February 1940: When You’re Young at Heart

Instant grownup — no, instant SUPER grownup! For a kid, that’s wish fulfilment on steroids.

In Whiz Comics 2 (Feb. 1940), Captain Marvel was created to be a caped, super-strong, invulnerable individual who could leap tall buildings in a single bound, just like Superman. 

Initially, where he differed from the Man of Tomorrow was in his alter ego, which was a refinement of Superman’s engaging weakness-to-power fantasy. Captain Marvel didn’t disguise himself as a mild-mannered newspaper reporter. He actually was a child, just like the majority of his readers.

In A Boy and His God: The Promise of Masculinity in Captain Marvel, Ryan Johnson wrote, “The Captain is, physically, a man. He has a man’s strength, a man’s size and stature, and even a man’s face. Specifically, it is the face of contemporary film action-hero Fred MacMurray, whose visage was so stereotypically masculine that when he aged out of playing younger roles he was repeatedly cast as the model 1950s-era patrician. But despite all this, the comic star is clearly not a man, remaining instead an over-large boy.”

“The Big Red Cheese revels in his abilities in a much more wholesome, boyish way than the destruction-prone Superman, using a pair of torpedoes as water skis, for example, or heckling an airliner as he flies past,” Johnson observed. “As he dashes by a plane in a one-panel aside, Marvel waves and shouts ‘Yah, yah, you can’t catch me!’ (Captain Marvel Scores Again! in Whiz Comics 5, June 1940)… (I)t is the very thing that a boy suddenly given super powers would be likely to do. Moreover, he reacts to the rest of the world with the same child-like spirit, especially when it comes to the opposite sex.”

Indeed, cartoonist Jules Feiffer saw Captain Marvel as “…a friendly fullback of a fellow with apple cheeks and dimples, he could be imagined being a buddy rather than a hero, an overgrown boy who chased villains as if they were squirrels.”