Shazam! director tries to discredit Captain Marvel yet again

Shazam director David F. Sandberg is referencing the “original Captain Marvel” again. We break down why his obsession with Captain Marvel needs to end.

While DC Comics and Marvel Comics obviously aren’t the only comic book conglomerates — and they aren’t even the only comic book companies to translate their characters to the cinema, these two entities are a couple of the dominating focuses on-screen and in print.

Every calendar year it seems like Marvel and DC contend for box-office revenue and trailer views, even if a lot of their target audience overlaps. The two are natural business competitors because they’re housed in the same industry.

One DCEU director, David F. Sandberg who is the director for Shazam!, has amplified any form of preexisting rivalry by invalidating Marvel’s first solo, titular woman superhero.

Sandberg recently shared a screenshot of a Variety Twitter poll, which asked followers to vote for the superhero movie they’re most eager to see in the new year. Although Shazam! wasn’t the most voted option, it did outrank Captain Marvel. This is likely what prompted Sandberg’s caption in his Insta post, which reads, “#TheOriginalCaptainMarvel.”

In case you were wondering, this isn’t the first time Sandberg has brought up the “original Captain Marvel” discourse. This October, Sandberg tweeted about Billy Batson being the original Captain Marvel. Sandberg’s continual references to Shazam being the original Captain Marvel in direct propinquity to Marvel’s upcoming woman-centric film and the lead actress in the said film indicates that he’s attempting to discredit Carol Danvers’ claim to the Captain Marvel name.

Before we touch more on the implications of Sandberg’s unhealthy obsession with referring to Shazam as the original Captain Marvel and how that’s a nefarious way to invalidate Marvel’s first solo woman hero film, let’s pay our respects to DC Comics’ version of Captain Marvel — who has been buried since the early 1950s, despite Sandberg’s attempts to zombify the alias.

Every time Sandberg mentions the original Captain Marvel, it incites two questions:

• Is Shazam legitimately the original Captain Marvel?
• Or is Sandberg dredging up decades of unnecessary comic book conflict regarding legal battles over the “original Captain Marvel”?

Technically, the answer to both questions is yes. On a reductive level, Billy Batson was originally known as Captain Marvel upon his comic creation in 1940. His comic debut was complicated from the drafting table. As Justia Corporate Center and the official legal transcript reports, Billy Batson was generally a plagiarized version of Superman. However, DC Comics didn’t create a forge of its predecessor character, Superman. No, Billy Batson was a falsified creation of Fawcett Publications, which led to a lawsuit between Fawcett Publications and DC Comics in 1951.

DC Comics absorbed the rights of Billy Batson, and thus Captain Marvel, after winning the legal fight. However, their win was short lived. As Mental Floss notes, M.F. Enterprises has its own interestingly unsuccessful run at the company’s version of a character named Captain Marvel. Ultimately, this led Marvel Comics to file for a trademark of the Captain Marvel identity, seeing as they didn’t really want another company using a character alias associated with their company name.

Soon after Marvel Comics won the trademark to Captain Marvel, the company created its version of the character in the form of a Kree warrior, Mar-Vell. Billy Batson’s new-found identity-less crisis transmuted into nearly two decades of licensing agreements between Fawcett Publications (the original “creator” of Billy) and DC Comics. In a lengthier article about the convoluted “Captain Marvel” alias timeline, io9 adds that the majority of Billy Batson fans don’t even refer to him by his long-since retired Captain Marvel pseudonym.

Because many fans don’t call Billy by his legally redacted name, Sandberg’s continued references of the “original” Captain Marvel is a not-so-subtle way to put a female character — and the actress who portrays her — in her proverbial place. Mentioning that Billy is the original implies that Marvel’s Captain Marvel and Carol Danvers are copies of Fawcett Publications’ Captain Marvel (and very briefly DC Comics’ Captain Marvel), which they’re not.

Whether it’s via Sandberg’s social media accounts or otherwise, framing any of the Shazam! marketing around Billy’s illegitimate claim to the Captain Marvel name is a way for the director to falsify the actual Captain Marvel.

It’s no revelation: Captain Marvel is the first woman hero movie in the MCU. Hope van Dyne (Wasp) was the first titular woman superhero, thanks to her time in Ant-Man and the Wasp, and where she had an equal amount of screen time as her superhero partner, Scott Lang. However, Captain Marvel will have the first Marvel origin story that focuses on her.

Apart from the implications behind Sandberg’s references to the “original Captain Marvel,” Shazam! is also siphoning Captain Marvel’s marketing success and retrofitting it as their own. Sandberg is simultaneously discrediting Captain Marvel and prospering from the female-centric film’s marketing scheme.

When a new Captain Marvel trailer drops or any Kree news arises, Sandberg has a habit of manipulating Marvel’s promotion to promote and namedrop his film. While he isn’t necessarily stealing any ideas from the Captain Marvel promo, there is a recurrent history of men profiting off women’s accomplishments and ideas.

Given this critical milestone in Marvel’s cinematic history, Sandberg’s decision to zero in on a woman character and the actress who plays her is conspicuous, to say the least. He isn’t explicitly attacking Carol or Larson, but his efforts are clearly linked with misogyny in the way he reframes any mention of a woman-centric film to a male character. Beyond these indirect attempts to center conversations about the real Captain Marvel around Billy and his male-dominated film, Sandberg is intrinsically constructing a misogynistic fandom.

Unsurprisingly, the male-dominated comic industry is still a hackneyed real-life trope. By mentioning Billy’s short run under the Captain Marvel alias that has no affiliation to Captain Marvel, who will appear in theaters next year, Sandberg is divisively creating the perfect environment for a toxic Shazam! fanbase.

If you search the Brie Larson tag or Captain Marvel tag everytime any relevant trailer or headline drops, you’ll come across an array of “harmless” critiques and comments. These criticisms are unequally, and sparingly, distributed to actors or male superheroes.

The mention of a titular female superhero infuriates the portion of comic fandoms that have been brooding in their adversity to healthy diversity for decades, which can lead them to a production that speaks to them and their fears of the “receding male representation” in comic-adjacent media. In this case, their fandom home can be represented by Shazam! and the director’s attempts to diminish Carol Danvers’ claim to the Captain Marvel alias.

Whether we’re talking about Monica Rambeau’s run as Captain Marvel, who was also the first woman superhero to don the moniker, or Carol Danvers herself, the Captain Marvel film celebrates women in comics. And that will remain true, regardless of multiple attempts by the DCEU cast and crew, such as Zachary Levi who also wrongfully believes in reverse racism and reverse sexism, and David F. Sandberg to invalidate this feminist pop culture achievement.

Captain Marvel, which features a symbolic and noteworthy deviation from canonically stereotypical woman hero aliases, debuts in theaters on International Women’s Day, on March 8, 2019.