The Next Time it Happens....
THIS Way : —
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.
Let’s talk about Magick. How does one get better at it?
GM: By doing it on a regular basis! It’s like a martial art or a musical talent. If you dedicate yourself to learning and practice, if you read other magician’s accounts, if you pay attention, then you start to notice details that the less engaged will miss and this allows you to do things that other people may regard as magical or even supernatural. Just like a stage conjurer, or a great guitarist, or a gifted actor or artist can do. It’s just about really paying attention and doing the work to see what happens. It’s just a way of looking at things in a fresh light and then working with this augmented version of reality in ways that can appear supernatural. One of magic’s main attractions involves bringing things into being, from the conception or thought all the way to solid materiality. Making the insubstantial tangible.
But there’s also a whole other thing. Magic is about DELIBERATELY inducing Unusual States of Consciousness.
Some of these States of Consciousness have been called Gods because they feel Super-Organized and Positive, and some of them can be called Demons because they feel Chaotic, Violent, Hateful and Perverted or Whatever.
That’s Part of Magic. It’s as simple as 'HOW Can You Create Different States of Consciousness'?
Magic uses Spells or Rituals, some developed over many centuries, to stimulate Specific Focused States of Consciousness, whether Demonic or Angelic or God-like.
Psychedelics and hallucinogens have been used by Shamans for the same Purpose.
And The Written Word along with the expression of it are ALL Magic. In the sense that Words THEMSELVES hold such Tremendous Power.
GM: If you can limit The Language you can reduce The Scope of a Conjuror. George Orwell warns us about that in the appendices to 1984.
If you restrict The Language, if you make it impossible to express Abstract Ideas, then you put boundaries on people’s Ability to Think Creatively or Communicate Certain Concepts. It DOES Work.
Words shouldn’t have the kind of Power and Meaning that we attribute to them but most of Us grew up in The Aeon of Osiris, where words have been really important and fundamental to Human Progress.
Words mean The Law, Words mean The Bible, or The Constitution, Words define The Divine Rules by which We Abide. The 10 Commandments.
As any Writer can tell you; Words are just things that DANCE AROUND when you Play with Them.
They can mean all kinds of different things.
They bring with them the distortions of interpretation where The Words of Christ – ‘Love Your Enemies’ – can be twisted to motivate bloody genocidal Crusades.
I think Wilson was trying to undermine people’s fear of The PERCEIVED Authority and Power of Words as Things in Themselves.
For sure. There are some big words that have been added to the dictionary over the last 20 years, specifically Beyonce’s ‘bootylicious.’
GM: Well exactly, there you go man. But still I don’t exactly know what it’s describing, but I can almost taste it!
Adding on the to the notion of words and symbols being charged with magic, they have also been charged through the increasing amounts of propaganda over the course of the 20th Century and into today. Isn’t that something that RAW is constantly reminding readers, that propaganda is real, and lots of it feeds off your base emotions, like anger and fear. Most people don’t recognize that cuz they haven’t seen the FNORDS!
GM: It’s more like people’s sense of the immense energy compressed into certain words. It’s not the word itself – as Wilson reminds us ‘fuck’ is a ‘bad’ word but it doesn’t sound much different from ‘folk’, a ‘good’ word, and it means the same as ‘coitus’, another ‘good’ word. So where exactly does the wickedness and dirtiness of ‘fuck’ reside?
Words become fetishized for reasons good or bad and the more fetishized they are, the more taboo they become, which confers an aura of outlaw sexiness that attracts some people to them.
Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bob Wilson himself, all made a point of saying that words should not be given this kind of power because once they have this power, they can become fetishized and weaponized. If you de-power a word then it can’t be used to trigger other people in the same reliable way, but we’re just not in that phase, with the dislocated politics of culture right now. I think people got it right to take down some of these structures right now and perhaps it’s okay to retire certain radioactive, abusive terms as long as we make sure we’re creating new words in other areas.
As a for instance, when I was a kid there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience. I’ve been non-binary, cross-dressing, ‘gender queer’ since I was 10 years old, but the available terms for what I was doing and how I felt were few and far between. We had ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ both of which sounded like DSM classifications rather than lifestyle choices! I didn’t want to be labelled as medical aberration because that’s not how it felt, nor was it something cut-and-dried and done. I didn’t want to ‘transition’ or embody my ‘female’ side exclusively, so I had no idea where I fit in.
Terms like ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary’ only came into vogue in the mid-90s. So kids like me had very limited ways of describing our attraction to drag and sexual ambiguity. Nowadays there’s this whole new vocabulary, allowing kids to figure out exactly where they sit on the ‘color wheel’ of gender and sexuality, so I think it’s OK to lose a few contentious words when you are creating new ones that offer a more finely-grained approach to experience.
When we make the jump to a non-Roman-alphabet-based emoji language for purposes of radio telepathic communication, things will change once more.
This conversation of neutralizing the charge from taboo words is also a premise of RAW’s Ishtar Rising, which you wrote the introduction of the newest reprinting of the book by Hilaritas Press. Also, in that book, Wilson explores the mythical trope of the underground journey, something explored and unpacked in nearly all his books.
Joseph Campbell has some cool stuff to say about the Underground Journey, mainly that in all his studies of world myths he had observed two types of underground journey stories. One type was when the underground swallows up a poor soul like the whale did to Jonah. When this happens, the sole purpose of the seeker is to just survive the ordeal and return to the surface in one piece. The second type of journey through the underground occurs when the hero or heroine must descend into the depths and kill a monster. Campbell mentions one myth where the hero must slay a dragon then drink its blood to gain its power and move on and continue their quest. Campbell associates this killing of the dragon and drinking its blood as an integration of our shadows into our psyches. By integrating these elements of ourselves we then gain the sort of personal power needed to live a joyful and energetically engaged life.
GM: Yeah, and the story of the underground journey in Britain often involves someone finding a cave where he sees all of King Arthur’s knights asleep just waiting for the time of England’s greatest need when they will have to rise up and fight the final battle against evil. So that’s a more passive version of the story. Someone goes in and finds these sleeping warriors. That’s the personal power, that’s the higher self that will arise when you need it most.
Wilson has a dark side version of this exact legend at the end of Illuminatus with the undead Nazi battalions awaiting their orders to rise from Lake Totenkopf and reclaim the world!
What advice do you have for the magicians out there who have a story to tell and want to storm the reality studio?
GM: Tell a different story. Tell a fresh story that speaks to its times and the people around you. A story that offers possibilities, exit strategies, rather than apocalypse and ruin. I can’t see that there’s anything else…
In the Wonder Woman book I’m doing, for instance, I’ve actively avoided writing the boy hero story that’s so ubiquitous as to seem inescapable — the familiar story of the One, the champion, the Joseph Campbell monomyth thing that drives so many Hollywood movies and YA stories. We’ve seen it. The Lion King. The callow youth loses mom or dad, or his comfortable place in the tribe, and he has to fight his way back to save the kingdom from its corrupt old leader, before claiming the captive princess and becoming the new king and… ad infinitum. The Circle of Life if it only applied to boys. I thought, where is the mythic heroine’s story? In Ishtar Rising, Wilson talks about the myth of Inanna, and how she goes down into Hell and has to give up everything of herself to gain the wisdom and experience she can bring back to her tribe. Privileging the network rather than the sovereign individual.
And so, as I thought about the differences between the hero’s and the heroine’s journey, it gave me a bunch of different modes to work in. Finding ways to avoid telling the boy hero story again was quite liberating. It just gave me a bunch of new ideas, an interesting new way of telling stories that didn’t rely on the framework of the hero’s journey that Campbell talks about.
Playing the devil’s advocate here. Today there is a lot of fervor around identity, and there is one strong of thought that people can never truly understand what it is like walking in the shoes of others. Some may ask why a white man would seek to tell the story of a woman, from her perspective, instead of just sticking to what he knows, being a man.
How authentically real is that character or story, etc.?
GM: It’s important to air These Feelings for debate. I must admit, with all respect, that I COMPLETELY disagree with The Idea That We Cannot Understand One Another.
Firstly, there’s a major obvious problem about coming at things from this perspective — if fundamentally, we cannot TRULY Know or have any Meaningful Opinion on What it Feels Like to be X, then we may as well STOP LISTENING to ANYTHING Anyone Else has to Say about Their Personal Experience, on The Basis That it can only be IRRELEVANT to Our SPECIFIC Lives!
If I can never TRULY Understand You without Walking in Your Shoes and vice versa, WHAT'S THE POINT of Listening or Talking to ANYONE about Our experience? What’s The POINT of Writing Stories, or Protesting, or Making Art if experience cannot by its nature be communicated and understood by ANYONE who has not shared The Experience of The Artist, or The Writer?
I think we all know it doesn’t really work that way in The Real World. We don’t need to BE a thing to have some Understanding of How it Operates.
People can be great Veterinarians without personally experiencing the day-to-day Inner Lives of Dogs and Cats.
I can read Solzhenitsyn and shed empathic tears for The Inmates of the Gulag without having to REPRISE their EXACY experience.
To think otherwise might be, I suspect, a Symptom of Narcissism painted into its inevitable corner, its Private Echo Chamber – destructive, divided, atomized, individualistic to the point of self-abnegation – and indicative of Late stage Osiris pathology.
And you know, We actually DO Understand one another in so many ways.
We can imagine what it’s like to live someone else’s life –— or we can have our imaginations enflamed by well-told tales of other people’s lives and thrill to the ways they resonate exactly with our own lived experience.
As a Writer, I KNOW This to Be True.
We’ve been observing one another’s behavior and drawing conclusions since The Dawn of Humanity.
People AREN'T so complicated or new that the basic functions remain a mystery.
All our plays, poems, songs and stories are a record of our attempts to understand ourselves and one another.
The fact that Greek drama or Shakespeare still speaks to us is evidence that basic human nature has remained fairly consistent for thousands of years.
We figured one another out a long, long time ago.
And ultimately, I’ll say again, we are all the same organism. What we’re seeing is ring fingers fighting with thumbs, eyelashes screaming that eyebrows can never understand them!
To point that out is probably an anathema in this current time of Narcissistic Inflation but it will be understood as a Fact of Nature in The End.
Maybe I’m wrong and we’re all fucked because humans are a kind of cancer-creature and our only purpose is to destroy each other and all other lifeforms on our planet… there’s still time for Agent Smith to be proved right!
I think everyone should have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We can all learn from one other but that means communicating; that means starting with the assumption we do have a common basis for genuine understanding even if our specific circumstances can never be repeated or totally understood by anyone other than ourselves. We all hurt, we all feel joy, we all get turned on, or scared. We all experience loss, and lack of self-worth and feel badly treated by the world at times.
And I understand why everyone should talk and tell stories from their own position you know but it’s also very useful – and a major human talent – to imagine how other people feel and consider how the world might look through their eyes.
And you do that by staying informed, listening to voices even when you disagree with them –—and by employing empathy and imagination to put yourself in their place as best as you’re able.
These are difficult times. I’m not a guru. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. There’s seven in a half billion people and it often seems they all fucking hate each other! Yet they all want everyone else to agree with their tiny, restricted, localized points of view. And they’ve all got a piece of ground to defend against perceived foes. I get it, but ultimately, we’re all one thing, one massive organism that’s going through difficult growing pains at the moment, so maybe we need to start thinking about what makes us alike, rather than different.
I hope so
GM: Well, this is part of the boiling process. Capitalist Consumer Culture has clearly reached its LIMITS and we either Advance to a More Efficient, Stable, Less-Suicidal and Aggressive Engagement with other people and our environment or we go extinct as a species, taking all the whales and tigers and gorillas with us, before we even figured out how to talk to them and hear their stories! There are few options remaining.
The current questioning, the judgmental audit of where we are and how we got here, is a Horus thing. We can only hope we sublimate from here via Ma’at into something more nurturing and sustainable.
It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.
GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris.
The Echoes of The Inquisition, accusations of ‘WrongThink’, The Return of Original Sin, The Demonic GLEE taken in any stumble or falter from The Approved Path seems almost mediaeval.
It’s terrifying.
The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by Rules That Grow ever more Authoritarian and Specific every day.
Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading Power by The Osiris Energy of The Last 2000 years, now gone Rotten and Unsustainable but trying HARDER to Keep Everything and Everybody under Increasingly Deranged levels of Control in every area of our lives.
Writers and artists can find more reasons to stop their expression than ever before it seems. The voice of Criticism and Judgement is easier to find these days, just doom scroll through various social media sites and it’s all over the place.
GM: I regard it all as new input. As tough as it is, there’s an excitement. It’s Making Me Think, it’s making me question myself and my assumptions, it’s making me write different things. I love ideas that Challenge My Thinking — even if I don’t AGREE with them in The End.
What are your thoughts on Simulation Theory these days?
GM: I was reading New Scientist recently and one of the correspondents on the letters page threw out this random idea that really resonated with me. The writer was saying that if we live in a simulation then perhaps the world in the past was not as detailed or as high fidelity as it we experience it now! There have been upgrades, developments. In computer game terms, think of the difference between Space Invaders and Red Dead Redemption 2!
And I thought, wow, wouldn’t that be funny if, you know, those medieval painters with the flat landscapes and no perspective, what if they were accurately representing an earlier, more simplistic iteration of our simulated reality? What if they were simply portraying what the world actually looked like in the early stages of the simulation! What if these artists were recording what they saw and that’s how it looked?
Suddenly I saw the history of art in a whole new light! I thought how cool it would be if the cave paintings at Lascaux represented caveman reality perfectly – that’s how the simulated world really looked in an early development of the simulation when we were all just stick figures with antlers and the animals were sketchy semi-abstracts…
I love that idea; that the simulation is becoming more complex and well-rendered as it goes along – and we can see where it’s been.
It almost seems like it will become harder to break the Matrix as it becomes more refined, nuanced and easier to mistake for reality. It is interesting looking at the Simulation theory with the idea of calling it a metaphor for the same thing that the Gnostics came up with.
GM: Yeah, the idea that the universe is a counterfeit created not by god but by some sort of underling of god… that was the gnostic idea. It’s not so much about breaking the Matrix, I feel it’s more about learning to work with it. In the movie, once Neo figures out how it works, he becomes a magician, a superhero. The counterfeit world in the movie seems much more fun than the real one.
Can magic be a useful tool for navigating VR and AR in IRL?
GM: Yeah, because magic is just about adding meaning or enchantment to the environment and to your life. Magic spices up everything; it’s like hot sauce! Once you add magic, the universe comes to life and starts to dance with you. If you choose to be an exploiter, a black magician, it’s more like a lap dance but otherwise it’s a tango! As I’ve said before, it’s easy to add magic to things. If you decide a certain stone could use some magic power, then carry it with you long enough and it will become first a good luck talisman and will finally accrue the significance and meaning of a Holy Grail if it’s given enough time and attention. So, the more meaning you can add to experience, the more magical it will seem. It’s not difficult or ‘occult’ at all. Magic makes everything more exciting, rich and alive and that’s its job. The more magic you can create around something the more special your interaction with it will feel
ONCE THE FORMULA was established, dozens, hundreds, of variations and combinations of the hero type could be run.
In his crime-fighting guise as the Flash, Jay Garrick wore a tin-winged helmet, a red shirt with a lighting bolt motif, blue slacks, and boots with wings. In this way, he personified comic books’ debts to one of their secret patron gods.
We’ve all seen the logo of the Interflora chain of florists. We may be familiar with Greek statues depicting a gracefully gliding youth in a tin helmet. This hat and the Flash’s winged heels belong to the Greek god Hermes and his Roman counterpart, Mercury. He is the messenger of the gods, and he represents, quite simply, language itself. Like language, he is swift, inventive, tricky, slippery, and elusive.
In India, he is personified as elephant-headed Ganesh, who writes the story of existence with his own broken-off tusk. In Egypt, he was Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe. The earliest Babylonian cultures portrayed him as Nabu. In the voodoo pantheon, he is Legba; to the Celts, he was Ogma; and Viking mythology knew him as Odin, the one-eyed god, from whose shoulders the magical ravens—thought and memory—fly hither and yon to bring the god instant knowledge from all corners of the cosmos. In 1940 Hermes just couldn’t resist showing up in person to join in all the fun as his fellow gods were reborn on paper.
He washed up with the rest of the trash in the swill of twentieth-century gutter culture but was given a new vitality down there where no one but children and illiterates were looking. No longer a god, but still a popular representation of a god, he was that bridge between man and the divine now known as the superhero. And the wing-festooned Flash was only one manifestation: Those were Hermes’ fledged heels on Prince Namor, too, and the swift god’s lightning brand would be worn by generations of superheroes. But he would find his truest expression, perhaps, in the form of Captain Marvel, the bishonen, the condemned young man who became the most serious threat to Superman’s sales domination.
Today every comics company has at least one, and sometimes several, characters who are direct analogues of Superman: Mr. Majestic, Supreme, Samaritan, Sentry, Hyperion, Omega, the High, Apollo, Gladiator, Omniman, Optiman, the Public Spirit, Atoman the Homelander, Superior the Plutonian, Alpha One — the list unfurls like a toilet roll. All of these characters are thinly disguised copies of Superman published by companies other than DC, or in some cases by DC itself, as if one Superman was too few.
Things were different in 1940. A lucrative trademark was a jealously guarded intellectual property. National had their socialist strongman in fetters, milking his uniqueness for every dime and dollar. The last thing anyone there wanted was another Superman, let alone a potentially more charming and profitable one.
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 MirĂ³. 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.
