Shazam!: The World's Mightiest Mortal Vol. 3

Shazam!: The World's Mightiest Mortal Vol. 3 by E. Nelson Bridwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Shazam! The World's Mightiest Mortal Volume 3 collects stories from World's Finest Comics #253-270, 272-282 and Adventure Comics #491 and 492.

The original Captain Marvel is one of those characters I've always been interested in but there's never much material in print at any given time. The other two Shazam collections were fun so I picked this one up.

E. Nelson Bridwell writes all the stories in this collection and with the exception of a Gil Kane fill in issue, Dandy Don Newton handles the penciling chores, backed by a whole slew of inkers. E. Nelson Bridwell is adept at cranking out short but compelling stories. I don't think there's a single story in this collection longer than 15 pages and most of them were shorter, as befits the small page count available in DC's anthology books in the late 1970s.

Officially, I prefer a more CC Beck influenced style to my Marvel Family adventures but Don Newton draws a great looking book. I didn't realize how much ENB did to flesh out Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family during the Bronze Age. A lot of what I read in Who's Who back in the day actually happened during E. Nelson Bridwell's run rather than Cap's original adventures at Fawcett.

One thing this volume shows is that when the rest of the DC universe isn't in the picture, the Marvel Family really shines. Captain Marvel is presented as the top dog, not a second banana to Superman as he has been depicted in the last thirty or so years.

Shazam! The World's Mightiest Mortal Volume 3 might be the last time the Marvel Family was really given time to shine prior to The Power of Shazam twenty years later. Four out of five lightning bolts.

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