Mary Marvel

18 years ago - Mary Bromfield is born.

12 years ago - 6-year-old Mary's parents are killed in a car accident. Without any surviving family, she lives briefly in an orphanage where she meets Timothy Karnes before being taken in by her foster parents, where she meets Uncle Dudley.

8 years ago - 10-year-old Mary first meets her new foster brothers, Billy Batson & Freddy Freeman. At first they irritate her, but they soon come to trust and look out for each other.

6 years ago - 12-year-old Mary and Freddy Freeman 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 Mary & Freddy Marvel.

5 years ago - 13-year-old Mary and Freddy Freeman break into Thaddeus Sivana's labs with the help of Magnificus Sivana to help Billy Batson fight Mister Mind.

4 years ago - 14-year-old Mary's life is disrupted by Georgia Sivana who tries to make her miserable for helping Billy Batson defeat her father, Doctor Sivana. Mary manages to undermine her efforts without stooping to her level.

2 years ago - 16-year-old Mary and Freddy Freeman 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.

now - 18-year-old Mary is accepted at Metropolis University, but worries about being away from her brothers.

This is a really hard character to get right, because no matter how you use her, you feel like you're leaving off something. Mary was one of the earliest additions to the stable of Marvel characters in Fawcett Comics. Even though she was hugely popular and is perhaps one of the very first characters of her type, she never really had a role that was her own, which left her as something of an outsider in comics history, despite having a huge number of appearances. When working out how to use her, we struggled with the fact that we usually prefer to keep out characters that dilute the uniqueness of other more central ones, and it could be argued that some of the Marvel Family do exactly that. We think we've found a really good compromise, however, and hope you like it too.

Mary Marvel's Comic History

Mary Marvel appeared for the first time in Captain Marvel Adventures # 18 in 1942 by Fawcett Comics, by writer Otto Binder. Mary was introduced as Billy Batson's long lost older twin sister. Billy immediately told her everything about his secret identity, and she discovered that she also had the ability to gain powers by saying Shazam, although the wizard explained that she got her powers from a different suite of ancient gods; Selena, Hippolyta, Ariadne, Zephyrus (who... was a male god, right?), Aurora, and Minerva. There was no reason given WHY she was able to do so.

While the concept of having a kid sidekick was already established (Robin was introduced the previous year) Otto invented the idea of adding MORE characters, and would eventually milk the idea to death creating a small army of Captain Marvel sidekicks, but almost more important was the invention of the female spin-off of a popular male hero. Artist Marc Swayne evidently based her appearance on Judy Garland.

Mary appeared in Captain Marvel Adventures through the mid forties, and then In Captain Marvel Family and in her own self-titled series for the better part of a decade, until Fawcett was dismantled in the mid fifties.

Mary and the rest of the Marvel family began appearing in anthology stories once DC bought their characters, but were still in their own corner of the Multiverse up until the Crisis of Infinite Earths. Their new role in the unified timeline was laid out in Jerry Ordway's Powers of Shazam! series. Mary now becomes an adult when empowered the same way Billy does, and is also called Captain Marvel (although she's sometimes referred to as Lady Captain Marvel). In this series, the Marvel Family can freely alter their costumes every time they change, and midway through the series she changed to a white costume to differentiate herself from her twin brother.

Mary returned to the name Mary Marvel after the Powers of Shazam! series ended. She was largely a background character, guest-starring with fellow Otto Binder creation Supergirl before appearing in Keith Giffen & JM Dematteis's Formerly Known As the Justice League spinoff team the Super Buddies, which basically redefined her personality using more influence from her Golden Age persona.

This new personality followed her through her fairly prolific appearances across the mid-to-late 2000's, but so did a weird tendency to subtly fetishize her. I can't fully explain it, but in all of her appearances across that era there was something vaguely unsettling with the way she was depicted.

Then of course came the new 52, where the character Shazam and his new extended Marvel Family were reimagined by series writer Geoff Johns in backup stories in 2011's Justice League. Mary was of course present, now called "Lady Marvel' in her superhero persona. Like the rest of the comics of the New 52 it all felt sort of weird, but it did introduce to the mythology of the Marvels a concept that immediately feels like it should have been there from the beginning; they're all foster siblings.

Mary was slightly older than her foster brothers, and helped bond them all as a family. She became a featured part of the new Shazam ongoing series. Even though Mary Marvel has been around for a long time, it's really this version of the character that made her way to the big screen in the 2019 film.

Our Mary Marvel Story

So, 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 heroes 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. There was never an explanation for how Mary got her powers, they never really had a role to fill. They were just there.

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.

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 roles 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 shouldn't 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.

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