The Multiversity: Thunderworld Adventures #1 Annotations

The fifth chapter of the greatest adventure in DC Comics history is here!

Acclaimed for their collaborations on BATMAN AND ROBIN, SEAGUY and SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY: THE

MANHATTAN GUARDIAN, superstar writer Grant Morrison and renowned artist Cameron Stewart deliver some magic to THE MULTIVERSITY with a breathtaking journey to

Commentary

A journey to Earth 5 to check in with a much more 'stay true to your roots' Marvel Family than have appeared in a DC comic since the early 70's, for the most part; Thunderworld is a deliberate evocation of Captain Marvel's original run back at Fawcett Comics in the 1940's and 50's. For much of that period Captain Marvel was the best selling comic on the stands, before ceasing publication in the early 50's in the wake of a lawsuit from DC that sought to brand the character as a Superman knock off (contrary to received wisdom, Fawcett didn't lose the case; they won, at least initially. But, wary of fighting an expensive appeal from DC and facing declining sales in general, they decided to abandon their comic book line completely in 1953, paying DC (then National Comics) a large sum to settle the case out of court). Almost 20 years passed before the Marvel Family were seen again, with a licensing deal being struck between Fawcett and DC publisher Carmine Infantino in the early 70's resulting in a new Captain Marvel comic (now called Shazam! so as not to infringe on the 'Captain Marvel' trademark Marvel had registered while the character was dormant) hitting the stands in February 1973. Cap and his extended family appeared infrequently after their book was cancelled in 1978, until DC acquired the characters outright in the early 90's, paving the way for Jerry Ordway to revive the series as The Power of Shazam! in 1994.

Morrison's story here seems to owe a debt to 'Captain Marvel Battles the Plot Against the Universe' from 1949's Captain Marvel Adventures #100, in which Sivana, aided by a bunch of robotic duplicates of himself, invades the Rock of Eternity and steals the wizard Shazam's powers. The three part tale was reprinted in 1977's Shazam! From the 40's to the 70's

One interesting thing to note is that there are seemingly no people of colour on Thunderworld; even the background characters in the crowd scenes are all white. For a series that in part at least is explicitly about foregrounding a much more diverse group of characters than yer standard DC books of yore, this seems like it might be significant? It's extremely difficult to say for certain if this is something deliberate the readers were meant to pick up on (and almost universally didn't), but SOS's reveal of Doc Fate as a black hero who has to hide his face on a world where the civil rights movement implicitly never happened suggests some form for Morrison in engaging with the overwhelming whiteness of comic's 'Golden Age' in this series - to my mind the Doc Fate reveal wasn't really a story point made clearly enough, and nobody really noticed until Morrison explicitly singled it out in an interview. I suspect the same is true here, and foregrounding (backgrounding?) the implicit racism of the Fawcett stories/the Golden Age in general is at least part of what Morrison is referring to here (from an interview with Comics Alliance that came out around the same time as The Multiversity Guidebook) -

"Even to notice that certain things, like the Thunderworld comic that seems quite sweet and light isn't, actually. [laughs] There's a lot going on, a lot of weird things going on under the surface of how the characters are presented and portrayed. I think it'll make it slightly more interesting to go back when we've seen everything. "

Yeah, post-Watchmen superhero comics have poisoned the well, but what if it was already poisonous to begin with?

Annotations

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Page 1 -The Rock of Eternity, the magical foundation stone of the universe that sits at the centre of space and time, first appeared in Fawcett Comics' The Marvel Family #7 by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck in 1947. After DC licensed the Fawcett Marvel Family characters in the early 1970's, the Rock was quickly established as a hub where the vibrational barrier between the infinite parallel dimensions could be easily traversed, allowing the residents of Earth S to cross over with the regular DC characters of Earths One and Two in 1976's Justice League of America #136-137 and 1982's DC Comics Presents Annual #3, amongst others. The Rock is the home of the wizard Shazam, the source of the Marvel Family's powers - indeed, in 1996's Power of Shazam #10 by Jerry Ordway and Peter Krause, it was retconned to have been formed by Shazam himself by smashing together two slabs of rock from Heaven and Hell; an alchemical marriage of good and evil if you will.

The Rock was destroyed in the 2005 Bill Willingham-penned Day of Vengeance mini-series, though it seems to have gotten better by the time this story begins. I wonder if Morrison intended the various magical stones that are mentioned briefly in The Multiversity - the meteor that gave Vandal Savage and the Immortal Man everlasting life, the 'Four-Stone' that the Batman of Earth 17 is hunting for, maybe even Super-Chief's Manitou Stone - as fragments of the immensely powerful Rock that broke off and pierced the veil between realities? There's certainly a hint as well, both here and elsewhere in in Morrison's DC work, that the Rock (and the Earth 5 reality it's closely tied to) is the point where the link between the Multiverse proper and the Fifth Dimension is at it's strongest (compare "the dazzling, crystalline pinnacle of imaginations loftiest Empyrean peaks" and "the inconstant borderland that separates what is from what might be" here, with Bat-Mite's "the fifth dimension is imagination" from Morrison's Batman #680)

Page 2-3 - Statues of the Seven Deadly Sins (originally The Seven Deadly Enemies of Man) line the walls of Sivana's chambers, as they did way back in the very first Captain Marvel story in 1940's Whiz Comics #2 by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck.

"where the clock ticks once and forever" - like the over-realm of the Monitors, the Rock is outside of time

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Page 5 - Sivana's kids, from left to right are Magnificus, Georgia and Thaddeus Sivana Jr. Missing from the line-up (and this whole issue) is Beautia, who, like her brother Magnificus, was unfortunate not to inherit her dad's good looks. Magnificus first appeared in Whiz Comics #15 by Bill Parker C.C. Beck; Georgia made her debut in 1945's Mary Marvel #1 by Otto Binder and artists from Jack Binder's studio; and Thaddeus Sivana Jr. was first seen in 1946's Captain Marvel Adventures #52 by Otto Binder and Pete Constanza.

Georgia's 'Enid from Ghost World' redesign by Stewart is {chef kisses fingers]. The greens and magentas of the Sivana's costumes - along with the black lightning bolt - stand in opposition to the bright primary colors that the Marvel Family wear.

There've been evil Captain Marvel analogues before - most notably Geoff Johns-favourite Black Adam (who's conspicuously absent from this issue, more on that later), but also Zazzo-Plus from 1975's Shazam! #19 - but I don't think we've had Shazam-powered Sivana kids before. I might be totally wrong on this front mind, as there are literally hundreds of Fawcett Captain Marvel comics. You don't think I read them all to prep for one of these do you??)

Good gag with "Maybe now your mother will take me back", but Magnificus and the other two actually have different mothers. Check and mate.

Page 6 - Our first look at Thunderworld's Billy Batson, now livestreaming for Whiz Media rather than reporting on the radio as he did in the Fawcett books. The timequakes are caused by Sivana's suspendium shenanigans, and they'd be strongest around the old subway station as that's where the gateway to the Rock of Eternity is, as we see later in the issue. Beck Street would be named for C.C. Beck presumably, who's name has already cropped up a bunch here and will some more before these annotations are through. Dinosaurs and cavemen jamming up the city streets is a (probably unintentional) callback to Crisis on Infinite Earths.

"Loosely enforced child labor laws" - the dark heart of Thunderworld; a horrible place to be sure.

Morrison employs this sort of circular time stuff to much more traumatic effect again in the Ultra Comics one-shot.

Page 7 - Everyone looked, no-one found anything - the very prominent license plate number probably doesn't mean anything, or at least not to anyone other than Cameron Stewart. This top panel and Magnificus smashing the car into Cap on page 9 were the first pieces of art anyone saw from The Multiversity, when Cameron Stewart tweeted them, at least a year (maybe two even?) before this issue hit the stands.

Page 8 - Billy and Captain Marvel being two separate people with distinct personalities was a setup that lasted all through the Fawcett era. Though its been far from consistent over his time at DC, the Roy Thomas-penned Shazam: The New Beginning reboot that followed Crisis on Infinite Earths had Cap as essentially Billy in a grown-up body, a status quo that carried through to his appearances in the Giffen/Dematteis Justice League book and Jerry Ordway's Power of Shazam series.

Page 9 -Sitting in the window here is Billy's twin sister Mary Batson, alias Mary Marvel, writing in the Good Deeds journal that was often used in her Fawcett adventures as a framing device to introduce her newest adventure. Mary first appeared in 1942's Captain Marvel Adventures #18 by Otto Binder and Marc Swayze, before going on to headline her own adventures in Wow Comics, Marvel Family and her own short-lived title. Though she was featured in DC's 1970's Shazam! book, Mary was written out of continuity following the Crisis on Infinite Earths and didn't reappear again until 1995's The Power of Shazam #4.

Working at his newsstand there is Freddy Freeman, alias Captain Marvel Jr., who first appeared in 1941's Whiz Comics #25 by France Herron and Mac Raboy. Once reportedly the favourite super-hero of Elvis Presley, Freddy too suffered the ignominious fate of being wiped from the continuity of the post-Crisis DC Universe, eventually returning to the fold in 1995's The Power of Shazam #3.

Note the copy of The Multiversity: The Society of Super-Heroes #1 there in Freddy's hand. The Batman comic in his other hand doesn't look like its supposed to be any particular real issue.

Page 10 - Like Vandal Savage, Sivana doesn't like comics either. Yah boo sucks to you...

There is no parallel-Earth Sivana in The Society of Super-Heroes issue (though many have speculated, probably correctly, that Earth 40 - as featured in SoS - is where torture porn Sivana, who we first meet later this issue, hails from). Including him in that story, at least in a cameo, probably would have gone some way to making the whole 'villainous plot inspired by a comic from a parallel earth' bit a touch less muddy, but maybe the logistics of writing this series over a fairly lengthy span of time (there's a decent chance that the script for Pax for instance was written a good three or four years, at least, before it actually came out) for so many different artists futzed that sort of thing up a bit.

The cover and art for the SoS issue Sivana's holding here is obviously Photoshopped in from the actual issue - specifically pages 6-7.

Page 11 - The robots shuffling office furniture really accentuates the mundanity of Sivana's plot (an extra day of the week... to go to work more??) and goes some way to at least loosely tie Thunderworld to the over-arching themes of The Multiversity, expanded upon by Shazam over the page. Like The Question's Spiral Dynamics speech in Pax Americana, Sivana's standard villainous spiel is really unimportant here, and the art compels the reader to really put themselves in Shazam's position. A pretty interesting approach to foregrounding the 'correct' moral takeaway of the story I think, especially in these days of policemen painting Punisher skulls on the hoods of their cars and whatnot.

Page 12 - 'Stop annotating comics as you probably won't enjoy them very much anymore' is a pretty sound piece of life advice tbh, take it from me. But seriously, this indictment of the nerd tendency toward overanalysis, and obsession with the workings of the sausage factory rather than the simple pleasure which the sausage itself provides is really what this whole series is 'about'.

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Page 21 - The Monster Society of Evil first appeared in 1943's Captain Marvel Adventures #22 by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck. The Society were significant both as the first super-villainous team to be comprised of enemies the hero had fought previously, and as the antagonists in the first multi-issue storyline in super-hero comics history - the Monster Society story spanned more than two years of comics, concluding in 1945's Captain Marvel Adventures #46 with bespectacled Venusian worm Mister Mind being executed in the electric chair for his crimes (!).

As seen here, Morrison's Monster Society consists of (clockwise from top left) Mister Mind, who was first seen 1943's Captain Marvel Adventures #26 and appears here in his evolved 'hyperfly' form from 52 #51 by Morrison, Geoff Johns, Mark Waid and Greg Rucka, with art by Keith Giffen and Joe Bennett; that evil black cloud, I've got nothing - David Uzumeri suggested in his annotations that this might be Storm King, a Hoppy the Marvel Bunny foe who made his only appearance in 1944's Funny Animals #22, but that seems unlikely to me given a) it's never been reprinted so it seems almost certain that Morrison or Stewart have never read it, and b) it looks nothing like him. I've no better ideas though, so Storm King it is for now; the big robot looks like a Cameron Stewart reimagining of Mister Atom, who first appeared in 1947's Captain Marvel Adventures #78; the big grey naked barbarian guy is Oom the Mighty, a Spectre villain who first appeared in 1940's All Star Comics #3 in a tale by Gardner Fox and Everett E. Hibbard - Oom was retconned into the Monster Society when he appeared in Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron in the 1980's; and finally, a giant Crocodile Man, who first appeared in 1943's Captain Marvel Adventures #22. Like Mister Mind, Crocodile Man also got a make-over in a Morrison-written thread of 52, as Sobek, later revealed to be a disguise for Yurrd the Unknown, one of the Four Horsemen of Apokolips.

Mister Mind, Mister Atom and Crocodile Man were all created by Otto Binder and C.C. Beck. Storm King is so obscure the GCD doesn't have a writer listed for his one and only appearance, but it was drawn by Chad Grothkopf.

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Page 26-27 - The subway car with pink detailing to Captain Marvel's right is the same car that first delivered Billy Batson to the wizard Shazam back in Whiz Comics #2. This is a great spread, and I especially appreciate the Benday dot-style colour work from Nathan Fairbairn.

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