#it doesn't have to conform to my view of the pre-existing character it just has to be INTERESTING STORYTELLING

[daydreamerdrew]

From Doc Shaner’s podcast interview with The Comics Cube:

Duy Tano: We've been talking about characters like the Golden Age Captain Marvel, Space Ghost, so we're going really old here, Flash [Gordon] is even older than the Golden Age Captain Marvel- what is the appeal of the retro stuff to you?

Doc Shaner: It's hard to say. Obviously I'm not old enough to have known those characters when they were most popular, or when they first came about, so it's not like I have legit nostalgia for them, per se. But, I think, certainly, it's got to be at least partially an aesthetic that I'm fond of, a lot of the art deco stylings and the simple bold choices made by Beck and Alex Raymond and a lot of those creators is certainly very appealing to me. I like the simplicity of the characters. And they're so big and broad that I think there's a lot of fun to be had and kind of boring down and getting specific with those characters.

Duy Tano: What do you feel about the fact that the Golden Age Captain Marvel was the biggest superhero of the 1940s? And Flash Gordon might have been the biggest "superhero," though the word didn't exist back then, before Superman? And what do you think about the fact that those are like kind of just lost to history, you know, people don't know that? They see a Shazam movie coming out and they're like 'oh, who's Shazam?'

Doc Shaner: It's tough because I think Flash Gordon, certainly, even with a movie in the 80s, that was set in the 80s, it's unambiguously supposed to be of its time, and then the cartoon and what have you, so much of Flash Gordon is caught in his original time period, just the whole notion of him being just a guy who's really capable, that's a very old-school notion. Even with like modern action stars and movies and TV and stuff, there's still something about Flash that feels of it's time. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of that's still stuck on Captain Marvel, too. My theory has always been that Cap got essentially taken off the stands during the Silver Age of Comics, he wasn't able to grow in a lot of the ways Superman did, and Batman and a lot of those characters did. A lot of those DC characters grew and thrived in the Silver Age. And he missed, you know, the advent of Marvel Comics, too. So when DC tried to bring Cap and the family back, he was still very much a 40s character. And I don't want to deny the charm of that because there certainly is. It's what drew me to him in the first place, was that charm. But I think it also stagnated him in a big way, that I think that time period let the greater audience, the greater reader, think of Superman and Batman as being a little more malleable than Captain Marvel. And because of that, creators and readers alike, I think we struggle to let Cap grow naturally, because we want him to be the way he was, cause that's what we like about him. I think after I did Convergence: Shazam! with Jeff, that was why I, for a long time, I think I'd kind of closed the book for me and Shazam. Because I'd gotten my feelings of retro Golden Age nostalgia out of my system with those two issues. Jeff and I knew that it was not an opportunity that was going to come along very often, so we did everything we could to pack as much of our Captain Marvel fanboyism into those two issues. So we put as many villains as we could in there, and the whole family, and Tawky, and even Mr. Morris, and Uncle Dudley. We did everything we could because we knew we weren't going to get another chance like that to work with that version of the character. But yeah, I think for a long time it made me kind of think 'no, I think I'm done with Shazam' because I don't know what we can do with that character and that world, first what DC'll let us do, and what the readers will let us do, because I think a lot of times those are at odds.