It's Weird That Shazam Doesn't Have a Name, Right?
The complicated history of Captain Marvel/Shazam's name
If you were one of the dozens of people who saw the most recent DC superhero movie, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, this weekend — or saw its predecessor, Shazam!, back in 2019 — there’s a good chance you noticed something really weird about it: the superheroic star of these movies doesn’t have a superhero code name.
For context: Shazam! and its sequel are both about Billy Batson, a teenaged orphan (played by Asher Angel) who is blessed by a dying wizard, granted the ability to transform into an adult with extraordinary superpowers (played by Zachary Levi1) when he says the magic word “Shazam!” Now, in the comics, the name of this adult superhero Billy transforms into is Shazam — and Shazam is the name of the film as well, plastered on posters and billboards next to Levi’s costumed mug.
In the movies, though? Billy’s superpowered alter-ego isn’t granted the code name Shazam until the final seconds of the second movie, leaving Billy, his family, and the citizens of Philadelphia struggling to find a name that suits him for the majority of his screen time.
The movies themselves treat this as a pretty minor thing, but that in and of itself is part of why this choice is so strange: Billy’s lack of a codename feels like it should be a much bigger deal than it is, and that’s just tonally off-kilter. “The superhero without a codename” or “the superhero in search of a codename” could be a pretty compelling gimmick, but Billy Batson already has a gimmick (the kid who transforms into a grown-up); thus this search for a codename just becomes a minor running gag. There’s barely even a resolution; it takes until the final minutes of the second film, three years into Batson’s superheroic career, for him to be told by the Wizard that his name is Shazam, and in response everybody just kinda nods and goes “Oh yeah, we should have figured that out sooner.” That’s…deflating.
It’s also strange from a branding viewpoint. Now, Billy is far from the first costumed superhero in a movie to not have a codename. Way back in 2000’s X-Men, Jean Grey went without one (having long outgrown her various monickers in the comics), and Wanda Maximoff spent her entire tenure as an Avenger in the MCU battling without a codename, not taking on the role of the Scarlet Witch until her heel-turn in Multiverse of Madness. But Shazam isn’t a supporting player in his movies, he’s the star. Like the comic books that inspired them, superhero movies are almost always named after the hero that stars in them; if you aren’t calling him Shazam in the movie, you’re really fucking up at branding.
Four years after Shazam!’s release I’m still stunned that Warner Brothers’ marketing team allowed this to happen, that they didn’t make the writers commit to just fucking calling Shazam, Shazam. As I walked out of the theater, I had to wonder if the choice had something to do with the incredibly fraught history behind calling Billy Batson “Shazam” and the controversy (and legal trouble!) that has always surrounded the character and his superheroic moniker. Buckle in, because this story is as wild as anything you might find in one of Shazam’s comics.
The most important thing to know about the Shazam! comic book franchise is that it’s been mired with legal issues since its very inception.
Way back in 1939, Fawcett Comics debuted a new character named Captain Marvel in Whiz Comics 2 (written by Bill Parker and illustrated by C.C. Beck). The story may sound familiar to you now: 12-year-old orphan Billy Batson is blessed by the wizard Shazam, granted the ability to transform into an adult superhero named Captain Marvel when he says the magic word “Shazam!” Captain Marvel was an instant success2, and went on to be the best selling comic of the 1940s, outselling even Superman!
DC Comics, owner of Superman, wasn’t too happy about that. It didn’t help that Captain Marvel shared more than a few similarities to Superman in regards to powers, design, personality, and even occupation (Billy Batson was a cub reporter for a radio station). DC sued Fawcett for copyright infringement in 1941; the case went to trial in 1948 and dragged on until 1953. By then Captain Marvel’s sales had dropped significantly anyway, and in fact, superhero comics themselves had largely fallen out of fashion and were facing hard times3; thus, Fawcett ended up settling with DC, paying them $400,000 in damages and agreeing to never publish Captain Marvel comics again.
In a sad, ironic twist of fate, DC Comics would go on to license the Captain Marvel characters from Fawcett Comics in 1972 (and eventually bought the rights to the characters outright in 1991). However, this brought with it a new legal struggle: in the interim, DC’s rival Marvel Comics had introduced their own, completely unrelated character named Captain Marvel in 1968, and by doing so, now owned the trademark on the name.
This Captain Marvel was an alien soldier, Captain Mar-Vell of the Kree Army, and though he never became all that popular as a character, Marvel Comics made sure to publish a series starring their Captain Marvel (and, eventually, several successors to the mantle) every few years specifically so that they could retain the copyright and keep it out of DC’s hands.
This put DC in a bind. Legally, they were allowed to feature the classic Captain Marvel in their comics and could even continue to use the name, but they weren’t allowed to title any comics, tv shows, or movies Captain Marvel. Thus, every Captain Marvel comic was given a name like Shazam! or The Power of Shazam! — they briefly tried a “featuring Captain Marvel” byline, but Marvel Comics quickly put the kibosh on that. This created an incredibly complicated branding situation, with most casual fans assuming that Captain Marvel was just named “Shazam” — after all, that’s the name of his comic.
Even aside from that, DC struggled to find a niche for Captain Marvel in their publishing line. The quaint charm of child wish fulfillment felt anachronistic in the gritty 80s and 90s, but any attempts to update the characters with more modern sensibilities fell flat, losing the heart that made them work in the first place. While Captain Marvel’s evil counterpart, Black Adam, took DC Comics by storm throughout the 2000s and became their premiere anti-hero, Captain Marvel kinda bounced around aimlessly, taking up brief tenures in the Justice League International and Justice Society, and popping up in small (but memorable) roles in the Justice League Unlimited and Young Justice TV series and seminal comics like Kingdom Come and The Dark Knight Strikes Again. There was clearly interest in the character, but he just couldn’t gain enough traction with readers to maintain an ongoing series.
In what would end up being a bit of a trial run, in 2008 DC made major changes to Captain Marvel and his supporting cast. Billy Batson took on the overseer/mentor role of the Wizard Shazam, naming himself “Marvel” and becoming bound to his magical base, the Rock of Eternity. In his place, Freddy Freeman — Billy’s best friend and Captain Marvel’s sidekick, who had until then been called Captain Marvel Jr. — became the new champion of Earth, fighting crime under the name “Shazam!” The gamble mostly landed with a thud and was reversed within a couple of years4, but it set the stage for a far more significant shift in Billy’s status quo.
In 2011 DC completely rebooted their publishing line in an initiative called The New 52. In the New 52, Billy Batson was re-imagined as a bitter child with abandonment issues who was recruited by the Wizard Shazam, who saw in him the potential for greatness. The Wizard grants Billy the ability to transform into an adult superhero when he says the magic word “Shazam,” but this time, the name of the hero Billy transforms into is also Shazam. Captain Marvel is no more.
While this change had been a long time coming (as I said, readers had been assuming his name was “Shazam” since DC revived him in the 70s anyway), DC’s hand was also starting to be forced; it’s worth noting that this was also about the time Marvel Comics finally made their Captain Marvel stick, passing the mantle onto perennial B-Lister Carol Danvers and giving the character an all-out media push that turned her into a household name (she’d go on to headline her own movie in 2019, officially crushing any chances of Shazam regaining his former mantle). DC also took this opportunity to further differentiate Shazam from Superman, not just in personality, but in appearance (adding a cloak, hood, and glowing magic insignia to his uniform) and power (adding magic projectile lightning and spell casting to his repertoire).
DC also took initiative when it came to solving some of the problems caused by changing Captain Marvel’s name to Shazam. Billy’s magic word had always been incredibly sensitive, transforming him into Captain Marvel any time he said “Shazam,” or even heard himself say “Shazam” on, say, a cassette or video tape, whether Billy wanted to transform or not. The magic word could be a liability, and it was even moreso for Freddy Freeman, whose magic word for transforming into Captain Marvel Jr. was, not “Shazam,” but “Captain Marvel” — yes, he was a superhero who couldn’t say his own name, and while it was often played for laughs, it also proved to be a nuisance to writers (they started calling Freddy “CM3” through the late 90s and early 2000s, but it never really caught on). Not wanting to deal with this same issue with the newly christened Shazam, DC decided that the magic word “Shazam” now only worked when said with intention, allowing for Shazam to say his own name without transforming back into a teenager.
Finally, it should also be noted that this rebooted, New 52 take on Shazam is almost solely the inspiration for the movies. Billy’s personality, Shazam’s appearance and powers, and Billy’s expanded foster family and their own heroic counterparts are all ripped straight from their pages. Pretty much the only concept the movies shied away from is the actual goddamn name of their own starring character!
When I first sat down to write this piece, I was convinced that the movies put off giving Billy his official “Shazam” codename as long as possible because of all the confusion and drama that had always surrounded his name, but actually writing out the character’s history has disabused me of this notion. If anything, the choice makes even less sense to me now. Guys, the comics already sorted this out! They’ve been calling him Shazam for over ten years now!
Billy taking on the name Shazam has been a change that has largely been accepted by fans, and his modern writers have even gone out of their way to anticipate and solve any issues this name change could create. The change worked! Why complicate it?!
Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe it really is just a running gag that makes the screenwriters chuckle. Or, maybe I’m underthinking it. Maybe this is commentary on the fact that modern superhero movies almost never actually use their heroes’ codenames anymore, or even a bit of meta-commentary on the character himself — after all, Billy’s journey in the films to find his name and make a place for himself isn’t all that different from the journey the character took in real life as he tried to find a name that wasn’t already taken and a viable niche in DC’s publishing line and modern pop culture.
There’s a lot of possibilities here, and honestly, they’re all kind of strange — but at least both Shazam movies are a lot of fun, and this is really just an awkward slight misstep that doesn’t drag them down. Still, at this point, rather than a Shazam 3, I’m far more interested in the possibility of a movie about the Fawcett vs. DC lawsuit over Captain Marvel. God, the drama — that would be a movie!
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“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
Also a noted anti-vaxxer, because apparently this must be the newest trend for comic book movie actors.
Hell, Elvis Presley of all people considered Billy’s sidekick, Captain Marvel Jr. a.k.a. Freddy Freeman, his favorite character and ended up modeling his hair and wardrobe choices after Junior for the rest of his career. These were huge, formative comic books in the 40s!
The “Golden Age of Comics,” which began with the creation of Superman in the late 1930s and led to a boom in superhero titles, died out rather unceremoniously after WWII ended. Comic books themselves remained popular, but tastes trended more towards horror or romance titles. Once-titans like Captain Marvel, Captain America, and the Justice Society of America faltered in sales until they were cancelled outright. DC Comics was just about the only publisher whose superhero line wasn’t completely gutted, and even then only five heroes — Superman, Batman (and Robin), Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman — remained in continuous publication throughout the remainder of the 40s and 50s. In the late 50s DC, in an attempt to re-spark interest in superheroes, introduced Barry Allen as the Flash. This new take on the Flash was an instant success and led to a second boom in superhero comics, the “Silver Age of Comics,” which only grew in popularity as Marvel officially entered the fray with The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man within the next couple of years. Though superheroes have waxed and waned in popularity since, they’ve never come as close to total extinction as they did after WWII.
So my memory of this period is that fans weren’t all that upset about dropping the name Captain Marvel for Shazam — it had seemed inevitable for decades — and the swap of Billy and Freddy was mostly met with sighs and/or indifference. What made fans livid, though, was the corruption storyline Countdown was putting fellow Shazam-sidekick Mary Marvel through at that same time. It was a really gross, mean-spirited, and poorly written storyline that was lambasted and raged against at every opportunity. I don’t think anybody really cared enough about the Billy and Freddy swap for DC to change them back — that was just a byproduct of DC trying to sweep Dark Mary under the rug.
Just to add to the incest, Supergirl's adopted name is Danvers.