On The New "Shazam", in "Justice League" #0

       
Just how desperate is DC to pander to the eternally adolescent-minded fanblokes that it’s tailored so much of its product for? We already know the answer to that, of course. And yet, as if to underline how tail-chasingly reactionary and complacent so much of the company’s product's currently is, here’s writer and corporate cornerstone Geoff John’s Justice League #0, a book so intent on bumping up the next quarter’s profits that it’s drained every last microscopic trace of charm and imagination from the character once known as Captain Marvel.  As such, there’s nothing here to surprise, let alone challenge, the I-know-what-I-like superhero devotee, which means there’s precious little if anything at all for everyone else.

       

It seems telling that Johns has gutted his story of any authority figures who might advise or even stand up to the thoroughly unpleasant, and soon-to-be super-powered, young Billy Batson, who we're told is fifteen and yet thinks and behaves as if he were either half that age or somewhat dense for it. Worried, we might assume, that the target audience might not warm to the presence of anyone representing common sense and ethical oversight, Batson's powers are no longer granted by an all-powerful, all-wise, three-thousand year old wizard. Instead, Johns presents us with an apparently teetering-on-senile, and perhaps even comic book-schizophrenic, magical enabler - the only representation of a person of colour in the whole book - and then allows the whining teenager to dominate their conversation. Well, what could age, experience and knowledge possibly have to offer an arrogant little pimple of a boy anyway? (Perhaps the Rump don't like their superheroes seeming too bright, although it seems they might enjoy them coming across as somewhat lippy.) As such, it's Batson who knows all about human nature in their conversation, and it's Batson whose interests dominate the discussion, and it's Batson who's granted the power of a "demi-god" based on the most slender, and quite frankly unconvincing, evidence of his "potential". It's a hormonally-unbalanced, habitually unpleasant 12 year old's version of the rising and advancing of the spirit; behave as ignorantly and callously as you like, show as little respect as you can get away with, and in return, why, there's the reward of a Superman-like body which arrives quite out of the blue. It's super-powers on the ethical instalment plan, as it were, with Batson apparently expected to pay off the karmic debt he's accumulated in a fly-now, be-good-later arrangement.

        

 
Of course, the conceit that Batson is anything but a paragon is a smart one, for it allows for character development to occur in future stories, and yet Johns simply doesn't have the courage of his convictions. He wants us to know that Batson's behaving badly, and yet he also wants us to glorify in that stupid-minded, dead-hearted behaviour too. Like a yellow journalist decrying some terrible immorality while making sure that explicit pictures of the act are splashed all across the front page, Johns has the newly super-powered Batson's first act be the impulsive and purposeless demolition of a great stone throne. The ever-able Gary Franks makes sure that the scene's played as a supposedly hilarious money-shot, all ludicrous hyper-muscles and testosterone-fueled glee, as if it's perfectly  understandable and entirely hilarious that Batson's first instinct is to unthinkingly demolish the home of the person who's empowered him. Johns' story pretends to be about the dimly perceivable seeds of a moral awakening, and yet the supposed high points of the tale are designed to celebrate the very things that he's suggesting are immature and regrettable. It's the sheer fun of the transgressions that's emphasised here rather than their deplorable nature, with Batson's choices being implicitly excused by his status as an orphan who's endured a hard, hard life. It seems we're supposed to sympathise with this brat to the point at which anything he cares to do or say goes, and why? It's a question that Johns never delivers a satisfactory answer to, although it seems that the reader's simply expected to associate with whoever's got the muscles, the shiny tights, and the heroic code-name.

        

What's most pathetic about Johns' script is the characterisation of Batson himself. We're clearly meant to see him as something of an edgy character, and yet he's an affluent, cloistered pre-pubescent boy's version of a bad sort. Though no-one could expect Johns to have lent Batson anything of how typical 15 year olds actually talk, he might at least have studied how the likes of Brian Michael Bendis has his youthful characters speak in Ultimate Spider-Man. Instead, Batson's presented as if he were a choir boy trying to catch the spirit of a James Dean or a Montgomery Clift. There's nothing here of the 21st century, and the whole story seems to take place in some distant past on a generic Hollywood sound-stage. When Batson expresses contempt to the old man he encounters underground, he calls him "Chester" and "Grandpa", which is somehow intended to convince us that this is a sometimes cruel and defiant boy. What kind of streets are they that Batson has experienced, and how hard has his life on the social periphery actually been? When he threatens to knock out "the last" of the mysterious sorcerer's teeth, it's a laughably implausible business.

   
In short, he's as unconvincing as a Bob Haney hippie, which of course makes him the perfect representation of rebellion for a  niche audience which loves its product to be full of violence and yet absent of consequences, charged with strange suggestions of illicit sex and yet fundamentally empty of recognisably mature relationships. This is a story for folks who want to pretend that they're daring while instinctively avoiding anything that's in the slightest bit threatening at all. Having his utterly unengaging protagonist, who's less than a year away from being old enough for full-time employment, behaving like a disturbingly narcassistic 8 year with impulsivity problems is what passes for confrontational here, and it's actually a discomforting business. Are we really supposed to sympathise, and even empathise, with him as a lead character, let alone a superhero? It's one thing to imply that Batson will end up a splendid chap advising other strangely anachronistic teens not to call their elders "Chester". But it's another to expect the reader to applaud this petty-minded prodigal being so incredibly well rewarded, no matter how chuffed Johns clearly expects us to feel about the whole business.

If Batson's sins were of some substance,or even some interest, then perhaps his road to redemption might be a compelling one. But Johns portrays him as little but a brat. He's selfish, he's sharp-tongued, he's stolen uncooked meat from hard-working butchers. He probably even throws cans at stray cats who come mewling towards him in search of a tickled neck. But that's not much of a stone to push up the mountain when the reward of being the World's Mightiest Demi-God has already landed in his lap.

         

It's not just the authority of the wizard Shazam that's missing from these stories. So too is any significant trace of the ethics which both Billy and Captain Marvel once represented. This isn't so much a reboot as a comics festival of the undead. These are the gutted shells of the stars of what was once the biggest selling four-colour franchise in America, and if the character has undoubtedly failed to achieve commercial success in the years since 1953, the solution needn't have been to persevere with nothing but the faintest traces of what had once been. That's never so obvious as when considering Billy's new super-powered body, which Johns has decided to call in a fit of patronising contempt for his audience's intelligence, "Shazam".("Captain Marvel", it seems, is too confusing a code-name.) As might be expected, Shazam - help me - lacks the wisdom of Solomon which was part of his predecessor's power-set. It would've been a fascinating business, to have a sad little reprobate such as 2012's Batson forced to inhabit the consciousness of a supremely wise and perfectly ethical being every time he assumed his super-powers. Perhaps it was feared that a Captain Marvel who has a different character to Billy might confuse the poor lambs that are the new version's target audience, and it would certainly get in the way of having Super-Billy punching would-be muggers through cars - a humorous business, it seems - or destroying the property of anyone that he doesn't care too much for.

        

It's not just that Justice League #0 features a typically thin, read-it-in-a-minute, woven-from-money-shots tale from Johns. It's not even that Frank's version of Captain Marvel often appears to be a psychotic, punk-skinned version of the Hulk crackling - in a textbook case of fan-pleasing overkill - with lightning bolts. I wouldn't even argue that the problems stem from the fundamental lack of respect that's been shown to all that Captain Marvel once was, although it doesn't help for anyone who came across the good Captain's adventures before. Rather, it's the fact that the whole project seems so craven in its grovelling to the tastes of a tiny niche of readers. The finest achievements of the superhero sub-genre since the turn of the Sixties have tended to occur when creators have refused to be bound by the expectations of their work's core audience. From Ditko, Kirby and Lee through Miller and Moore and beyond to today, the jewels in the super-book's history have challenged and extended what the sub-genre is. It's not a point which Johns and his fellow corporate architects of the New 52 are interested in for all but a tiny number of titles. Instead, they're purposefully, and even hysterically, chasing a marketplace of little but uber-fanboys, who, though capable of floating what remains of the superhero comicbook industry, demand product which will never sell to a wider audience. Justice League #0 is nothing but cynical, cold-hearted, poorly-crafted product.

           

It'll come as no surprise that there's just a single woman to be seen in the whole of the lead feature in Justice League #0. She's attractive, of course, and a helpless victim, as you'd expect, and the new "Shazam" saves her just as embodiments of blokeish wish-fulfilment are expected to. He even gets to scrounge twenty dollars from her for doing so, and laughs about it with his best mate afterwards. What could be more laddish than that?

As a triumph of fulfilling the narrowest expectations of an apparently fanatically naval-gazing readership, Justice League #0 is mechanically impressive. But it's glossily soulless trash too, and worse, irredeemably stupid to boot. Reader, beware.

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