Last week’s Briefly Noted featured a note on Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear’s “Shazam!,” an exuberant and melancholy collection of nineteen-forties artifacts relating to the fantastic and once massively popular comic-book hero Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel’s untimely demise—Superman’s publisher more or less sued him out of existence in 1953—made him the object of one of the first organized fanboy/geek cults: Xero, a science-fiction fanzine that began publishing in 1960, regularly featured pieces on Captain Marvel and the artists and writers responsible for his exploits; so did the Rocket’s Blast Comicollector. These and other homegrown publications regularly celebrated the brilliance of C. C. Beck, the artist who created Captain Marvel and drew hundreds of his comic-book covers and stories. Beck’s simple, uncluttered style, his bright colors, and even his distinctive typography were the perfect expression of Captain Marvel’s screwball-comedic tone: cartoonish, but with an appealing sincerity, more childlike than childish. The influence of Beck’s line can be seen today in the work of comics artists like Jaime Hernandez and Charles Burns; it’s hard as well to look at the second page of Captain Marvel’s origin, in Whiz #2, in which the orphan Billy Batson descends underground to board a mysterious subway train, and not see some of Chris Ware’s inspiration.

Having largely abandoned comic books for commercial illustration, Beck became a star of the nascent comic-convention circuit in the seventies, as well as a grumpy columnist and commentator for the Comics Journal. In 1973, when DC revived Captain Marvel (an ironic twist, given that it was they who had originally shut him down), they turned to Beck to draw new adventures, but he was unhappy with the scripts and the relationship soon soured. Via the conventions and zines, however, Beck developed a new sideline, which he pursued well into the eighties, prior to his death at the age of seventy-nine, in 1989: selling commissioned, medium-sized paintings in tempera, gouache, and acrylic that re-created famous Captain Marvel and other comic-book covers and scenes from the Golden Age. A few especially delightful examples were produced for the publisher of the Overstreet Guide, long the definitive price guide for vintage comic books.

Beck’s paintings have circulated over the years within the comics-fan subculture, but rarely outside it—one can occasionally find them on auction via eBay, or on serious comic-art auction sites such as Heritage or Hakes. For a time, G. B. Love, the founder of the Rocket’s Blast Comicollector, took it upon himself to act as Beck’s agent; per a prominently placed ad in several issues (the original stats for which happen to be currently on offer at eBay), these paintings were sold for five hundred dollars each. I’ve managed over the years to stumble into ownership of a pair that Beck did in 1981: one, in acrylic, depicts a scene from Captain Marvel’s origin; the other, a tempera piece entitled “Billy Batson’s Bad Dream” (shown above), finds Captain Marvel at the mercy of his archenemy, Dr. Sivana, and his son and daughter, inside Sivana’s laboratory. Someday I hope to see an exhibit of these paintings all together: in them, Beck managed to realize a new version of Captain Marvel in a way that the character’s revival in comic books never quite did.