Sabbac

23 years ago - Timothy Karnes is born.

17 years ago - 6-year-old Timothy Karnes' mother dies of a drug overdose while his father is in prison. He is placed in an orphanage.

12 years ago - 11-year-old TImothy Karnes meets Mary Bromfeld while she is briefly placed in the same orphanage.

10 years ago - 13-year-old Timothy Karnes steals a car and is sent into juvenile corrections.

6 years ago - 17-year-old Timothy Karnes is used as a subject in Doctor Sivanna's attempts to replicate the summons used by Captain Marvel, creating Sabbac. Marvel manages to trick him to say his own name, but the demons empowering him pull him back into hell with them.

3 years ago - 20-year-old Timothy Karnes escapes hell when it's power structures are disrupted. He's unable to summon the power of Sabbac.

2 years ago - 21-year-old Timothy Karnes performs a murderous blood ritual, summoning hugely enhanced powers. He battles the entire Justice Society and is left comatose.

Captain Marvel was a whole comics world unto itself for a very long time, so of course it has a bunch of characters that retread the core concepts that made the character popular in the first place. There are other villians that copy the hero's whole "say an anagram made from the names of a bunch of characters from mythology and gain their powers" schtick. Notably, Ibac was a crook who said his magic word (Ibac was an anagram of Ivan the Terrible, Cesare Borgia, Attila the Hun, and Caligula) to just be a bigger, scarier crook. Of those characters, Sabbac is our favorite take on the trope so he's the one we chose to include, but if you have a particular favorite of your own that we left out, we'd love to hear it!

Sabbac's Comic History

Sabbac showed up for the first time in Captain Marvel Jr #4, waaay back in 1943. He's Timothy Karnes, a bumbling, bucktoothed sorcerer and nazi sabbateur, who is introduced to us as "the world's worst criminal". He spends a few pages goofily fighting Captain Marvel Jr with magic, but when he finds out that Hitler has promised governorship of America to the person that defeats the hero, he gets serious and summons six demon lords, creating his own magical transformation word (Sabbac is an anagram of Satan, Any, Belial, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, & Craeteis), allowing him to turn into a fanged, monstrous, super-powerful version of himself. Sabbac appeared again, one more time in issue #6, and that was it for a long time.

Admittedly, this classic Captain Marvel villain wasn't exactly the most visually interesting character, so you can't actually fault the writers for never bringing him back. I could be wrong, but I don't actually think this version of the character ever showed up again except for two appearances in the early 80's, when DC was working to bring the Marvel Family into DC proper by adding them into the many anthology series at the time. Even in that environment, He only showed up twice.

Fast forward to 2004, in the pages of Judd Winick's Outsiders. Winnick really doesn't get enough credit for how innovative he always is, smoothly moving character concepts into new directions that feel like natural developments of what had come before. In a frankly shocking storyline, Judd introduced a whole new version of Sabbac as a russian mafioso stole the power of the demons from Timothy Karnes, battling the Outsiders along with Captain Marvel Junior. This new direction gave Sabbac a ton of new utility, showing up in new stories as a huge, muscled monster, or even as a giant fire-breathing demon.

Our Sabbac Story

We want our version of Sabbac to fufil the whole idea of the monstrous reflection of Captain Marvel. To tie him more directly into the story of Captain Marvel, we're going to make his original bonding with the demons the result of the experiments of Doctor Sivana.

We basically want two main appearances for this character. In his first battle with Captain Marvel, his monstrous form is a big bald hulking brute that basically has to be outsmarted. This appearance is one of our absolute favorites, even though it actually only appeared once, in the 2006 series Superman/Shazam: First Thunder.

His second appearance is going to be far more dangerous; more akin to the russian gangster character that appeared in the pages of the Outsiders. In our version this will still be Timothy Karnes, but having returned from hell with a more demonic appearance and greater control over his magic. This was a great enemy for the Outsiders in the comics, so we'll use him as a threat to a group as well; this time, he'll battle the new Justice Society; perhaps even functioning as the catalyst for Captain Marvel joining them. We'll leave him comatose after this battle, probably secured in the Rock of Eternity, which is a great way to set him up to serve as a threat again in a future story.

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