Winick on "Trials"

He's strong, he wears a cape, he flies and everyone knows who he is. He takes on a colorful rogue’s gallery in his battle for truth and justice. He’s not Superman; he’s Shazam! (a.k.a. Captain Marvel), who decades ago rivaled the man of steel in the hearts and minds of comic book buying kids everywhere.

The intervening decades have not been kind to the good Captain and his extended family of Marvels, something that DC comics and writer Judd Winick and artist Howard Porter are looking to rectify in the “The Trials of Shazam!,”  a 12-issue maxiseries that debuted in comics shops this week.

Winick, known to millions from his tenure on MTV’s seminal reality show “The Real World,” has become a mainstay at DC Comics, which has long struggled to find the right approach to Captain Marvel.

“Dan (Didio) and I talked about it and the bottom line is what wasn’t working about him isn’t so much the antiquated qualities of the character as much that everyone thinks of him as a rip off or Superman,” Winick says. “He needed his own realm, needed his own toy box. And for us, we wanted to concentrate on his becoming a character of magic.”

Magic has always played a part in the DCU, but Winick says he thinks a lot of the best magic ended up migrating to the Vertigo imprint with titles like "Hellblazer" and "Books of Magic." That left the DCU in need of getting its magic back.

“We want to tap into what it’s like to have cool magic, stuff sort of like 'Hellboy' and Joss Whedon’s 'Buffy' and things like that and wrap it up in this new version of Shazam,” Winick says. “In general we’re taking a more realistic view of an unrealistic realm. People who are doing magic are aware they’re doing magic and they comment on it and think it’s crazy. I have small little bits of it in the first issue, where he’s fighting and this giant demonic frog crashes out of the castle and attacks him. His comments under his breath are like, ‘Wow, that’s a really big frog.’”

The status of magic in the DCU became a major element in the Days of Vengeance series, which shows The Spectre killing the wizard Shazam, who gives Captain Marvel his powers. That opens the door for major changes in the plot of “Trials of Shazam!”

“Captain Marvel more or less gets kicked upstairs. He’s no longer going to be the guy in the red suit. The wizard Shazam perished in Days of Vengeance and now someone has to fill that void,” he says.

Filling the void left by Captain Marvel is Freddy Freeman, better known for more than 50 years as Captain Marvel Jr. Freddy has to visit the gods whose powers make up the name Shazam and undergo their trials to prove he is worthy of replacing Captain Marvel. “If he succeeds in his tests, he is rewarded with their power,” Winick says. “And when he succeeds, he will become, not Captain Marvel, he will become a character called Shazam.”

The new magic order in the DCU has a permanent effect on the members of the Marvel family, which in the Golden Age expanded to include Mary Marvel and such oddballs as Uncle Marvel, Tall Marvel, Fat Marvel and even Hillbilly Marvel and Tawky Tawny the talking lion. “We clearly define that there are no more Marvels. They’re all gone,” says Winick.

For hardcore fans, the whimsy and the often silly nature of the Golden Age Captain Marvel was what made it unique. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s in the same realm as Plastic Man and a lot of the old-school fans like that. But that doesn’t work real well for the mainstream comic book audience,” he says.

It was humor that first made fans sit up and Winick for his work on “Barry Ween,” a series Winick says is on the backburner while he concentrates on his work for DC and his Cartoon Network show, “The Adventures of Juniper Lee,” now in its third season.

That doesn’t mean “Trials of Shazam!” will be humorless. “Anyone who’s read my stuff knows that I crack jokes ad nauseum. My most serious books have lots of jokes in them. Being funny and being serious are not two different things.”