Yesterday I mentioned that Ana Nogueira, the screenwriter for the upcoming Supergirl movie in the DC Gunninverse, had trouble believing Supergirl could be so upbeat after seeing her planet die. Kal-El was a baby and saw nothing, while Kara, depending on the continuity, was either on a Kryptonian colony or a chunk of the planet that somehow maintained atmosphere and gravity. Some versions still have Argo City alive but out of phase with the regular universe, or in a pocket dimension or warp or something. The official comic story however is that Kara is as much a survivor of a doomed world as Kal is. While Kal-El was raised on Earth as Clark Kent and only learned about Krypton later in life, Kara has to see her people die, with knowledge of her cousin being alive on Earth her only benefit…only to find that thanks to cosmic shenanigans he was already grown, thus taking care of her instead of the other way around. Not how one wants to spend their teenage years.
I was thinking about this after writing yesterday’s article and remembering that’s kind of why Geoff Johns remade Billy Batson’s personality, or so I theorize. Billy Batson lost his family in a car accident, in his earliest version having his uncle steal his inheritance (I’ve never heard how big that actually was…were the Batsons rich?) and kicking him into the streets. In the original Golden Age version Billy survived as a newspaper boy until he was brought to the Wizard and given the power of Captain Marvel, today going by Shazam for a bunch of we don’t care for this article reasons but don’t be surprised if I end up using both interchangeably or “Captain Shazam” because to me he’ll always be THE Captain Marvel. He ends up with a job in a radio station, then they retconned in a sister who was thought dead but found and later raised by a loving family who also took Billy in.
So what’s the problem? Billy, like Kara (who was also adopted by a loving couple after taking on the identity Linda Lee, depending on continuity), didn’t react the way current writers think he should. He was good natured, caring for others, and so optimistic that Captain Marvel would be called the “Big Red Cheese”, though I don’t think that’s the actual origin of the nickname. I’ll find out when we start looking through the old Fawcett comics. According to the writers, they should be despondent, angry, weighed down by the huge trama of how terrible their backstories are. Except they aren’t, and the fact that they don’t understand why shows they don’t understand how DC used to operate.
