There was a scene before this where Shazam literally saves Superman's life by stopping Luthor from firing a kryptonite bullet. (Which makes this worse.) Then Superman kills Luthor and Superman hears the whole world mourning Luthor's death. This is where it gets a little meh for me. Superman is in agony. Not because he cared about Luthor but because he wanted to be loved. He wanted to be the center of positive attention the whole time. In other words "Sorry about all that character development, kids! He was a repressed psychopath the whole time and was a 2D cutout of a person PRETENDING to have complexity!" Then he drops his crafted facade and this shit happens the rest of the way.

A videogame where Superman and other heroes fight each other and go brutal.

I still insist that the old wizard who taught Billy Batson the magic acronym is Shazam, and Billy turns into Captain Marvel. I'll bow to trends on a lot of things but not on that.

Calling Captain Marvel Shazam! isn't a trend. It's a botched attempt to get around Marvel's swooping in and obtaining a name trademark, just because the boy who transforms into a man, has a spinster, crocodile-men, an alien worm and a bullet-headed radioactive robot for villains, and hangs around with a suit-wearing talking tiger is OBVIOUSLY infringing on the Superman concept.

The funny thing is, guess who was the first truly indestructible hero who could fly, whose strength was off the chart, and whose arch-enemy was an evil scientist? 'Tweren't Superman.

Originally, Superman's vibe was that he was a super-evolved human, more or less. So nothing Superman did was fundamentally beyond what humans could do, he just did them better. Originally he was leaping tall buildings because he couldn't fly, he just had really strong legs.

Oh, is "Shazam" currently in a position where he can't say his own name, Captain Marvel Jr style?

I don't know if you know this, but last decade, Billy punished Black Adam by changing his magic word and not telling him what it was. He did eventually stumble across it though:

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k214/sallyp617/Silly/blackad am6p12zt3.jpg

What's funny is, DC can legally call the character Captain Marvel as much as they like, they just can't put that name on a comic book cover (DC got around this for years by simply calling his book "The Power of Shazam," which is kind of like calling Superman's comic "The Power of the Sun.") Deciding to reboot the character and just call him Shazam is entirely due to DC just not wanting to use its competitor's name in any context.

Of course, then you have an issue because Billy's wizard mentor is actually named Shazam and always has been. In the reboot, they basically fixed the problem like this:

WIZARD: Hello, Billy, I am Shazam. And now, so are you! *gives Billy superpowers*

BILLY: Wait, we're both Shazam? Won't that get confusing?

WIZARD: No, because watch this. *dies for no reason*

"*dies for no reason*"

Well, the giant lightning bolt that Billy just summoned might have had something to do with it. Like I say, this puts him in the same category as Captain Marvel Jr (and Captain Chocolate Egg Creams) that he can't say his own name without losing his powers. It's not much of a solution.

So Bort: after changing to Shazam, why does Billy ever change back again? Would you? You'd think prudence alone would dictate otherwise, for after you've fucked with a few supercriminals you're gonna have a lot of people gunning for you and being a 14 year old boy isn't the safest thing to be.

I don't know what the canonical reason is for going Billy. I can tell you that Captain Marvel Jr. had to turn back to wounded / crippled Freddy Freeman because he couldn't actually heal while in superpowered form, so maybe with Captain Marvel it's something similar. Maybe Billy Batson can never become the man who can use The Power Of Shazam ™ to best effect if he doesn't truly grow up. Or maybe The Wisdom Of Solomon requires it to keep him from losing sight of the human condition like Black Adam did (suck it, The Wisdom Of Zehuti).

Over at Image Comics, the Captain Marvel pastiche Mighty Man had to turn "normal" just to eat and sleep and so forth; if he didn't, he'd eventually die in superpowered form. This actually happened to someone who got ahold of Mighty Man's powers and never switched back. So that could be a thing.

If it's been answered in comics, I don't know what the current justification is. Maybe Batman makes him do it because it's a bad idea to have a guy who has the powers of multiple gods but doesn't know his state capitals.

That whole show was sooo goood.

Young Justice was a nice follow-up, but JL will always be better since the protagonists aren't snot-nosed teens.

I've been rewatching them too, and they really are amazing.

Amusingly, there's a whole storyline in JL that basically does the Injustice plotline a decade before the game came out, and does it better. Superman goes authoritarian, kills the president, takes over. Of course this is all happening in a parallel universe, since they could never have "our" Superman go bad...except by the end of the episode he's forced to make some serious moral compromises to stop his evil counterpart. Great stuff.

RSR is correct, I love Young Justice, but JL/JLU is the best superhero TV show ever made.

All credit to JL/JLU, but the Superman / Batman "World's Finest" team-up is the pinnacle of that particular universe. It dispensed with the Zach Snydery bits almost as if they weren't even worth dignifying, which is as it should be.

I'm trying to remember "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" well enough to compare it to JL/JLU. It was typically lighter but that doesn't make it better or worse, just different. And, it did give us the Music Meister.

The JL cartoon didn't quite "take" for me (although it was good and I watched many episodes when I had the flu), but Young Justice completely sucked me in with its hacker-go-lucky Robin and angsty Superboy and the sad facade that was Miss Martian's life. Superpowered Breakfast Club all the way!

I mean, just the Superman/Superboy story alone. I've seen plenty of stories where Superman becomes a bad guy for this or that reason, but seeing him act like a shit father after finding out he has a teenaged son that he never wanted, while continuing to be a perfect superhero in every other context and transparently using his heroics to distract from his family obligations, was impressive storytelling for this kind of show. I wasn't expecting anything like that going in.

Too bad the second season was sorta bananas, but I still liked it.

Agreed on the charms of "Young Justice". And we have "Teen Titans" of all things to thank for the Dick Grayson revival: kids whose first experience with Robin was via "Teen Titans" saw him without preconceptions, and took to the guy with no super-powers who can still hold his own against anyone. (I know of one kid who, watching TT, decided Robin was possibly even cooler than Batman, and went apeshit when he learned that Robin was Batman's partner. Again, no preconceptions, including no "Superfriends" or Burt Ward.)

Dick Grayson is an adult in the comics, and is pretty much the best character DC's got. All the talent of Batman, all the optimism of Superman, and a butt so distinctive it's as good as a fingerprint. Yes, that's actually a plot point in the comics:

http://comicsalliance.com/man-of-the-year-dick-grayson/

As far as I know, this game is based on the premise of, "what if the Joker killed a bunch of people including Lois Lane and Superman went on a murderous rampage because that's normal behavior for grieving people?"

Oh, the Kingdom Come / Zack Snyder sort of shit. Kingdom Come was good exactly ONCE.

No need to repeat it over and over.