There are very few things you can predict these days.  Oh sure, we know about death and taxes, that autumn in San Francisco is the best weather of the year, that Quentin Tarantino is taking stuff from movies we haven’t seen, that day follows night, Christmas follows Thanksgiving, and Chuck Austen follows any writer departing a Marvel comic.  Beyond these certainties, all else is uncertain, awash in ambiguity, and even our memories and tastes are suspect. 

How else to explain my appreciation for the Dave Marshall Prog Rock Explosion?  After all, my idea of prog rock is tedious drum solos and long freeform noodling on a synthesizer until, finally, somehow, you end up with Rush, which I still believe was a stealth weapon created by passive-aggressive Canadians to drive the rednecked masses of America into revolt.  And it would have worked too, if the masses hadn’t been pacified with a movie star president much to our, uh, advantage.  (After all, I’m having to work two jobs to cover my health cares costs and I’m ordering prescription drugs from Canada off the Internet so obviously we won that battle, right?)

And yet, every Friday, more or less without fail, Dave Marshall shows up at the store for the Dave Marshall Prog Rock Explosion to play Brian and I a selection of rock and roll at its most gloriously pretentious, and it’s been great.  Over the last few months I’ve been exposed to Jethro Tull and their rockin’ flute, The Beach Boys and their crafty Theremin, Bachman Turner Overdrive and their Pictures At An Exhibition, and enough classical themes pounded out by stoned hippies on fender feel like I’m trapped in an aural recrecation of This Is Spinal Tap where everyone’s too subtly hilarious to give away the joke.

Besides, as Mr. Marshall has explained while sonorous bass solos drove customers from the store with tears of either pain or ecstasy in their eyes, some of the masters of pretentious prog rock—like Led Zeppelin—aren’t seen as proggy becuase of their greatness, and you just generally can’t get to glam rock or art rock without going through prog rock.  And since these days my interests are divided pretty evenly between glam rock—Peter Gabriel dressed as a giant sunflower while fronting Genesis, or David Bowie wiggling those androgynous superhero hips of his—and art rock—a heavily mascara’d Brian Eno crafting lovely ambiguous pop albums then becoming the evil Svengali of the Talking Heads, while Lou Reed and the Velvets snarled and used cigarettes to burn their initials into the tapestry of rock and roll—I have to see Prog Rock as an embarrassing necessity for the music that I like:  they made ideas in pop music, no matter how stupid and ill-conceived, cool and I owe them a debt for that.

What’s this got to do with comics (other than make some of you resolve to never come get them on early Friday afternoons)?  Well, of course, it’s got everything to do with Captain Marvel.  No, not the Peter David title that won the “U-Decide” contest with a tactic that will hopefully be memorialized in the history books as “U Salt The Earth.”  I’m talking about the original Captain Marvel—or as we tend to put it, “the Shazam! Captain Marvel.”

“Man,” Dave said one Friday, “Remember that crappy live action Shazam?”

“Oh God yes,” I moaned.  “What a disappointment that was.”

“Wasn’t it?” Dave said and laughed as he always does when something is depressingly horrible.  “That awful stiff-lipped animation at the beginning, like in the Star Trek cartoon—”

“Filmation, I think.”

“Right, and Billy Batson as this long-haired kid traveling with an old guy in a van having adventures.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.  “Named Mentor, no less.  Good lord, where these producers even aware of what they were implying?”

“Billy Batson was this stoned looking transcontinental rent boy…”

“Well, clearly, that was supposed to be our role model.”

“Well, clearly,” Dave said.  “Because they weren’t really adventures, they were life lessons.  They were always saving an endless number of boys falling into wells…”

“And getting their legs caught on railroad tracks…”

“And telling lies until nobody would believe them when their best buddy…”

“Would either fall into a well or get their legs caught on the railroad tracks.”

“That’s right,” Dave said, and then waggled his fingers to a guitar solo based on a Shostakovich opus.  “Good God, those were terrible.”

“And the special effects were lousy.  Remember how they just strapped Captain Marvel to the hood of a car and then had him stick his arms out…”

Dave laughed and waggled his fingers some more.

“Captain Marvel was always flying down the middle of the street, four feet off the ground…”

Dave nodded.  “Bugs and gravel from passing trucks smacking him in the face.”

I shook my head.  “Shitty, shitty special effects.”

“What I can’t get over,” Dave said.  “is that dumb-ass animation at the beginning.”

“Weren’t those the Greek gods?”

“Well, the guys who Captain Marvel got his powers from.”

“Right,” I said.  “Those were Greek gods.  Zeus.  Hercules.”

“Well, Hercules was a demigod…”

“Uh, Athena?  Doesn’t he have the wisdom of Athena?”

At this point in my memory, Hibbs walked in.  But, actually, after consulting with some of my secondary sources, I realize Hibbs had been there the whole time.  Brian Hibbs, new, proud, sleep-deprived father, had been standing at the counter for over twenty minutes, a silvery thread of exhausted drool caught in the corner of his beard, while Dave and I dissed the Shazam TV show.  Hibbs said nothing, merely stared into the distance with the thousand yard stare usually afforded to shipwreck survivors and soldiers lost in the acrid jungles of ‘Nam.

“Bri,” I asked.  “Do you remember, does Captain Marvel have the wisdom of Athena?”

Brian seemed to consider this a minute.  “I’m so tired,” he announced, “I can see through time!”

I looked at Dave who looked at Brian.  “The scary part,” Dave said.  “is that I believe him.”

Hibbs looked at Dave.  “You’re a good boy,” Brian said, and rubbed Dave’s head.  “Yes, you’re a good boy.”

“Uh, Bri? Brian, snap out of it, dude!”

“It’s 1862,” Brian said to us, “and there’s a fire in the saw mill.  A fire in the saw mill…”

“Crap,” I said to Dave.  “What should we do?”

Dave pondered  this a moment while Brian petted him.  “Put on some Zep,” Dave told me.  “That should snap him out of it.”

At the opening drum riff of “Good Times, Bad Times,” Brian shook his head, as if coming out of a spell, and immediately stopped petting Dave.  “How the hell did I get here?”

Dave said, “God, I wish he’d feed me lines like that when he was fully awake.  But now it’d like picking on the handicapped.”

“Does Captain Marvel have the wisdom of Athena?”

Brian shook his head.  “Wisdom of Solomon.”

I nodded.  “Oh, right.  So what do the A’s stand for?”

Brian thought about this for a minute.  “Umm…”

“Athena?  Aphrodite?” I suggested.  “Agape?”

“Why are you femming up Captain Marvel?” Dave asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I’m going through my glam rock stage, I guess.”

Brian said, “I think it’s the invulnerability of Achilles and the…strength of Atlas?”

“Isn’t it the strength of Hercules?” Dave suggested.

“Maybe it’s the wisdom of Hera,” I suggested.

“No, no,” Brian said.  “Wisdom of Solomon, remember?”

“Right,” I said.  “Maybe it’s Hera’s intolerance of adultery?”

“You’re right, it’s the strength of Hercules,” Brian said.  “Dammit, there’s only one way we’re going to settle this.”

Dave looked at him.  “Dueling Robert Plant imitations?”

Brian walked over to a shelf and pulled the wrap off a Shazam Archives.  Dave and I gasped aloud.

“Okay,” Brian said.  “Lessee, lessee. Here we are!  It’s the—ah, the Stamina of Atlas!”

“Oh, sure,” I said.  “The stamina of Atlas.”

“Sure,” Brian said.  “It’s not a matter of Atlas’s strength, it was his stamina.  And check it out, the bravery of Achilles!”

‘Huh,” Dave said.

“How brave was Achilles?” Brian said.  “He was invulnerable!  It doesn’t take much bravery to go into battle knowing that you can’t die.”

“Maybe ‘bravery’ is a code word for arrogance,” I said.  “Or rage.  Wasn’t that what he was known for, his rages?”

“Says here it’s his bravery.  And then the power of Zeus and the speed of Mercury.”

“Captain Marvel has the speed of Freddy Mercury?”  Dave asked.  “That’s not really what he was known for, was it?”

“Wow,” I said.  “Wouldn’t that have been cool.  A glam rock Captain Marvel?  It’d be, like, Shaglam!  Or Glamzam!  Or something.  The octave range of Freddy Mercury, the guitar skills of Ziggy Stardust, umm…”

“The harmonies of The Sweet,” Dave said.  “The showmanship of Alice Cooper…”

“Uhhh,” I said.  “The annoyingness of Hair Metal…”

“That’s not a band,” Dave said.  “That’s another genre.”

“Crap,” I said.  “And I still need another ‘A.’”

“Well,” Dave said.  “How about a prog rock Captain Marvel?  The power of Zep, the folksiness of The Strawbs…”

“Okay,” I said.  “Keep going…”

“The innovation of Miles Davis…”

“Miles Davis wasn’t prog rock.  He was jazz.”

“Well,” Dave said.  “Prog rock is jazz.”

“Yeah, but jazz isn’t prog rock!  You’re equivocating!”

“I’m not equivocating,” Dave said.  “It’s just that one is the same as the other, is all.”

“Okay, what’s your definition of equivocating, then?”

“It’s the year 1066,” Brian said, “And the Normans are invading Britain, and a little goat named Sir Lancelot is bleating in a field for its supper.”

“I think we lost him again,” Dave said.  “It’s a shame, because I was really hoping he’d help me with another prog rock ‘A’ band.”

“Almost every genre is deficient in bands beginning with ‘A,’” I said.  “Except Metal, of course.”

“Metal, you think?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.  “Power of Slayer, breadth of Anthrax, annoyingness of Rob Zombie, obstinacy of Metallica…”

“What about ‘H?’”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.  “Something with Hell in it.”

“That’d be Death Metal then,” Rob said

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“Well, pretty much by definition, I’d think,” Dave insisted.

“No, no.”

“Hide, Sir Lancelot!” Brian said.  “The evil Frenchmen are storming your shores!  Hide and stop chewing on that gherkin!”

“I think I understand why they came up with such odd choices for Shazam,” Dave said.  “They totally had to cheat to get the good figures to fit in.”

We looked at Brian as he reached out and started petting his own head.  “Good boy,” Brian said dazedly.  “You’re a good boy.  Yes, you are.”

“True,” I said.  “Except why’d they put him in the van with the old guy named Mentor?”

Dave shrugged, then held his hands up and waggled his fingers for another air-guitar solo.  Now and then, I wonder if that’s the only answer that might make any sense at all, the big secret to television shows and rock and roll:  when you can’t figure out what the hell you’re doing, get your ass to the next town and do it again until you either figure it out or you’re rich.  Rock and Roll, baby!  Rock and Roll!