Trailer for Chip Kidd's new Shazam! book

(Video Link) Chip Kidd, one of the greatest living book designers, wrote and designed Shazam!: The Golden Age of the World's Mightiest Mortal, a giant-sized tribute to Captain Marvel, a superhero created in 1939 by C. C. Beck and Bill Parker.

Captain Marvel's popularity often exceeded Superman's. At his height of fame, the comic book was published bi-weekly and had a circulation of 1.3 million copies (wiki). The fate of the character is sad, involving lawsuits from DC, who said Captain Marvel was a Superman rip-off, but Kidd's book focuses on happier times in the life of the world's mightiest mortal, and there were plenty of them, as this video attests.

Stay tuned for an exclusive preview of Shazam! here on Boing Boing soon.

Shazam!: The Golden Age of the World's Mightiest Mortal

• [Anonymous]

  Captain Marvel was a Superman rip-off. Looking forward to reading this. Thanks for the heads up.

• [Stefan Jones]

  Many Captain Marvel adventures were republished in the 1970s as “Shazam.” I found them a lot more accessible than Superman, whose adventures had a huge back story that I found daunting. I bought the repackaged reprints for a few years, then lost interest. I was enough of a fan to find the Saturday morning TV show lame and disappointing. (There was a cartoon too . . . much better, from what I remember of it.)

  As Roy notes, the Captain Marvel serial shown in the trailer was pretty cool! The flying effect was very well done.

  Jeff Smith — best known for BONE — did a reboot of Captain Marvel a few years ago. It was well drawn and fun, but I thought took too many liberties. Great as a stand-alone story rather than a reboot.

• [cinemajay]

  Love the pic he chose for “Stamina”!

  On a side note, I had the chance to see Kidd speak when he was at the Minneapolis Institute of Art last year. He’s not only extremely talented, but a hilarious presenter. He autographed my favorite book of his BatManga which is the circa 1960s, Japanese re-interpretation of the character. Great stuff!

• [Lester]

  That was a lousy lawsuit, IMO, and Capt. Marvel got a bum deal. Its not like The Man of Steel didn’t nick ideas from The Man of Bronze (Fortress of Solitude, anybody?).

  The first comics I ever read were a bound copy of grandfather’s Shazam collection.

• [edgore]

  If this is 1/4 as good as his book with Paul Dini “Batman:Animated” about the Batman animated series, it should be a very good book indeed. I think I will have to look into getting a copy.

• [Roy Trumbull]

  There was Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr., and Mary Marvel. I preferred them to Superman. Worth a good laugh is the Captain Marvel serial starring Tom Tyler. It’s high camp from the back lot. Available on tape and DVD. I suggest it as a must if you run a campus film program. Once I ran a program with maybe 20 people at noon time and then filled the place once the word about CM got around.

• [jphilby]

  Got some chuckles reading about Captain Marvel Jr. in Wikipedia; he was originally a crippled newsboy name of Freddy Freeman.

  When he wasn’t fighting forces of evil like Captain Nazi (!!), Freddy like Tiny Tim “continued to live in a run-down hovel and to dress in shabby rags.” Man, talk about *humble*. Maybe that’s why Underdog was “humble and lovable”.

  Gar. Can’t make up stuff like that. … oh, wait …

• [Bionicrat2]

  Went to the “panel” for this at ComicCon and was pretty impressed by the depth of his knowledge and great the whole book looked. It was totally fun and shameless old school geekfest. Even Mark Waid was in the audience getting excited!