I saw #Shazam the other night and I loved it! No surprise, they made a passing reference to the wizard Shazam once having a champion who betrayed him. Let's talk about that guy: Black Adam!

Black Adam makes for a pretty good #SupermanAnalogue given his vast powers. Like Captain Marvel/Shazam, he draws his powers from a sextet of dieties that he invokes by saying aloud the acronym S.H.A.Z.A.M.

In his case, being from Ancient Egypt, they're different deities than what we're used to:
The Stamina of Shu
The Speed of Haru
The Strength of Amon
The Wisdom of Zehuti
The Power of Aton
The Courage of Mehen

Black Adam originally was a fallen champion of the past who was banished to the outer edge of the Galaxy. He spent 5000 years travelling back and fought the whole Marvel family.

He was a match for any of them, so no one was able to get an upper hand. Uncle Dudley (I'm probably going to have to talk about some of the stranger sidekicks at some point) tricked him into saying the name of the wizard, reverting him to his human form, who then aged rapidly.

And that was it! He didn't appear again until the Silver Age revival by DC. With his power, he became a popular recurring villain when they needed a real threat for the various Supermen of the multiverse.

In the 90s reboot, he became a reincarnation of the ancient champion, Teth Adam. This created an interesting contrast as his modern persona was much more thuggish and battled for control with the ancient version, who was recast as more of anti-hero.

That modern persona, Theo Adam, was actually responsible for the murder of Billy Batson's parents.

Black Adam would go on to show up in various media as a villain.

And every version of Captain Marvel/Shazam now included an appearance by the mighty villain.

But then a funny thing happened: that anti-hero persona for Black Adam became really popular. He was retconned to hail from  Kahndaq and his motives changed to reflect an older sense of Justice. He became somewhat reformed and joined the Justice Society (Yes! He was an SJW!)

He had a popular story in 52 (my favorite) and when DC relaunched the line with the New 52, he quickly was established as a threat to the DC heroes and a bigger player than the newly renamed Shazam himself.

He's been in Batman cartoons and video games. There's just something compelling about an evil Superman who can be reasoned with. He's strong, smart, and dangerous, but he's got a sense of honor. He's in many ways become the DC version of Namor. Most importantly, he's Black Adam.

Oh, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was a producer on Shazam and he's been linked to playing the character for years. I'm pretty sure we'll get a sequel given the positive buzz the movies been getting, so looking forward to that!

I for one hope they go with more morally gray version of the character. In my opinion, you can't have too many characters empowered by gods flying around!

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