Superman sued Shazam for $4 million dollars and it was a major upset in the comic book community. But it paved the way for the today's Captain Marvel.
Despite its recent resurgence in the pop culture landscape, superheroes and comic books have been with us for over 80 years, and just like its host of larger-than-life characters, the history of comic books is chock-full of wild stories. They're sometimes more entertaining than the heroes themselves. It also lets you see what others don't, like the irony of these two movie adaptations opening only a month apart.
Captain Marvel was another hero that made his debut in"Whiz Comics #2" in the late 1939 published by Fawcett Comics. It featured a 12-year-old orphaned newsboy named Billy Batson who can transform into an adult superhero by shouting one word. Captain Marvel became an instant success, launching his own new independent series"Captain Marvel Adventures," which would later go on to sell more copies than"Superman.
DC's argument was simple, that Captain Marvel's main powers and characteristics were too similar to Superman and therefore infringed on its copyright. Fawcett argued that although these two characters were similar, it wasn't to the point of infringement and that similar feats have already been performed by other fictional characters like Popeye or Tarzan.
This was devastating news for DC. It meant that it did not own Superman and that anyone could publish Superman's stories without legal repercussions. This lasted over two years. Out of 160 strips of"Superman," published from January 1939 to April 1950, less than half of them were from Detective Comics.
A brand-new publication that no one knew at the time trademarked the name after it was abandoned by Fawcett. That publication was called Marvel. It took repeating slumps in sales and six different iterations until Carol Danvers, whom most of us are now familiar with, took on the mantle of Captain Marvel in 2012.
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