Uncle Dudley

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65 years ago - CC Dudley is born.
47 years ago - 18-year-old CC Dudley goes to college.
43 years ago - 22-year-old CC Dudley begins teaching.
41 years ago - 24-year-old CC Dudley gets his own classroom.
15 years ago - 50-year-old CC Dudley has to stop teaching for medical reasons. He goes to live with his nephew.
12 years ago - 53-year-old Uncle Dudley's nephew becomes a foster parent to Mary Bromfield.  He helps take care of her.
8 years ago - 57-year-old CC Dudley helps take care of Billy Batson & Freddie Freeman when they join his household.
4 years ago - 61-year-old CC Dudley learns that Billy Batson is Captain Marvel, becoming an even more important mentor and role model.
2 years ago - 63-year-old CC Dudley has a chance to share a fraction of Billy Batson's power when its given to Mary Bromfield & Freddie Freeman, but he declines.
After including Mary & Freddy Marvel as supporting characters for Captain Marvel, you'd think that would be the end.  There are a ton of other members of the Marvel family, from the classic pre-DC era of Tawky-Tawny and the Lieutenant Marvels, to the modern extended Foster Family with Eugene, Pedro, and the loveable Darla.  We're not including them because, in the long run, the dynamic of Billy, Freddy, and Mary together really define these characters, and it's the simplicity of those three together that really makes them work.

So why are we including one of the goofiest characters from the classic Marvel Family?  Well, truthfully, we're not.  We're basing a new take on this character on some brief appearances he's made, but in doing so we think we're adding a small bit of support to the story of the Marvels that will actually make them even stronger.  Tell us what you think!

Uncle Dudley's Comic History

Mary Marvel's Uncle Dudley appeared for the first time in Wow Comics #18 in 1943, perhaps the first sign that Otto Binder was going to just keep adding members to the Marvel Family until someone made him stop.  The loveable old scamp trope was pretty well-loved in children's fiction at the time; newspaper comic strips were overflowing with them, and lots of characters we now know and love started out as prime examples of the archetype; most notably a certain british butler. 

Uncle Dudley was a huckster who found Mary's Good Deed Ledger and discovered all about the Marvel Family.  He started posing as Mary's Uncle, pretending to have powers similar to hers, but was in fact faking it and doing a pretty bad job of it.  Mary let him believe he was fooling her, however, because he was a decent person at heart.  It sounds pretty ridiculous to a modern reader, but audiences at the time loved this sort of thing
Dudley would start to show up with the rest of the Marvel Family in their various books, although his actual appearances were fairly limited since he was a joke character by design.  

In DC's post-crisis, as Jerry Ordway rebuilt the Marvel family for the regular DC continuity, Dudley was the janitor at Billy's school who covered for him while he was living on his own, and would also help out once he discovered that he had powers.  This evolved into an ongoing support role in the series, although the character's roots as a joke translated weirdly into 80's comics, as he was sometimes depicted as struggling with alcoholism, and was even shown attempting suicide at one point.

This series was essentially the last to depict Dudley as a part of the regular continuity.  He would appear in stories that looked back and celebrated classic Captain Marvel stories like Convergence & Multiversity, and also made an appearance in the Young Justice cartoon where we see him briefly  as Billy Batson's caretaker.  That animated appearance is actually going to have a pretty big influence on our take on the character.  

Our Uncle Dudley Story

We've made some pretty big adjustments to Dudley's backstory to make him work with our modern take on Billy Batson's foster family.  He's going to be the family's main caretaker, but we want to make him fit that role a little bit better, so we actually went back and gave him a career as an elementary school teacher who is now retired for health reasons.  It's not really a change supported by any of his in-canon appearances, but we think we can find a way to make it work.  He's still a loveable eccentric who connects with the Marvel kids in his own off-kilter way, but this way it feels a little more appropriate to modern audiences in a vaguely Ms Frizzle way, and without the old "homeless kids pal around with a drunken tramp' vibe that was okay in the 40's.

This also creates a pretty easy to follow dynamic between Billy, Freddy, Mary and Uncle Dudley (who, by the way, we're giving the first name 'CC', after the creator of Captain Marvel... a name usually given to Billy's deceased father).  He becomes the adult they have to outwit to go out and use their powers.  Later on, when he discovers the truth about their secret, he can become a great ally for them.  We've included a small homage moment when Freddy and Mary get a share of Billy's power to become Freddy and Mary Marvel, and Dudley actually gets a chance to also gain powers... but he declines.  

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