#funniest thing ive ever read | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yellowocaballero · 1 year

Note

SHAZAM SHAZAM SHAZAM pls tell us about billy batson. ive only ever seen the movies o great comic knower

Very very very VERY far from comic expert (that's brawltogethernow) but I have read a lot of Shazam. His history is actually really, really fascinating and involves more than one lawsuit that really defined very early comics. I'll focus on one thing, though.

There are two Captain Marvels: One from the 1940s to around 2013, and one from 2013 til now. The Captain Marvel you're familiar with (who is named Shazam) is from 2013. He's a more realistic, grounded character. He was created to be pretty much the polar opposite of his original version. The best summary is to say that the Wizard chose Billy Batman 1940 because he had the purest heart, and the Wizard chose Billy Batson ~2013 because he was there. My personal 'best' Shazam story is the "Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil" graphic novel by the guy who made Bone. It's good because it's for elementary schoolers yet acknowledges this small child as homeless. Which, don't get me wrong, you shouldn't always do. My personal favorite is the 1970s ones.

As some background: Otto Binder was the creator/main writer of the very early Captain Marvel comics. He was by far and away the best writer of the early Superman Silver Age comics, because all of his comics were batshit insane. Shazam has a complicated and legal history with Superman, so the 1970 run was a super fun high camp tongue in cheek reinvention of the best Silver Age stories.

So the 1970 Captain Marvel comics are insane.

I can't even summarize them without sounding crazy. Basically the conceit is that Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr, and Mary Marvel (Billy, Freddy, and Mary) are having 1940s Golden Age Adventures when they get somehow in suspended animation and are basically time travelled to the 1970s. This don't bother them too much. Why would it bother them. Nothing bothers these people. Nothing. I don't think anybody experiences a negative emotion in these comics. Not bc they were twee. Bc they were insane.

Many of the comics basically had three shorter comics inside it: one Billy story, one Mary story, one Freddy story. Interestingly, they all had different art styles, artists, types of story, genre, etc. Billy's stories had a cartoony art style with very over-the-top and silly plotlines that involved supervillain bad dudes. Freddy's art was slightly more realistic and was slighty more grounded, but still had some classic Marvel indescribable scifi that can best be summarized as that one meme panel people have seen where Sivana recites a science equation that lets him walk through walls. Mary's stories were much more realistically drawn and featured the most banal shit, like her starting a club with her friends. Somehow Mary Marvel gets involved in those.

Sometimes they worked together and did superhero things and fought bad guys. The average fight looked like this:

Billy was a twelve year old who lived by himself, in his own apartment, had his own radio show, a full-ass job, a whole thing as Captain Marvel. He paid fucking taxes. Everybody knew this and nobody cared. He's the most affable, good natured kid on the face of the planet. Nothing bothers him. Nothing. Nothing bothers any of these people. Sivana shows up and he's BIG MAD so he's creating another death ray and Captain Marvel shows up like "Oh you rascal! Time to punch this and go back to helping my friend eat his infinite Jello."

He has a friend named Talky Tawny, who is a talking tiger wearing a suit. He also has a friend named Sunny Smiles, a person of indeterminate gender who everybody falls in love with, for unexplained and unknown reasons. Not to be confused with Freddy's friend Gregory Gosharootie, the "World's Dullest Mortal", who is so boring that nobody notices him and he keeps accidentally comitting crime. There is also an old guy named Uncle Marvel who pretends he has superpowers, which they all find funny so they just roll with it. Freddy is a disabled orphan who has to sell papers on the street corner to make a living. Mary lives in a middle class suburban home with loving foster parents. It never once seems to occur to Mary's parents to adopt Billy, for Freddy to live with Billy. Everybody is happiest this way.

I do think this is partly why a good Shazam comic has to be aimed at the 6-12yo demographics. They have to be for small children, because Billy is living a complete and utter power fantasy that only a ten year old would think is a good idea. He's a kid, and he doesn't have drag parents or a lame family, but he can turn into Superman, and he can also do magic, and everybody loves him and thinks he's the nicest person, and his supervillains are Dr. Doofenschmirtz and a worm, and his supporting cast is like okay my sister if she HAS to be involved, but also my best friend who is a paperboy! but cool because he's disabled, and….

Look, you could engage with that seriously. You could go "holy shit this is a homeless child". That's fine. That's what they do these days, and that's what they did in the movies. Nothing wrong with that. Take the story more seriously.

But also they don't give a worm the electric chair in those stories, so.

To actually give some commentary on these comics: these comics really love people. I've never seen comics that were so entrenched in their community. The kids just know everybody they meet on the street. Freddy delivers paper up and down every block, so an average story for him is just talking to a butcher or baker or old man or grumpy housewife and helping them out with some batshit problem. Mary's a sweet girl who's always starting clubs with her friends and taking on neighborhood projects. Many Billy stories involve one of his many friends falling into some trouble and Captain Marvel helping them out - or just exploring some fun with Billy hanging out with Sunny Smiles, who is a person of indeterminate gender who for some reason has magic love brainwashing powers -

This isn't the biggest #Shazam take, but I think a good Shazam story stays grounded in that. These are poor street kids who love Fawcett City so damn much. They love fighting their supervillains, but they love helping out the random guy off the street with their problems even more. Way more so than Spider-Man or a lot of other guys, I think of the Marvel family as the friendly neighborhood superheroes. They're both larger than life and street level. They're Superman level powers but they just use the powers for wrapping up their hijinks. Isn't that nice? Aren't you tired of going apeshit? Don't you just want to be nice?

#captain marvel #shazam #mary marvel #freddy freeman #billy batson #captain marvel jr #mary batson #i pulled open the old comics to review to write this #and as a kid I was like.#“hah! silly old silver age comics! they don't know how dumb they are!”#but reading it now im like #“holy shit i think they're doing it on purpose. holy shit. i think this is the most sarcastic comic ive ever read.”#“I don't think this is the funniest thing ever on accident. I think these were jokes. This comedy is sublime.”#genuinely they hold up SO well. they're fucking delightful.#high camp.#my writing #my asks

232 notes · View notes

trainingdummyrabbit · 2 months

Text

Woe. Extended Cocoa Monologue Be Upon Ye.

So. Her name is Cocoa. Theoretically. She's been around for a pretty long time, if not the longest when going by current employee terms. She's the one who works with Nothing There because shes the only one who. Can. A bit odd, she's almost entirely mute aside from a handful of phrases and words, and occasionally mimicking things said to her recently. She's considered to be a bit airheaded, not really paying attention to her surroundings and more often than not just kind of... cycling around the facility when not on the job.

She does a lot of things that would Seem normal on first glance, but are just.. kinda strange, when you actually pay attention to her. Like background actors pretending to be passerby, but when they get a lil silly with it and start like. Putting whipped cream on a carrot and eating it raw. Y'know. Girl Things. Most folks don't give her much mind aside from common pleasantries-- mostly because she just doesn't answer anything else. She just kinda stares blankly, no thoughts head empty, as if she doesn't understand. She's just silly that way though, so nobody minds.

When shes given a task, though, she's just. Entirely Different. Shes very methodical, cutting straight to the point-- oftentimes literally. It's where her experience with the whole Being A Lobcorp Employee really makes itself obvious. She can take a Lot of shit and just... Wont Die. She just gets back up! Easypeasy. It's almost mechanical-- and she barely seems affected at all by any of the Horrors(tm) that come with the whole... y'know. When it comes down to it, shes a little scary.

Nobody really Knows this necessarily, but before she was an agent, she was actually a clerk ! :] She just kind of... did her job. Was polite and enthusiastic, all that good stuff, model employee or whatever. but then, evidently, there was a pretty bad abno breach at some point, and she completely managed to hold her own, going so far as to be Almost Helpful! Astounding ! So they moved her around to being a fully functional agent! Something that has absolutely no consequences whatsoever !

. So, the horrors, right? Stepping out of exposition speak, Cocoa is an exploration on the split between human, monster, and object-- and what it means to define yourself within those terms. (It's honestly a common theme between the group as a whole, but they all tackle it differently.) Cocoa-- previously known as Holly-- was pretty much always a Highly Volatile person. Not that she ever showed it. A lot of her hinges on her desperate desire to be seen as Worthwhile, to be worthy of being kept around. Truthfully? She was always terrified of death.

She knew how the world worked. Either you made yourself useful and did what you were supposed to, or you were thrown out to the cruel whims of what the world does to people like her. She was, functionally, a Nobody. And she knew this. So she did her best to fit into the vision of somebody Useful. Polite, easy to herd around, noncombative-- all that stuff. It was grating, sure, but anything to keep her out of the bad books of people who could so easily crumble her already fragile life without a second thought. It was just what she needed to do.

So um. Unfortunately, pinning your entire identity on the whims of a conglomerated image of "other people" was never really sustainable. Not even remotely. Especially not for somewhere like the city. These sorts of things contradicted themselves, looped around, formed uncrossable chasms of expectation that she could never live up to even if she tried. And god, did she try. Constantly putting up a front was exhausting, but rewriting yourself completely every time you moved somewhere new? god can you even imagine.

She was just about Always tiptoeing a thin line between roles, teetering delicately between the gazes of those above her. Any action or expression or emotion contradicting from that image had to be immediately smothered, every step out of line earned a warning shot from herself that nobody else could really see. So like, no pressure!

So, going into Lobcorp, she was a model employee, secretly harboring the unstable energy of a dying star. Easypeasy. The abno escape was, as the kids say, "the last fucking straw in her miserable life," and she kind of just. blacked out, woke up, and it was over. She helped about as much as a clerk Could, but the fact that she was alive was an anomaly. Again, she is very very good at just... Staying Alive, when she shouldn't. So that was a pretty good vouch for her skill, even if she didnt present that at first. She, obviously, was pretty nervous about the whole thing, but if this is what she was being told to do, then so be it! Easypeasy! No big deal ! I'm sure Lobotomy Corporation is just an office comedy! She is very normal.

So, again, the thing about Holly is just that she. Doesn't Die. But the people around her sure do!! What happens around here is a bit of a blur, both to me and to her, but the long and short of it is pretty much this. Through the course of her acting as a full-title Agent, it did, shockingly in fact, Make A Lot Of Her Issues Worse ! Now not only did her Own life rest in her hands, but also a bunch of other people's! Crazy how that works.

She seems perfectly fine, mostly just because her immediate instinct in stress is to just. shut off. Panic, fear, anger-- none of that has any place in the role of a Useful Employee. She can't have doubts, cant have regrets, she just has to Move. So she just lets her body do what needs to be done, and tunes back in when everything is over again. It's not Easy getting to know people in a situation like that, but somehow she Did actually manage to make a friend! Though, I suppose, not that difficult, because "being friendly" is a very good Employee Trait to have, so obviously she has it. But, well, it Was nice! Was. Lobotomy Corporation Is A Tragedy ! Whoops.

So obviously, having a small bit of solace taken away from you is, to put it lightly, Not A Great Experience. But well, it wasn't exactly just that necessarily. To her, that person was everything that any model person Should be. Effortlessly. Intrinsically. They simply Were, and through the plain act of Being A Person, Unapologetically, was... well, it was refreshing! Silently, it was everything Holly Wished that she could be, but just couldn't gain the courage to reach. It wasn't even any huge event that killed them, it was just... some stupid mistake. The core of it simply came down to... well, if they couldn't do it, how could she? Her, hoping to be better than someone like that? Was that even possible? And this is about where things start . going sideways.

So. Her whole deal with Nothing There. It wasn't anything big. Not really, in the grand scheme of things. In all honesty, it was more of a Resignation. At this point, she'd already been kind of spacey and distant-- even for her own standards-- so of course, nobody would really notice much of anything. (Again, another good trait of a Useful Employee.) Working with NT for the first time was. odd. Nobody really knew what to make of it at the time, but Holly hadn't died Yet, so she was as good a choice as any. And seeing the damn thing, well. yeah, it was disgusting, but it wasn't what affected her the most. Rather, it was when it tried to start Speaking.

Calling it Horror isn't exactly correct, but it wasn't exactly... incorrect, either. All she could really do was watch it try to form words over and over, messy and stilted, inherently flawed. A crude imitation of something she should understand. Disgusting, sure, but not for the right reasons. Because all she could really see was a microcosm of herself. A horrible little excuse for a creature trying to pretend to be human, pulling itself together by the seams and stumbling over and over, painfully close yet uncomfortably alien to those it was trying to imitate. And she could only watch, as emotions she'd done her best to suppress slowly clawed their way back up.

It was then she had a choice. To confront what exactly it was that she'd been desperately locking away, that raging sensation of emotion, of desire, of anything-- or to resign herself into disappearing completely, letting herself drop all of the baggage of that flawed facade of "humanity" and allowing it to be replaced with... for lack of a better term, a Variable. an Anything Else. But... she was never very good at confronting herself, was she? So she sat down, and began correcting the entity's speech, forming both It and Her back into the shape that they "should" be. And at the same time, letting go of a "self" that could no longer exist anymore.

The thing about her, simply, is that-- again-- she doesn't die. Not the way that people do, not the way that people Should. But then again, "Holly" hasn't existed for a long time, by the start of everything. Anyone who Knew who she was never really had the chance to, with the way she was-- not that any of them were alive to be able to tell. She never answers anyone asking what her name is. or what her job is, or... well, much of anything. So people just call her Cocoa, because that's the only thing she seems to like :) And well, people say it confidently enough that others just Believe them, and Cocoa doesn't care enough to correct them, so like. whatever. Cocoa is here to do her job. Nothing more, nothing less. And nobody is going to stop her, because she's damn good at it. Nobody knows there was even a problem to begin with. Silently, wordlessly, the "person" she used to be simply... disappeared. And nobody was there to hear it. Which makes things... difficult.

Because she doesn't remember any of that. None of her peers do, either. She feels "fine," simply enacting whatever it is she needs to do. And because of that, people simply just Believe Her. It was as if "she" had never really existed at all. And at the end of it all... she was entirely indifferent. There was work to do, you know? No use worrying over some kid who couldn't handle the pressure. Happens all the time, right? And so the world moves on, without a second thought.

Not a second thought at all.

#pikocs #projmoon #long post #LONG fucking post i mean it #reading this back is so funny. 'stepping out of exposition speak--' No The Fuck You Aren't #anyway this is my little beast she can be trusted adn she is so so normal. perceive her at yuor soonest convenience <33 #i also. want to put down that ive been writing this group Before i read wonderlab which makes several things. VERY funny.#like. this isnt even the funniest bit. but um; thats an aside;#anyway this is like; an entire offshoot branch of Lcorp for context; and a lot of logistics im working out still #and a lot of logistics im just 'ehhh whatever' about so ^w^#but theyre just a horrible little jumble of 'oh god oh fuck oh shit' and th worlds most Unfortunate timing #and the worlds most Characters of ever who simultaneously make each other better and Significantly Worse <333 #ill uh. ill get to everyone eventually. probably. wapow ✌

23 notes · View notes