In his 1970s fanzine Comic Book, artist and writer Alan Jim Hanley lamented the comics’ loss of innocence.
Born in 1939, he pined for the return of his boyhood hero Captain Marvel, a character whose whimsical innocence hadn’t prevented him from regularly outselling Superman.
Captain Marvel had vanished in January 1954, in part because he was hounded out of existence by a lawsuit from Superman’s publishers. The hero wouldn’t be the last innocent who got a lesson in cynicism from the legal system.
“The late Alan J. Hanley was a talented cartoonist/writer who self-published in the 1960s and ‘70s. He loved Captain Marvel and funny animal comics of the 1940s, and his comic strips are nostalgic pastiches of that era,” noted Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine.
Here in Comic Book 6 (1974), Hanley’s Goodguy gang (whose official names were Major Marvel, Minor Marvel and Ms. Marvel) faced the ongoing villainy of the cynical Czar Castic with the assistance of a magically empowered middle-aged matron (“Moms Marvel”).
In another story, Hanley’s Captain America pastiche, All-American Jack, arrives from the 1940s to be shocked by the moral chaos he finds in 1970s America. Hanley’s complaints range right across what we’d call liberal and conservative issues — racism, the escalation of the Vietnam war, the threat of cutting Social Security, the corruption of Watergate, the prevalence of drugs, the legalization of abortion and the banning of organized prayer in public schools.
“Hanley could be didactic, but was still entertaining when sharing his political and moral views,” the blogzine noted. “In this strip, Goodguy and Green Lama of the Limbo League discuss sex and violence in the comics while Goodguy is strapped to a guided missile headed for Disneyland!”
Marvel Comics had revived the name of “Captain Marvel,” but nothing else about the character, in 1968. DC finally brought the original superhero out of mothballs in Shazam! 1 (Feb. 1973). Hanley celebrated that return to innocence in his fanzine, but it turned out that the former Fawcett favorite faced an indifferent audience in the 1970s.
Hanley, like the rest of us, would discover that lost innocence never returns.
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