Some thoughts about The New Champion of Shazam #1

Is Mary ready to gain even more power?

Billy has disappeared for strange reasons and now is up to his sister to receive the power of Shazam but this comes at the worst time ever due that she's trying to start a brand new life at college.

A new beginning for the Shazam franchise is here... which was pretty unnecessary considering that the one that Geoff Johns created was pretty much perfect. I'm still pretty disappointed that they were no plans to further expand the premise of the Shazam family and even more disappointed that what launched this particular book was Tim Sheridan's overall atrocious work that handled the idea of death as poorly as humanly possible. However, I always think is fair to judge a book for its own merits and not really for what it frustrated so as a story itself, how does this new series fare?

Well, pretty poorly too sadly.

The story is written by Josie Campbell who doesn't even bother to explain what actually happens in the new status quo for Shazam (aside from a few panels halfway the issue) and instead decides to present Mary as a girl who always had a temper and likes to hit fast so it was not only enough for her to be smart, now she also needed to be overly strong in that regard as well. Is easy to make accusations and complaints here but at least when Geoff Johns changed Billy's personality early on it was to subvert expectations and didn't make him any more perfect than he was in the past.

But okay, characterization is a bit derivative and lacking, how about that plot then? Well, Mary is in college now and receives a message from Hoppy the Marvel Bunny (who is the best part of this honestly) who tells her that she is the only inheritor of Shazam so forget about Mary having to actually earn the power like Freddy Freeman did in Trials of Shazam (which could have brought actual worldbuilding), now she just gets the magic without having to really work for it (and over her siblings for some reason) which of course, also makes her stronger than any other version of Shazam.

This... this is just too much.

And the rest is not really good either since she just has to fight a generic new version of Master of Disaster and the issue quickly ends just like that. Worst of all is that the writing can be overwritten despite that there's very little actual content.

Doc Shaner's artwork is what actually makes this shine thanks to his expressive, semi-cartoony style that makes the characters look great, if only he had more creative stuff to work on.

Yeah, this is not promising at all and I have no hope for the future. Another waste.