#power of Shazam

[puppetwoman17]

“Billy’s favorite hero is SUPERMAN!”

“Wrong! It’s Wonder Woman!”

“You’re both wrong! His favorite hero is John Constantine!”

All of you are wrong because his favorite heroes are the bullet couple. Him and Mary had action figures of those two, and when you have ACTION FIGURES, you know you’ve passed the point of no return.

Billy geeks out about these two, and then does the same with Windshear(the bullets’ daughter) when she shows up. Being friends with them is one of the coolest things to happen to him.

Also they care for them right back. I wish I got to see a few moments with the twins and Bulletgirl(she’s dead in PoS), but her daughter’s worry for them was also so sweet.

[im-not-buying-it-ether]

Never gonna stop thinking about the many whiplashes Billy gets in life with PoS, especially about how he's lived

Because he starts out with his family in a big house, living really well off and having hired tutors when they travel and traveling often for his parents' work, having solid bronze statuettes in the house and this dumbwaiter and renovations done to the old place and all this awesome nice stuff that is a daily factor in making his childhood really great and pretty privledged.

The his uncle kicks him out and hes living on the streets for a time, clothes on his back and a worn out backpack of personal items, and thats it for this kid.

Then when he gets a job at Whiz he's able to live somewhere but its a huge shift and realization into how much things do cost and how much being smart with money matters and hes like thirteen paying for his own place and trying to make it.

[snail-friend]

DC be nice to Billy challenge- there's been like 5 issues of misery in a row for these kids!?!

[bish-0-p]

i finished reading Power of Shazam! and i have some thoughts that i wanted to share. buckle up

firstly, i am so tired of "billy joins the batfam" stories, especially because 99% of the time the bats are reduced to fanon tropes with personalities that they don't actually have in canon. not to mention, mary is never included in these stories. it would be one thing if this was New 52 billy, who is only mary's foster brother, but the majority of what ive seen takes inspiration from the idea of billy being a homeless kid in fawcett

so why are we throwing billy in with people who live halfway across the country, when the bromfields are right there?

if you're going to write a fanfic where billy (and, hopefully, mary) joins another established superhero family, why not have him be taken in by superman? though they argue a lot in canon, their morals, abilities, and worldview are much more similar. they admire each other!

additionally, a lot of the time other members of the marvel family are completely ignored. freddy freeman only ever appears to be a romantic interest for billy or mary, tawky tawny shows up in some fics for a moment or so, but dudley and ibis the invincible are nowhere to be found. even black adam, doctor sivana, and mr. mind are underutilized!

Power of Shazam! is such a heartfelt story, when you look at the bigger picture. it's about a boy who's had to look out for himself for so long learning to trust family again. it's about him sharing the burdens of the responsibilities he has, and also sharing the guilt. billy feels so much guilt all the time, and it's absolutely gut-wrenching at points. there's an issue where fairfield, the twins' home town, is nuked to get back at them. and billy just has a breakdown

i have my criticisms on how New 52 handles billy as a character, but him having anger at the world is not out of character. billy is a very, very angry boy— why wouldn't he be? his entire life was taken away from him, his trust was betrayed again and again, the people around him think him to be incompetent

but he still finds joy in life. he's silly, he's funny, he always sees the bright side to things. and this run does a phenomenal job of demonstrating just how complex he really is

there's also the problem of mary and freddy acting subservient to billy. throughout this series, mary is explicitly referred to as captain marvel several times. she's captain marvel as much as billy is. and much of freddy's arc within this series revolves around him outgrowing the "junior" tagline and becoming captain marvel 3. they're not just a team, they're a family

they protect and look out for each other. this is what i want to see more of! i have fun with fics or headcanons where billy gets looked after by another hero, but if that's the only way you interact with his media, it's a disservice to his character and the characters of his family

read Power of Shazam! look into these characters. and please stop reducing these complex and dynamic characters to tropes

[billymarvel]

obsessed with his outfits. he dresses himself

[kenandeliza]

I saw that drawing requests are open and ran so fast in here 🏃‍♀️ omg 👀

If I can, could I please request a doodle of Billy Batson and Sinclair from the Power of Shazam?

Panel redraw of Power of shazam issue 2

So far I havent read the rest of the Power of shazam comics ;w; so I only managed to get to the third issue

Hopefully this will be alright :D

I will not erase dot-eye Billy batson

I believe in dot-eye Billy supremacy XD

[baambastic]

Cassandra Cain ran away at age 8, and she lived on her own for 8-9 years before the events of No Man’s Land.

No Man’s Land takes place not long before A World Without Grown Ups, in which Billy Batson is somewhere around age 15. And Billy becomes Captain Marvel somewhere between age 10 and 14. Regardless, Cass would have run away before Billy was at that age.

Accessing the Wizard’s power requires pureness of heart. At least, it does when one is trying to access it through the Wizard or his staff, although the Champion can share their power with anyone.

And Cass is shown to be able to access the Wizard’s power due to her pure heart, even after five years of a technoviral zombie apocalypse.

So, given all of this information, if the mission during which Cass took a man’s life and ran away from her father took place in Fawcett City, then it is very possible that the Wizard might have chosen Cass as his Champion instead.

[evilhorse]

DC superheroes house ad from November 1992

[flexingtyger99]

Cap….Shazam!

[dcinthe90s]

Something is amiss in Fawcett City, when everyone's roles get strangely shuffled! Billy's dad is Captain Marvel? Sivana is the mayor!? Is anything really as it seems??? Find out in Power of Shazam #25, from 1997!

[tomoleary]

Jerry Ordway - Power of Shazam! #33 (1997)

Source

[puppetwoman17]

No because I actually wanna talk more about Billy getting a call/email about his dad’s remains years later, because the concept is just so life-altering.

Like, imagine that you’re Billy, who had to deal with his father never coming home and his sister not remembering much from before. After years of dealing with all the hurt and trauma, he’s finally at a place he likes. He’s older, he has his sister back, and they’re extremely close. He has friends in and out of the hero community. He’s trusted within that community. He has a good job. He makes enough so he’s not starving. And while the wounds from his parents’ brutal deaths are still there, they aren’t as bad. They’re healing slowly, but healing nonetheless.

And then everything comes crashing down. And whatever point he gets the email or phone call does not matter. That’s honestly one of the worst parts of this. He could be waking up to a new day. Going to bed.ar the watchtower. Doing his job. Going on a date. Going out with the JL. He could be doing ANYTHING and it wouldn’t matter.

And it’s more likely for him to get an email about it. Idk why I think this, but I do. So you can probably imagine how it feels for him to get a random email from a random @ that says “C.C. Batson’s Remains Found”. Like, what the fuck do you mean? What do you MEAN?

Ebenezer got the email. He is absolutely fuming and refuses to have anything to do with it, so it’s left to Billy, because of course it is.

What does he look like to the League? To his friends? One moment, he’s the same as he’s ever been, talking and laughing and finally acting like the child he is at heart, and then his phone lights up and he reads something on it—

He goes completely pale. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t react when someone touches him or says anything. He just stutters out that he needs to go and asks for a sick day, or a sick week, or a sick whatever, because he doesn’t care. He just makes a run for it before anyone can ask.

They try to ask around, but Mary and Junior are offline soon after him. Dudley suspends Captain Marvel Inc.. Whiz Radio announces that the Whiz Kid segment will be doing reruns for the next two months. Diana is getting missed calls from all of her Fawcett war buddies.

Meanwhile, Billy spends agonizing days, weeks, waiting for his father’s remains to finally come home. There are warnings. From Adam. From Dudley. Hell, from the email sender. All about how gruesome C.C. looks. And billy is angry because that’s his father and he shouldn’t be so disgusted about finally seeing him again.

And then he finally does get to see him. He gets to see his dad after so many years. His ACTUAL, real dad, and not just Captain Marvel on the tv screen—

And he can’t look. He can’t. He just looks too…

Billy throws up all over the good-looking clothes he bought, because he thought the quality would make up for that entire situation. But of course it doesn’t.

Dad’s home, and Billy, for the first time, wishes he wasn’t. When he’s finally in the ground, next to his wife, next to their daughter’s empty coffin, all he can do is cry in shame.

[im-not-buying-it-ether]

Okay, worms and mold and all the infectious wriggly things that invade my mind like how Shazam has, blame @ghost144444

So, PoS had a fun alternate reality where C.C. and Marilyn Batson were the respective Captain and Mary Marvel of their world. That world fell apart despite C.C.'s efforts to keep it together so his family could be together and happy (for once). Ghost posed the idea of a fatherly Captain Marvel, and it's C.C. who just lost his entire family.

And I am mixing those together to pose that, oh yeah, C.C. is Captain Marvel and operating as The One And Only Captain, but it isn't his universe. His world fell apart, the wife he knew and the version of Marilyn here is dead, his kids are split and the world is as it was always supposed to be.

But Billy isn't Captain Marvel.

Somehow, by some miracle or curse, C.C. managed to find his way to before his son was shouldered with that burden. He gets the Wizard to agree that, with a Champion whose lost everything already ready and willing to be the current Champion, there's no need to burden Billy like how it's "supposed to be"

So this Billy is still how he normally is, but when he gets the exclusive on this new hero and gets his Whiz Job for after school covering it (while also finagling his own apartment through narrative spite) he has this upsetting and sad feeling the whole time that that hero is his dad. It has to be, he looks just how he remembers him. Maybe he doesn’t smile much or at all, and maybe he’s just holding on too hard or wishing stupidly like a dumb kid, but it has to be him. Right?

Meanwhile Mary is still having her nightmares and just barely remembering a family that was both her parents and a brother she can hardly put a face to, but she knows that her city’s new hero looks just like how she remembers her dad. And Nora? Seeing her cousins husband in the face of some new hero that popped up years later? In a world like DC’s with so much nonsense that it has to be real that he’s back from the dead? What’s she supposed to think? Or her husband Nick, who has a record and is just as guilty as Nora for falsifying the papers they used to adopt Mary.

Thoughts are thoughting and I’m sharing what’s literate rn, peace

[puppetwoman17]

That’s so real honestly. You could also say that the entire theme of Billy’s universe is “ sibling/ family relationships”.

I could genuinely list them off fr

Billy & Mary

Kit & Freddy

Sivana’s two oldest kids & his two youngest

Satanus & Blaze

Bulletman & Windshear(his daughter)

Oh my god the entirety of the Batson family because that is one cesspool of trauma and messy relationships.

Billy Batson is SO aroace coded for me and it's fun how I missed it for so long

Billy's stories is always about his family and his powers, in differents universes and everything. That's sweet and really cool, probably one of the reasons I like him so much, but I realised that my real thing with Billy is the fact he don't have romantic partners.

I mean yeah, you can mention Courtney or Cissie if you want, but I can't see Billy really in love with them ir dating anyone. It's not a ship war thing, it's a aro thing who actually fits with him so much. I can't see him dating, in any age, and that's make me so comfortable

And it's fun If you imagine someone in the league wanting a romantic advice from Capitan, since he's a "adult man" who lived so much, and Billy is just in panic bc he don't understand nothing about it and run away. I really like to see him as a Damian's friend, so imagine him seeing all of his friends having dates and be like "that's gross" but happy for them all the same time, and never thinking about himself having it bc it's so weird

people asking him about any girlfriend and Billy say "and why would I want that?" like at 17 years old

I love you aroace Billy im sorry I lost you for so long

[billymarvel]

this makes me so sad, i love this panel with my whole heart

shes a lil girl at a spelling bee competition now going for lunch when she swears the face that haunts her in her dreams stands before her

[moonlightcycle571]

The JL fight a magic user who casts a spell on everyone where their biggest weakness will be displayed above their heads. If Batman takes notes later, then that’s not on him.

There’s the predictable ones like Hal where it says ‘Yellow’, Clark says ‘Kryptonite’, and Martian Manhunter ‘Fire’.

But then there’s the one where you need to interpret like Flash halving ‘Bound’, the Hawks having ‘Clipped’ which pertains to their wings or even the ‘Pride’ on Doctor Fate.

What’s weird is that Batman and Captain Marvel of all people have the same word:

‘Adoption’

Little does everyone know that it’s for two entirely different reasons. Batman can’t help but adopt. Batson doesn’t want to be adopted.

No one knows Captain Marvel is secretly a kid, so everyone thinks he’s like Batman, but just doesn’t adopt (or thinks Freddy & Mary or the Vasquez kids are actually his if they are in AU). But for the sake of comedy, let’s not have them.

Batman thinks there is some kind of kinship, and asks how he battles the urge to adopt? Captain Marvel is trying really hard to not run away (he doesn’t want to get adopted, especially not by Batman, the puns enough are going to be atrocious).

It would look something like this:

Bruce: and that’s how I got all my kids. Or at least most of them. I’m not sure if technically family friends count, but they still got their parents, you know?

Billy, does not in fact know: yeah… darn those parents ammi right

Ollie, wondering if they should put Cap in the JL parent group: oh, do you have any kids?

Billy: oh no, I can’t (Cue misunderstandings)

Bruce: I understand the urge to adopt is real, good on you for not giving in. We live a dangerous life style

Billy: We’ll we can’t help the fae brain

Bruce: the what?

Billy, he just heard the term before and thought it was the common word: you know, when you just want to keep and raise a kid for yourself

Bruce, thinking of the numerous tales of witches and fae using first born children as payment only to realise it’s their way of adoption: … huh

Billy, just wants to escape and hug his tiger: oh it’s really fine. Anyways I need to bounce, but we’ll see each other on Mondays meeting

Proceeds to ruffle everyone’s hair (he can’t help it, he’s taller than anyone and enjoys the feeling of ruffling hair instead of having his hair ruffled)

Batman: oh OH

Cue most misunderstanding where they think Marvel mentally adopted them. They all have daddy issues anyways, so it really shouldn’t be a surprise when they try to be the fae brain favourite.

HAHA YOU THOUGHT YOU WERENT GETTING DAD MARVEL, BUT JUMPED ON THAT BANDWAGON THE SECOND IT CAME OUT