Whiz Comics
A comic book's popularity is often determined by the quality of its villains and Captain Marvel Adventures and Whiz Comics had some of the best. Binder's comic book career spanned 32 years of scripting for 18 major companies, ranging through the entire spectrum of comics' genres. Although the series was also scripted by Ron Reed, Bill Woolfolk, and Bob Kanigher, among others, comics creator and historian Jim Steranko once estimated that Binder wrote 451 of over 600 Marvel-title scripts, a significant proportion of the entire Fawcett line. Binder, stands out as the definitive Captain Marvel writer. His last years in the field were spent as an irregular columnist for The Comics Buyer's Guide and as a frequent speaker at comics conventions. Beck's charming drawing style is simple, perhaps the cleanest and most straightforward to appear in comics, and was ideally suited for the gently satirical tales. Beck is the definitive Captain Marvel artist and drew the character from the founding days in 1940 through Fawcett's demise in 1953, and on to the Captain's revival at DC in 1972.
Beck, however, made a life-long career in the field, being promoted to chief artist at Fawcett and enjoying editorial control over the majority of the scripts crossing his drawing board. Parker, who originally planned six characters to share Shazam's powers, had little interest in comic books as a career, and after launching Captain Marvel returned to Fawcett as a magazine writer, eventually editing Mechanix Illustrated. Off the printed page, Captain Marvel's creators were writer Bill Parker and artist C.C. Naturally Captain Marvel triumphs, but the leering Sivana was far from finished and would return in numerous Fawcett titles again and again, at one point stealing the Capital Building and all the senators in Congress. Billy offers to track Sivana down in exchange for a job as announcer and roving reporter at WHIZ. Curiously, his grand campaign starts with a plan to extort money from a local radio station, WHIZ. Billy's first test as Captain Marvel occurred in Whiz Comics #2, 1940 , when he simultaneously debuted with his perpetual enemy, the comics field's most gleeful mad scientist, the bald and diminutive Dr.Thaddeus Bodog Sivana --he really got a bang out of evil. Now Captain Marvel possesses all those attributes and can revert to Billy again by shouting Shazam's name. Merely by reciting the wizard's name, Billy was changed into a strapping red-clad muscle-bound figure of a man bearing a marked resemblance to actor Fred MacMurray.
He had started his life in the panels not as an alien immigrant to this planet, but as humble Billy Batson, a young orphan magically gifted with super powers by an immortal Egyptian sorcerer, Shazam. It's hard to believe that Captain Marvel originally suffered death by litigation for alleged similarities to DC's Superman. As a preteen I had never been interested in super hero comics, but the World's Mightiest Mortal's adventures had a streak of good-humored fun, unselfconscious campiness, that made them a delight to read years later.