Captain Marvel, the 21st film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, releases this Friday. The superhero film is the first female-led film in the MCU and has Brie Larson in the main role as Carol Danvers or Captain Marvel. But Carol is not the first person to be referred to as Captain Marvel. That honour goes to Shazam, who is referred to as the original Captain Marvel. How? Back in 2017, a little while after Zachary Levi was cast in the role of Shazam, James Gunn posted on Twitter that he agrees with Levi that Shazam is the original Captain Marvel, leading to the usual DC vs Marvel social media battles. But there is truth in that claim. Billy Batson, which is Shazam’s real name, was created back in 1939 and is one of the earliest comic-book superheroes. But it was not under the DC umbrella then, and it was a publisher known as Fawcett Comics that published the first stories of the character. Also, its name was not Shazam, but it was actually Captain Marvel and it was the first character to bear that name. DC execs saw a lot of similarities between Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and their flagship character Superman. They sued Fawcett and the publisher finally closed shop in 1953. DC Comics went on to acquire all the Fawcett properties in 1972, including the original Captain Marvel, but by that time Marvel Comics had released their own Captain Marvel (not Carol Danvers, but Mar-Vell, a Kree who becomes a superhero when he arrives on earth; his name gets corrupted to English ‘Marvel’) and had trademarked it. Fawcett had not done it and the name was thus up for grabs. DC then decided to rename the character Shazam, based on the word the adolescent Bill Batson utters to transform into the adult, muscular superhero. Even under DC universe, Shazam still lives in Fawcett City, which became another one of DC’s fictional cities like Gotham and Metropolis.
