

with the green light, and they disappear.

LISTER: 

You scum!  You've wiped them out!

KRYTEN: 

(holding LISTER back) 

Sir!

LISTER: 

He's crazy, Kryten!

He's erased The Cat and Rimmer!

INQUISITOR: 

They are quite safe.

KRYTEN: 

Sir... I'm afraid it is we 

who are to be erased.

LISTER: 

Ah.

The INQUISITOR does something on his gauntlet, and chains appear linking KRYTEN and LISTER 

together at the ankles and the wrists.

LISTER: 

The Cat has lead a more worthwhile life 

than either of us?

INQUISITOR: 

He is a Shallow and Selfish Creature, 

as is The Hologram. 

By their own low standards, 

they have acquitted themselves.

Whereas you and the mechanoid 

could have been so much more.

The INQUISITOR surrounds them 

with the red-orange energy bubble.

LISTER: 

What's this?

KRYTEN: 

Best Guess: We are being surgically 

removed from time.  

Every memory of us, every action 

we ever performed is being dissolved.  

Our Lives are being undone.

INQUISITOR: 

It is Complete.  

The time-lines are knitted.

Causality is healed.  

All that remains is to remove 

your physical forms from existence.

LISTER: 

Well, if you've got some amazing 

secret plan up your sleeve, Kryten, 

now's the time to mention it.

KRYTEN: 

No plan, sir.  

(Indicating his mechanoid arms) 

No sleeves.

Another KRYTEN appears 

behind The INQUISITOR.  

He is wearing A Gauntlet

like The INQUISITOR's.

FUTURE KRYTEN: 

Perfect!  Ah, now, What Do I Do Next?

FUTURE KRYTEN revs up a chainsaw 

and cuts off The INQUISITOR's Hand 

with The Gauntlet.  

While The INQUISITOR staggers around in pain, 

FUTURE KRYTEN kicks The Gauntlet 

to LISTER and KRYTEN.

FUTURE KRYTEN: 

Now, hurry! Take The Gauntlet and Go!

LISTER: 

What the smeg is goin' on?

FUTURE KRYTEN: 

I don't have time to explain!

I've come from The Future to rescue you.

Now you must go!  Hurry!

KRYTEN: 

What about me?  I mean... you... 

I mean... us?

FUTURE KRYTEN: 

I'm afraid we get killed.

KRYTEN: 

Killed?  How?

FUTURE KRYTEN: 

While I'm standing here explaining this to you, 

The Inquisitor jumps me 

from behind, like this : --

The INQUISITOR jumps FUTURE KRYTEN from behind and starts to crush his head against the wall.

FUTURE KRYTEN: 

I forgot to say, before you reach 

The Final Confrontation in The Storage Bay, 

you must have decoded The Gauntlet's controls.

LISTER: 

How? Can you give us a clue?

FUTURE KRYTEN: 

Well, I cannot explain --

For some bizarre reason 

My Final Words are "Enig."

LISTER: 

"Enig?!"

FUTURE KRYTEN: 

Yeah, enig--

There is a crunching noise as the INQUISITOR 

finally crushes FUTURE KRYTEN's head.  

The remaining KRYTEN begins 

to pull LISTER away down the corridor.

KRYTEN: 

Come on sir, we have to go!

LISTER: 

He's just killed you, Kryten!

KRYTEN: 

Sir! We have got to go!

Name

“I was a DC fan and never picked up Marvel Comics, but there wasn’t much else to check out, and one cover in particular caught my eye: Captain Marvel no. 29, with its hero in a dramatic red and black costume soaring up against a hyperreal star field, courtesy of Wayne Boring via Steve Ditko. 

“DON’T DARE MISS THE BIG CHANGE IN MAR-VELL, 

IN THE THRILLER WE CALL —METAMORPHOSIS! 

 

 

HE’S COMING YOUR WAY! 

THE MOST COSMIC SUPERHERO OF ALL!” 

Many covers of the seventies showed The Questing Hero in Space, The Cosmic Seeker. No longer on the streets or even in the air between city skyscrapers, superheroes were head-tripping, off on journeys, finding themselves while The World got its own act together. 

The writer-artist on Captain Marvel was ex–navy photographer Jim Starlin, who was closer to the experiences and temperament of his young audience than Kirby. Like many of his peers, Starlin was an acidhead, and he made it plain in his stories. His mythology was more pop psych than Kirby’s, but it synthesized everything about the Marvel style in a new, easy-to-digest package that absorbed the lessons of New Gods, flattened out the spiky edges, and made Kirby look as old-fashioned as Gunsmoke on black-and-white TV. 

Starlin’s Freudian universe, which echoed and reversed Kirby’s Fourth World, revolved around the Power Struggles of Thanos of Titan and his family of demigods, including, of course, the libidinous Eros. 

Starlin recruited the Captain Marvel character to play the Orion War God role, reaffirming the captain’s shamanic roots and his appeal to psychedelic voyagers everywhere. Marvel’s Captain Marvel had begun as an uninspired attempt to secure the trademark by rustling up a character from whole cloth. The only Captain Marvel allowed to use that name on the cover of his book was Mar-Vell, a dull warrior of the Kree, until Roy Thomas drafted Marvel’s ubiquitous sidekick-for-hire, Rick Jones, into the Billy Batson role. 

Jones was soon slamming his “nega-band” bracelets together to summon The Hero in a blast of energy that recalled the original captain’s vocal detonation of occult thunder. 

In one sly scene, the meaning of which passed my young self by, a bored Rick Jones, adrift in the Negative Zone while Captain Marvel went to work, passed the time by dropping acid. Unsurprisingly, this affected The Captain’s performance, and problems ensued. 

If Kirby’s Promethean dialectic was informed by his experiences in World War II, Starlin’s came courtesy of the post–Vietnam War counterculture. Thanos was Darkseid not as galactic tyrant but as thwarted lover, a gnarled and massive embodiment of the death wish that had overwhelmed so many young Americans in the sixties. 

To make sure no one missed the point, Thanos even courted Death itself in the alluring form of a robed, hooded, voluptuously breasted female figure that followed him around like some ghostly Benedictine groupie. 

Kirby’s Satan was a monster of Tyranny; Starlin’s was a frustrated Nihilist, wooing Death like a lovesick puppy. Thanos was a Gothic teenage villain who spoke to a generation that couldn’t care less about Hitler or The Will to Power. 

I was fourteen when I found Captain Marvel no. 29, immediately arrested by its front cover. We were punk chrysalids, and Starlin’s existential heroes spoke our language, as they overcame foes that we all recognized from our spotty, sleepless nightmares. 

In a story portentously entitled “Metamorphosis,” Captain Marvel found himself on a distant planet, about to be judged by the godlike Eon. We know Eon is godlike because he resembles an enormous, hovering potato with jelly hands, a stern human face, and a giant staring eye in an acidhead’s best approximation of An Angel. 

His opening statement included these words: “WE ARE EON—HE WHO WAITS! SINCE THE DAWN OF OLYMPUS WE HAVE AWAITED YOUR COMING, AN ARRIVAL FORETOLD BY KRONOS, THE COSMIC BALANCE!” 

Starlin’s dialogue lacked Kirby’s percussive beat poetry but was more naturalistic and much easier for a fourteen-year-old to take seriously. 

If Kirby was the King James Bible, Starlin was the New English translation. Starlin smoothed Kirby’s rough edges into a solid, plastic finish. His figures were as massively proportioned and as given to sudden, violent action as the King’s but were drawn with a supple, clean line that gave them the springy believability of plasticine animation. The frenzied expressionist slashes of Kirby’s outlines were refined, mellowed out to a 3-D finish. 

Closer inspection revealed Starlin’s greatest innovations as a combination of Ditko and Kirby into one fresh new look. From Ditko he borrowed his mind-bending psychescapes and grubby urban scenes, his abstract concepts rendered into anthropomorphic form, his sliced-time panel grids and formal page compositions. 

From Kirby it was the relentless action, the epic vision, the massive figures, and the brawling masculinity. “WHY ARE YOU TORTURING ME SO?” snarled Captain Marvel through gritted enamel as he balled his fists and glanced back over his shoulder at the impassive Eon. “BECAUSE KNOWLEDGE IS TORTURE AND THERE MUST BE AWARENESS BEFORE THERE IS CHANGE.” 

Before Captain Marvel or we the readers had any chance to ask for evidence to back this up, the booming inhuman voice of Eon continued. 

“THIS WE KNOW BECAUSE WE WERE CREATED TO KNOW!” 

Which placed us in no doubt whatsoever. And so his Warrior Spirit was subjected to a series of symbolic visions showing the Futility of War: a montage of weeping children, limbless veterans, and sieg heiling Nazis. 

The Universe needed A Protector, not A Warrior, Captain Marvel was informed, and his agonizing shamanic ordeal among The Stars was designed to bring about the birth of a new “cosmically aware” Superman, a being intimately connected to everything in the cosmos. 

An out-and-out psychedelic superhero had emerged from the chrysalis of Captain Marvel. “TO BE TRULY FREE ONE MUST OVERCOME HIS OWN INNER DEMON!” 

This was the intro to Captain Marvel’s two-page fight with a crumbling stone version of himself that was conveyed in dazzling freeze-frame digital panels intercut with wide borderless shots in which two decisive figures clashed against the white space of the page. 

A series of devastating strikes reduced the inner demon to builders’ chips, and Captain Marvel was, at last, ready to move on. I’d never seen anything like it. This comic felt like it had been custom created with my specific needs in mind as a reader. I was transported, hooked on a new drug. 

As ever, it’s easy to look back and laugh, but to a fourteen-year-old who wished he’d never seen Uncle Jimmy’s porn, or squashed dogs called Shep at the side of the road, knowledge was torture. 

Which meant that maybe there did have to be Awareness before there could be Change. To an introspective, imaginative, and repressed teenage boy who had timidly rejected The Bible, this cosmic creed was as good as any. The Justice League seemed childish compared to Starlin’s beefy Pop Art psycho sci-fi — an increasingly guilty pleasure as the DC universe became stale and conservative, congealing to a set of repeated gestures played out with exhausted emblems, empty signs. 

The age-old lessons of psychedelic drug trips, the booming, inevitable voice of the bloody obvious suddenly given godlike status, were passed on to me via these stories as surely as they were through the music of The Beatles or The Doors. 

Mar-Vell was now “cosmically aware,” which meant that his features would often cloud over with a beautiful graphic representation of starry, unbounded consciousness. His face would plunge into shadows lit with moving star fields and nebulae, with only his two blue eyes gazing out of infinite space at us. 

This was How it Felt to Live inside My Head too. These battles were ones I was fighting in my own adolescent soul. This was the shamanic trip as Marvel hero book. 

Marvel Comics’ original conception of Mar-Vell had been too boring to contain the voltage of Captain Marvel, the original super shaman, but here he was finally living up to the promise of his stolen name and the responsibility of his heritage.”

We Live in an Age of Marvels

In Fair Philadelphia, we lay our scene, 

City of Brotherly Love :

Hey, Yo Baby-Creed, Rock-O, remember The Neighborhood!

Hey, Yo, Jazzy Jeff, Fresh Prince —

Spider Rico —

Hey there, Mick, Yo, Paulie —

Hey, Yo, Steps, Little Marie (from The Atomic Hoagie Stand) — Let The Be LIGHT!

Captain Marvel —

No, not that one. 

Or The Other One. 

Or, the other, Other One, who was an imposter, but not in a bad way. 

Or, any one of The Girl Ones

— Captain Marvel saves Mary from being hit by a snow plow ] 

Mary Bromfield : 

Oh, my God.

Captain Marvel : 

Mary... Mary, are you okay? 

Are you...

Mary Bromfield : 

How do you know My Name?

Captain Marvel : 

Uh... How do I know your name? 

Uh... One of my superpowers is 

name-guessing. 

Which is really weird, I bet. 

Uh, it's not as cool as super-strength or super-speed, but it's really helpful when I meet new people. 

Are you Hurt?

Mary Bromfield : 

No, I'm okay. 

Thank you. 

Um... I just need a second to think. 

This has been such a weird day.

Captain Marvel : 

Um, using my powers of super-observation, I see that you're holding a letter from a college in your hand. 

Are you upset because you didn't get in?

Mary Bromfield : 

[shakes her head, then nods]  

I got in.

Captain Marvel : 

Uh... well, now my superpowers are failing me and I am very confused.

Mary Bromfield : 

Yeah. Me too. I don't know. 

I know I should be excited 'cause This is My Dream and I've worked really, really hard for this, but it's like... 

I don't know. 

Leaving My Family does not feel fun, you know?

Captain Marvel : 

Could I, could I give you a little piece of advice? 

Don't be worried about Everybody Else. 

Always look out for Number One. 

Gandhi said that.

Mary Bromfield : 

I don't think he said that.

Captain Marvel :

Yeah, he did.

Mary Bromfield : 

Gandhi did not say….

Captain Marvel : 

Somebody like Gandhi said that.

Mary Bromfield : 

Take care of Number One?

Captain Marvel : 

It was a really Wise... 

It might've been Yoda. Listen...

Mary Bromfield : 

I'm sorry, no.

Captain Marvel :

Agree to Disagree. 

The Point is, 

You Do You, you know? 

You Gotta Look Out for You. 

And get as far away from this place as you can.

Mary Bromfield : 

I don't know if I want to.

Captain Marvel : 

Of course you do. 

What're you gonna do?

 

You're gonna live in a Group Home 

for the rest of your life?

[pause] 

Captain Marvel : 

Look, Families are for 

People Who can't Take Care of Themselves, okay? So... 

You Know, and You Can Take Care of Yourself. 

Also, Look Both Ways When You Cross The Street.

Well-Disposed Towards People, Generally

Q : 

Who Are You?

A : 

A Friend.

Arthur Dent : 

I see — anyone’s friend in particular, or are you just well-disposed towards People, generally?

Q : 

WHAT ARE YOU?!?

A :

I’M BATMAN.

KIRK: 

Bones -- There's A Thing out there...

McCOY: 

Why is any object we don't understand always called 'A Thing'?
 

 

KIRK: 

...headed this way. I Need You. 

Dammit Bones, I Need you. Badly!

 

 

*****

 

KIRK: 

Human Beings...
 

SPOCK: 

But Captain, we both know that I am Not Human.

KIRK: 

Do you want to know something? 

...Everybody's Human.

 
SPOCK: 

I find that remark ...insulting.

KIRK: 

Come on, I Need You.

*****

PICARD : 

Q. End this.

Q : 

Moi? What makes you think I am either inclined or capable to terminate this encounter?

PICARD : 

If we all die, here, now.... you will not be able to gloat..!! 

You wanted to frighten us. 

We're frightened. 

You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. 

For the moment, I grant that. 

You wanted me to say that I need you. 

I NEED You!

(With a snap of Q's fingers, the Enterprise goes whirling through space again)

Q: 

That was a difficult admission. 

Another Man would have been humiliated to say those words. 

Another Man would have rather DIED than ask for Help.

“Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” 

We can imagine that among those early hunters and warriors single individuals — one in a century? one in a thousand years? — saw what others did not; saw that the deer was beautiful as well as edible, that hunting was fun as well as necessary, dreamed that his gods might be not only powerful but holy. 

But as long as each of these percipient persons dies without finding a kindred soul, nothing (I suspect) will come of it; art or sport or spiritual religion will not be born. It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision — it is then that Friendship is born. 

And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude. Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not. They would be glad to reduce it. The first two would be glad to find a third. In our own time Friendship arises in the same way. For us of course the shared activity and therefore the companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. 

It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? — Or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?” 

The Man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance, can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about The Answer. 

Notice that Friendship thus repeats on a more individual and less socially necessary level the character of the Companionship which was its matrix. The Companionship was between people who were doing something together—hunting, studying, painting or what you will. The Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared and less easily defined; still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling companions, but on a different kind of journey. Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead. 

That is why those pathetic people who simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is can arise — though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. 

Those who have nothing can share nothing; 

those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.

 

 

 

 

 

 UHURA: 

Captain, Starfleet reports our last six crewmembers are ready to beam up - 

...but one of them is refusing to step into the transporter.
 

KIRK: 

Oh? I'll see that he beams up! 

...Transporter room.

[Enterprise transporter room]

KIRK: 

Ellen.

ELLEN: 

Yes sir.

KIRK: 

What was the problem down there?

ELLEN: 

He insisted we go first, sir. 

Said something about first seeing how it scrambled our molecules.
 

KIRK: 

That has a familiar ring, doesn't it? 

Starfleet, this is Captain Kirk [NO IT ISN'T.]. 

Beam that officer up now! 

 

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE SIGHT OF HIS OLD FRIEND, REAR-ADMIRAL JAMES T. KIRK HAS FORGOTTEN HIMSELF

 

...Well, for a man who swore he'd never return to Starfleet.

McCOY: 

Just a moment, Captain, sir. I'll explain what happened. 

Your revered Admiral Nogura invoked a little known, and seldom used, reserve activation clause...

...in simpler language, Captain, they drafted me!

 

BONES HAS NOT NOTICED/DOES NOT CARE THAT JIM IS NOW AN ADMIRAL

 

and Kirk Does Not Care to correct him.

 

 
KIRK:

They didn't!
 

McCOY: 

This was your idea! 

This was your idea, wasn't it?

KIRK: 

Bones -- There's A Thing out there...

McCOY: 

Why is any object we don't understand always called 'A Thing'?
 

 

KIRK: 

...headed this way. I Need You. 

Dammit Bones, I need you. Badly!

McCOY: 

Permission to come aboard?

RAND (OC): 

Permission granted, sir.

McCOY: 

Well, Jim, I hear Chapel's an MD now. 

Well, I'm gonna need a top nurse, not a Doctor who'll argue every little diagnosis with me. 

And ...They've probably redesigned the whole sickbay, too. 

 

I know engineers. 

They LOVE to change things.....

 

My Friend 5

I relied on the Captain Marvel of Earth-5 to come through.

From a simpler, kinder universe than the Marvel Family I know back Home.

HOYNES

Leo, I have had it up to here, with you and your pal! 

I've been shoved into a broom...

LEO

[gets riled] 

Excuse me! 

“Me” and “My Pal”..?

The Captain Marvel of Earth-5 is What Superman Would Be if Jimmy Olson were to have become Superman instead of Clark

Captain Marvel introduced audiences to Billy Batson, an orphaned 12-year-old cub-reporter who, by speaking the name of the ancient wizard Shazam, is struck by a magic lightning bolt and transformed into the adult superhero Captain Marvel. 

Fawcett’s circulation director Roscoe Kent Fawcett recalled telling the staff, 

“Give me a Superman, only have his other identity be a 10- or 12-year-old boy rather than a man”

“ “This imposes on me at the outset a very tiresome bit of demolition. It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual. 

The dangerous word really is here important. To say that every Friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too obviously false; the wiseacres take refuge in the less palpable charge that it is really — unconsciously, cryptically, in some Pickwickian sense — homosexual.

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive Love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. 

NEVER.

The rest of us know that though we can have Erotic Love and Friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is LESS like a Friendship than a love-affair. 

Lovers are always talking TO one another ABOUT Their Love; Friends talk hardly EVER about their Friendship. 

Lovers are normally Face to Face, absorbed in each other; Friends, Side by Side, absorbed in some Common Activity”

C.S. Lewis, 

The Four Loves

CAPTAIN MARVEL OF EARTH-5 : 

From a simpler, kinder universe than the Marvel Family I know back Home.

“While National’s legal team would eventually contrive to prove otherwise, Captain Marvel wasn’t much like Superman at all. Superman celebrated the power of the individual in settings drawn to look as true to life as possible. Captain Marvel’s stories offered a world that slid and slipped and became unreal, a world where the word took center stage. He embraced the interior world of dream logic, fairy-tale time, and toys that come to life. If Superman was Science Fiction, and Batman was Crime, Captain Marvel planted his flag in the wider territory of pure Fantasy.

  His origin story detailed an out-and-out shamanic experience of a kind familiar to any witch doctor, ritual magician, anthropologist, or alien abductee.

  Young Billy Batson’s journey begins in a typically mundane setting. Here on a city street corner at night, the reader is introduced to an orphan boy, a victim of the Depression, selling newspapers outside the subway station where he sleeps rough. When Billy is approached by an odd character in a slouch hat and trench coat, he seems to take it all in stride. The stranger’s face is hidden in the shadows beneath his hat brim, and Billy shows a level of trust that would seem unfeasible in our pedophile-haunted twenty-first-century world when he agrees to follow the dodgy figure into the station.

  A train arrives in the otherwise deserted station, and it can only be a train from another reality, with modernist motifs daubed across its side like graffiti painted by Joan Miró. Resembling the streamlined Platonic prototype for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express, the train carries Billy into a deep, dark tunnel that leads from this world to an elevated, magical plane where words are superspells that change the nature of reality.

  Billy’s psychedelic tunnel voyage culminates in another empty train station. Entering, the boy finds himself in a threatening archway of flaring shadows. At the end of the corridor, Billy stands face-to-face with a long-bearded “wizard” who outlines the boy’s new and unexpected duties and abilities. All the while, a monstrous, trembling cube of granite hangs suspended by a splintering thread above the wise man’s venerable skull. Everything is heightened, torch lit, and feverishly real as higher powers explain to Billy their plan.

  Billy Batson, Good and True, has been selected to take the place of the retiring wizard, who has used his powers to protect humankind for the last three thousand years and wants a break. The transfer of power is accomplished when Billy speaks the wizard’s name — “Shazam!”— triggering a thunderclap and flash of lightning. In the swirling smoke of the ultimate conjuring trick stands a tall man in a cape. He wears a red military style tunic with a chunky yellow lightning bolt on the chest. His cape is white with a high collar and braided yellow trim. He has a yellow sash around his waist, red tights, and yellow boots. (He wisely steers clear of the underpants-on-the-outside look.) With his slicked-back brilliantined hair, he looks like the boy Billy grown up, perfected. He looks, in actual fact, almost exactly like the actor Fred McMurray, upon whose features Charles Clarence Beck based those of his hero. His final task complete, the wizard slumps back in his throne, and the immense block of stone drops to smash his body flat. His spirit form haunts the panel like Obi-Wan Kenobi dispensing postmortem advice to the fledgling superhero.

  It’s a heady brew and it extends the potential of the superhero in the way that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”pushed the prevailing idea of popular music into something unforeseen.

  The Magic Word was a concept that connected the hero to the basis of human speech; language, storytelling. Captain Marvel’s power came not from years in the gym or from his alien biology or his royal blood. His power came from a spell. 

He was a Magician.

  I remember walking alone as a child, chanting every word in the dictionary in the hope of finding my own Shazam! Eventually, everybody searches for his or her own magic word: the diet, the relationship, the wisdom that might liberate us from the conventional into the extraordinary. That eternal human hope for transcendence gave the Captain Marvel strip rocket fuel.

  Shazam! has entered the culture as an Abracadabra or Hey Presto! — an all-purpose magical incantation. It was a word of enlightenment and personal transformation that accomplished, in a white-hot instant, what decades of Buddhist meditation could only point toward. His powers were the siddhis claimed by ultimate yogins. In the language of ceremonial magic, Shazam! summoned the holy guardian angel—the exalted future self—to come to one’s aid. When Billy’s natural curiosity got him into trouble, the word could summon Captain Marvel to deal with any and all consequences.

  In fact, Shazam was an acronym. Captain Marvel’s powers were derived from six gods and heroes of legend. He was endowed with the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. Mercury was all over the concept, from the bright yellow thunderbolt motif on the captain’s scarlet tunic, to the word games and the presence of the old wizard who gave Billy his word. Billy worked as a roving boy reporter for WHIZ radio, going one step beyond newspaperman Clark Kent in scoring such a prestigious adult job. The tower atop the WHIZ building crackled like the RKO Pictures logo with graphic zigzags. A boy radio announcer seems so perfect a job for a modern Hermes that it’s barely remarkable.

  All of this made Marvel the first occult — or, perhaps more accurately, Hermetic — superhero; Marvel was the magus in tights, empowered by angels and the divine. Where Superman’s strength relied on pseudoscientific explanations, Marvel’s adventures opened doors to a world of magical self-belief and transformation. Where Superman tightened his jaw and tackled the ills of The Real World, Marvel smiled a lot and had room for whimsy, warmth, and a well-developed personality. Where Superman’s cape was plain, adorned with only his S brand, Marvel’s was flamboyantly decorated with gold trim and fleur-de-lys. He was wearing the military dress uniform of a regiment of future men and women.

  Marvel heralded another innovation. Superheroes had so far been loners. In 1940 Batman had only just hooked up with Robin, and the era of boy sidekicks was yet to kick off in earnest, but Captain Marvel had Family. A superhero family! In 1942, he was joined by his cousin Mary Batson, who only had to speak the name of her hero, “Captain Marvel,” to transform from wise and good Mary Batson into the wise and good Mary Marvel, who could punch a building to dust. The third member of their team was the magnificent Captain Marvel Jr., from Whiz Comics no. 25, 1941.

  In an era when so much of the artwork could at best be described as robust primitif, the work of Mac Raboy on these strips had an illustrative delicacy and a grasp of anatomy and movement that made it unique. His Captain Marvel Jr. was a lithe Ariel, effortlessly capturing the blue-sky freedom and potential of youth better than any other superhero. With such accomplished competition as Raboy in the studio, Beck’s polished professional line work also developed a new gloss that propelled Captain Marvel’s sales beyond those of even the mighty Superman. Backgrounds seemed more solid in Marvel Family stories, the shadows were blacker and more distinct, the focus and depth of field somehow sharper, and the comics developed a deluxe look that recalled Disney animation and the best of the newspaper strips.

  In his turn, Captain Marvel spawned his own imitator, the British Marvelman — a character who provided my own first exposure to superheroes, when I was three years old and picking my way through a bizarre “Marvelman Meets Baron Munchausen” adventure. Marvelman was a child of necessity rather than inspiration. When DC successfully sued Fawcett Comics, Captain Marvel’s publisher, in 1952 and new Captain Marvel comics ceased to appear, a hasty substitute strip was assembled to fill the pages of his ongoing British reprint title. Editor Mick Anglo reconfigured the basic Marvel Family setup and remade the character as a blond hero in a streamlined jet-age blue costume with no cape and no exterior underpants. Billy and Mary were replaced by Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman. And yet, as if litigation was somehow built into the concept’s atomic structure, Marvelman himself became the subject of a bitter court wrangle that continued for decades and involved major comic-book industry players like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Todd McFarlane. Captain Marvel and his cloned offspring found themselves tangled in statutes as if the law had enacted its judgment on Prometheus. Exile would follow. DC would go on to completely destroy Fawcett in court, but the word Marvel would return to haunt DC Comics.

  Despite the legal wrangling, the exile and disempowerment of the original Captain Marvel, he and his family had made their mark on the culture. Elvis Presley’s first single appeared three years after DC filed the lawsuit that brought down the entire Marvel Family universe, but the king of rock ’n’ roll identified so strongly with Mac Raboy’s lithe superboy that by the time his own physique was somewhat less than slender, he had his costumes designed to recall Captain Marvel Jr.’s boyish, cavalier spirit. Take a look at the short capes and high collars Presley wore in his later years and note how Captain Marvel Jr.’s tousled, jet-blue cut was re-created on Elvis’s troubled head. Even the lightning bolt TCB logo on the tail of his private jet derived from Captain Marvel’s chest emblem, marking the beginning of a continuing cross-pollination between comics and popular music, two equally despised and scapegoated midcentury art forms.

  It is hardly any surprise that Captain Marvel was Ken Kesey’s favorite superhero as well. In 1959 Kesey had volunteered to take part in a series of clinical LSD trials, which inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey and some young followers painted a school bus with Day-Glo colors, wrote Furthur on the destination board, and set out to recruit an army of rebels—an alternative society of liberated superhuman beings.

  The story of Kesey and his Pranksters with their superhero alter egos—Mountain Girl, Cool Breeze, Black Maria, Doris Delay—and dreams of a new society was transformed into myth by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which talks of Kesey’s trips into the mountains to summon down lightning from the Rock of Eternity and release a thunderbolt pure enough to blind the squares and deafen the bigots and change the world forever.

  The Spirit of Marvel lived on.

The other night I was talking with My Friend, 5. 

He was over at my place, and we were out in the greenhouse together. 

And he was explaining to me how when a member of The Mende -- that's His People -- how when a member of The Mende encounters a situation where there appears no Hope at all —

He invokes His Ancestors. 

It's a Tradition. 

See, The Mende believe that if one can summon the spirits of one's ancestors, then they have never left— 

and The Wisdom and Strength they fathered and inspired will come to his aid.

James Madison

Alexander Hamilton

Benjamin Franklin

Thomas Jefferson

George Washington

John Adams — 

[John Quincy is now speaking directly to the marble bust of His Father, President John Adams, in the corner of the Supreme Court Chamber of The United States]

We've long resisted asking you for guidance —Perhaps we have feared in doing so we might acknowledge that our individuality, which we so, so revere is not •entirely• our own. 

Perhaps we've feared an -- an appeal to you might be taken for Weakness. 

But We've come to understand, finally, that this is not so.

We understand •now•. 

We've been •made• to understand, and to embrace the understanding,

That Who We Are -- •is• Who We Were.

We desperately need your Strength and Wisdom to triumph over 

Our Fears, Our Prejudices, Our Selves.

Give us The Courage to do 

What is Right.

And if it means Civil War , 

then LET IT COME. 

And when it does, may it be, finally, 

The Last Battle of The American Revolution.

That's all I have to say.”