Freddy Marvel
17 years ago - Freddy Freeman is born.
9 years ago - 8-year-old Freddy's mother abandons him. He's placed into foster care, moving between different households.
8 years ago - 9-year-old Freddy first meets her new foster siblings, Billy Batson & Mary Bromfield, as well as their caretaker, Uncle Dudley. At first they irritate him, but they soon come to trust and look out for each other.
6 years ago - 11-year-old Freddy and Mary Bromfield first learns that their foster brother Billy Batson is in fact Captain Marvel as he fights Timothy Karnes, Doctor Sivana's creation Sabbac. They each gain a share of Billy's powers, allowing them to temporarily become Freddy & Mary Marvel.
5 years ago - 12-year-old Freddy and Mary Bromfield break into Thaddeus Sivana's labs with the help of Magnificus Sivana to help Billy Batson fight Mister Mind.
4 years ago - 13-year-old Freddy's life is disrupted by Thaddeus Sivana Jr who tries to ruin his life for helping Billy Batson defeat his father, Doctor Sivana. Freddie manages to outthink him.
2 years ago - 15-year-old Freddy and Mary Bromfield become Mary & Freddy Marvel again to help Billy Batson battle Magnificus Sivana, Thaddeus Sivana Jr & Georgia Sivana when they are empowered by Thaddeus Sivana's artificial Rock of Eternity.
Captain Marvel Jr might seem like another kid sidekick of an adult hero, but he's a little more complex than that. First of all, his adult counterpart was ALSO a kid, and in fact, his stories tended to be a little more playful. Captain Marvel Jr was sort of like a pared down version of Captain Marvel. He had similar stories but without the fanciful conceit of becoming an adult when he was empowered, and in a lot of ways his stories would actually more action-packed. Of course, they all also happened in an era full of problematic tropes, and those classic comics don't exactly hold up today.
Modern comics have never really found a way to reproduce the energy of those pre-DC Captain Marvel Jr comics, but in a way, that's actually a good thing. It lets us focus instead on Freddy Freeman. The fact that the modern day Captain Marvel has his foster brother at his side getting into shenanigans is one of the best things about the character.
Modern comics have never really found a way to reproduce the energy of those pre-DC Captain Marvel Jr comics, but in a way, that's actually a good thing. It lets us focus instead on Freddy Freeman. The fact that the modern day Captain Marvel has his foster brother at his side getting into shenanigans is one of the best things about the character.
Freddy Freeman's Comic HistoryHere's an interesting timeline; Captain Marvel debuted in January of 1940, and was soon outselling Superman, thanks in no small part to the way it managed to take the Superman power fantasy and make it even more accessable to children. Within a few months, DC followed suit by introducing Robin to the world, which ushered in a whole era of kid sidekicks. Was the invention of Robin influenced by Captain Marvel's success? Who really knows? By 1941, Captain Marvel had a kid sidekick of his own in Freddy Freeman's Captain Marvel Jr. He was a kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time; crippled by Billy Batson's nemesis Captain Nazi. The Wizard Shazam, who had shared his power with Billy whenever he said his name, explained that Billy could do the same thing with Freddy. When Freddy said "Captain Marvel", he became Captain Marvel Jr.
While Freddy would appear alongside Billy in the Captain Marvel Family comics, he actually had an incredibly prolific solo career, showing up in Master Comics as well as his own self-titled series, He fought a lot of Nazis, as well as his share of the usual racist steriotypes of asian people. Eventually, after many years of rampant popularity (including, fameously, being Elvis's favorite comic), Fawcett comics was sued into oblivion by DC and the Marvel family largely vanished into the ether of nostalgia. |
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After DC purchased the characters they started to appear in anthology stories in their own part of the multiverse. 1985's Crisis of Infinite Earths folded them in with everyone else, and Jerry Ordway's series The Power of Shazam! worked to merge the Marvel family of characters into the mainstream DC universe. From there, DC was basically continually attempting to add Captain Marvel Jr. to the Teen Titans, almost always as part of whatever the off-panel back-up team happened to be. This is right around the time where the comics finally acknowledged the incredible inconvenience of Freddy saying his own name to trigger his change, and the solution seemed to be for him to start going by 'CM3', which im sure you'll recognize as a dumb idea. As cool as his pre-DC appearances were, His 80s and 90s appearances all had a distinct trying-too-hard vibe.
A brief but very noteworthy exception to this is the Trials of Shazam, a 2006 series that took place in the post-Infinite Crisis era. Billy Batson had become the new keeper of the Rock of Eternity, and now Freddy needed to undergo a series of challenges to take Billy's old role, who was now going to be called Shazam. It was a short-lived shift in the status quo, but it gave us a fun new take on the Marvel Family. |
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The whole story of the Marvel Family was re-imagined by Geoff Johns, the series writer of the post-52 Justice League, in a series of back-up stories and then continued it in it's own series. What really works in John's new version is the way he rebuilt the relationships between the characters, making them foster siblings.
Some of the new takes on the characters made a little more sense than others, but I think I can safely say that the attempt to rethink Freddy didn't work. His civilian identity was essentially the same character, just blonde. Where it goes off the rails is when he gets his powers, and suddenly being blonde becomes his primary character trait. I don't know who the audience was for 'Surfer Dude Freddy', but by the time this take on the Marvel Family all appeared in the 2018 life-action movie Shazam, they had safely returned to a more traditional take on Freddy. |
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Our Freddy Marvel StorySo, what specifically works within the Captain Marvel mythology, and what are we going to bring over into our version of it? Generally speaking, we're looking to make characters stand out as unique and not have whole casts of supporting hereos if they don't specifically make the original hero better by being there. Mary and Freddy were both introduced in a comic that didn't really feel like it needed a lot of explanation for what was happening. Freddy was introduced, and then literally told, in-panel, that he would be headed to a different comic. Verisimilitude wasn't ever a priority, and for that reason, these seem like characters we could arguably skip.
Despite that, there is a very particular aesthetic that comes from Billy Batson's Captain Marvel being flanked by his two teen sidekicks. To some degree I think it comes from seeing Miracleman do the same thing in the intervening years between Captain Marvel's original popularity and their arrival as DC characters, but there's just something about that visual that makes these characters stand out, and makes them feel necessary, so we definitely want Mary and Freddie to have access to their powers. |
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However, that doesn't mean we want to add Mary and Freddy full-time. As popular as they might be, they've never really had their own thing that really made them necessary stand-alone characters. They bring so much more to the larger story if they're just Billy's foster siblings, helping him from a much more human place. Their rolls sort of write themselves, with Freddy perhaps being the more adventurous of the bunch, and Mary being far more clever, you almost immediately get a Harry, Ron & Hermione vibe from them, and that feels immediately familiar and comfortable.
When Freddy & Mary DO get their powers, it shouldnt be in a way that grants them permanently, or puts them on an equal power-level with Captain Marvel. They shouldn't similarly become adults, that should all remain something unique to Billy's powers. Instead, they could both have been granted, temporarily, a small fraction of his powers just as a one-time thing. We've deliberately named only two incidents where this has happened. The rest of the time, Mary & Freddy get to simply be allies of their foster brother. We really like this take on these characters, it feels like the right compromise between keeping the spotlight on Billy and giving Mary & Freddy room to shine. Oh... we're also having him just go by Freddy Marvel, instead of Captain Marvel Jr. It works for Mary, and it'll work just fine for Freddy too. |
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Allies & Teams
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