Fawcett City

Fawcett City is a fictional city appearing in stories published by DC Comics.

Overview

First appearing in the graphic novel The Power of Shazam! by Jerry Ordway in 1994, it served as the home base of Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family during the 1990s and 2000s. Its name is derived from the original publishers of Captain Marvel comics, Fawcett Comics. It is also home to Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Spy Smasher, Ibis the Invincible, Mister Scarlet and Pinky the Whiz Kid and Minute-Man; also characters from Fawcett Comics.

Features of Fawcett City include radio station WHIZ, which employs Captain Marvel's teenaged alter ego Billy Batson as an on-air and field reporter. Streets in Fawcett City have been named in honor of creators who worked on the Shazam property over the decades including Otto Binder (Binder Boulevard) and Bill Parker.

Fawcett City, like other fictional cities that appear in comics published by DC, has no exact location, besides being identified as being located in the Midwest region of the United States. However, in the 1990s series The Power of Shazam!, it was suggested that it was located in Wisconsin, thanks to various clues given by writer Jerry Ordway (who grew up in Milwaukee).^[1] A Teen Titans Secret Files & Origins special, however, stated that Fawcett City was located in Indiana^[2] and a map in JSA vs. Kobra #4 (November 2009) indicates that the city is in Minnesota.^[3] Fawcett City is also a small town compared to metropolis like Metropolis and Gotham City.

The city is distinguished in the comic stories by an old-fashioned look and feel. Despite existing in the modern world, with current technologies and events, Fawcett seems old fashioned, as if stuck in the 1940s or 1950s. This timeless feel was explained in the Power of Shazam! series as being the results of a spell cast over the city in 1955 by Ibis the Invincible. The spell was requested by the wizard Shazam, and was said to have protected Fawcett from the influences of outside evils and slowed the passage of time. For the next forty years within the DC Universe, the city existed as a time-warp of sorts to the 1950s. The spell was shown to be removed in Power of Shazam! #11 (January 1996), and Fawcett began to slowly become a more modern city, although most of its Art Deco style buildings and generally old-fashioned values remain intact.

Other stories featuring the Captain Marvel/Shazam! characters were set in other locales. The Fawcett-era and 1973-1985 (pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths) DC-era stories were set in a New York in an alternate universe known as Earth-S. The 1987 miniseries Shazam! The New Beginning was set in San Francisco, and the most recent 2012-2013 Shazam! story from the pages of Justice League was set in Philadelphia. Alternate universe versions of the Marvel Family, as depicted in The Multiversity, live in Fawcett City on what is known as "Earth-5" in the DC Universe.

References