Shazam! #10 review

Dan Mora’s wonderful cover promises good things – just look at that cutaway shot of the Shazam Family’s new house, with all sorts of fun things happening. Inside things are actually crazier as the new property Rosa and Victor Vasquez have managed to finance for them and their foster kids proves even busier than that cover tease.

A little offshoot of Olympus in the closet. It’s not hard to guess who’s behind this.

The godspreading deity has created the ultimate mancave.

All over the house are petite portals to other realms, one for every personage behind the ‘SHAZAM’ acronym. And then there are uninvited guests…

… which I’ll let you discover when you come to read this issue, the debut of a new creative team. Writer Josie Campbell and artists Emanuela Lupacchino and Mike Norton hit the ground running with a confident, stylish continuation of the entertaining series begun by Mark Waid and Dan Mora. I don’t know whether Lupacchino and Norton are doing full art on half the book each or if the always adaptable Norton is inking Lupacchino, I do know the art has a consistently sharp, smoothed look. That’s undoubtedly helped by the excellent colourist Trish Mulvihill, who seems to be enjoying the variety of locales the story throws up.

(Update: I asked Josie Campbell on Twitter/X about the art split and she was kind enough to share: ‘Mike drew a lot of the inter dimensional pages where we’re seeing the gods and the Things That Wait, but he and Emma did such a great job collaborating that the transitions between their pages are very seamless!’)

On the one hand, Shazam! is a pretty crowded series, with six kids, two parents, a talking tiger, a talking rabbit, a talking dinosaur… on the other hand, can we keep the nymph?

She’s from proper mythology and everything.

There’s another new character debut.

Oh look, a pretty neighbour arriving at exactly the same time the Shazam Family – please God, stop calling them the Shazamily – arrive in the neighbourhood. That’s not suspicious at all.

In other news this time, Freddy has passed his driving test and got his hands on an abandoned camper van.

Shades of the Seventies TV series! Sadly, Freddy’s brothers and sisters act uninterested to the point of meanness.

The subplot with Billy thinking of The Captain as a separate person continues. And then there’s this.

Intriguing.

I’ve not mentioned letterer Troy Peteri yet, but as ever he does a terrific job, especially when it comes to putting a logical spin on the threats made by the villains of the issue.

This first chapter of Moving Day is framed by a nice bit of business from Josie Campbell about foster kids and insecurity, adding emotional weight to what’s mostly a delightfully whimsical issue.

I was a little nervous about how this book would look with the departure of the superb Waid/Mora team, but the magic is still there.