CAPTAIN MARVEL & ART OF NOSTALGIA HC

In a forgotten subway tunnel, Billy Batson meets a wizard who offers a precious gift: a magic word that will transform the newsboy into a hero. When Billy says, "Shazam!," he becomes Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest Mortal, one of the most popular comic book characters of the 1940s. The saga of Captain Marvel is also that of artist C. C. Beck and writer Otto Binder, one of the most innovative and prolific creative teams working during the Golden Age of comics in the United States. Billy Batson's America, with its cartoon villains and talking tigers, remains a living archive of childhood memories. Taking cues from Beck's theories of art and from the growing field of memory studies, Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia explains why we read comics and, more significantly, how we remember them and the America that deamed them up in the first place.