Incidentally, is this the seventh christdamned thread about Captain Marvel in as many weeks? When did this website become SHAZAM! through the Ages, anyway?
There needs to be a moratorium on Captain Marvel threads, stat. I'm sick of hearing about the guy.
I still think Alan Moore came up with the best explanation for all this sort of thing in Miracleman: You get yourself cloned, then the clone is subjected to some sort of genetic manipulation that makes it highly evolved, and then it is shot out into infra-space or sub-space or whatever. Then, you say a word that is actually a post-hypnotic trigger, and your body gets replaced with the superclone, though apparently your consciousness remains. However, since your consciousness goes into a more evolved brain, you think differently (apparently in a more poetic manner). Then you say the magic word again and you're a middle-aged bloke in Thatcherite Britain again.
In some ways the Marvel imitators are more successful because they think it through so well.
One character I always found interesting was the Captain Marvel-slash-Wonder Woman of the Phillippines (an unlikely region to create superhero comics), Mars Ravelo's Darna. What I found most interesting is yes, there's the usual Captain Marvel business about a girl who becomes an adult heroine, but JUST when we think this chick is just the little girl in a different body...we learn this female heroine had a life and a backstory and indeed different MEMORIES. Darna was a warrior on a planet of alien superbeings.
The Lt. Marvels and Hoppy, the Marvel Bunny!
Oh, c'mon. The Lieutenant Marvels were pretty much negligible forces in Captain Marvel history with a handful of appearances. The idea they're a permanent fixture of the Marvel world is a retroactive, inappropriate concept. It's like making a list of Superman supporting cast members and including Ed Hamilton's "Brainiac A."
And if they all became ideal versions of themselves, why is Fat Marvel still fat? Some people look better with a few extra pounds, but still.
These examples outweigh the other one Julian referenced.
If all it was, was one issue from 1940-whenever, I'd agree.
It's not just that one comic, though. There's the overpowering implication that Billy Batson and Captain Marvel are two different individuals, which permeated the book. Captain Marvel referred to Billy in Third Person as "he" and "him."
Also, their thoughts, their very "voice," or way of speaking is different in a way that wouldn't make sense if CM was just Billy who briefly upgraded to an adult body.
One of the deliberate reversals done in the 1987 "Earth-1" Captain Marvel was the idea that Captain Marvel was made to explicitly have Billy Batson's mind...and if the Cheese always HAD Billy's mind even back in the day, how would that in any way be a reversal?
Part of continuity is the implied sense of how things work.
Yes, I could live there, but I am a native of New Zealand living in Australia, and how different are those places from Britain anyway? Not a lot, really, if you boil it down. I do have the ancestry necessary to live and work in the UK indefinitely, but I'm betting I'll always call the antipodes home, good reasons being the air and the space and the sunshine, which I would miss. Yes, I could live in England or Scotland no problem, however, so part of me belongs there.
Ahh, this whole conversation makes me want to read Pat Wrightson again.
Of all the writers I loved as a kid (circa age 10 - some years before discovering Tolkien and Heinlein at 12 and Moorcock and Edgar Rice Burroughs at 14) the one I loved best was Patricia Wrightson, even more than C.S. Lewis, because he was English whereas the Australia Pat created in NARGUN AND THE STARS was a cool, awesome world where every billabong had a giant mischief-making Potkurok in it and every tree had playful Turongs.
The thing I liked best about Pat Wrightson was she could do something Tolkien could not do as well: create this overwhelming sense of melancholy and antiquity. Her Nargun was a sympathetic, slow, alien monster. There was one particularly moving scene in THE ICE IS COMING where a Dreamtime Ninya creature died, and it was an occasion of great mourning, because no new Ninya had been born since the dawn of the world.
With Pat you felt as if Australia really WAS the world's oldest continent.
Interestingly enough, at a science fiction event I was able to corner the line designer for TSR, and I asked him why there were no Australian "monsters" in AD&D. To his credit, the guy actually knew what I was talking about, and his response was that they avoided doing so not because these creatures aren't well known outside Australia, but because they are spiritually significant to Koori peoples, and it would be possible some might take offense.
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