Poor Captain Marvel.  If ever a character struggled to change with the times, it's him.  Trials of Shazam is a twelve-issue miniseries in which Judd Winick and Howard Porter try to redefine him.  The results are less than ideal.

The concept here is, to put it mildly, not very well explained.  There's been a big shake-up in the world of magic, which is something to do with Infinite Crisis, and now Captain Marvel is, er, somehow in charge of running around sorting it out.  I gather that the actual concept is that Captain Marvel has taken on the powers and responsibilities of Shazam, the wizard who empowered him in the first place.  Quite why the creators felt it unnecessary to explain that clearly in issue #1 itself, I can't begin to imagine.  Anyhow, the series apparently involves Captain Marvel undergoing some sort of trial to prove himself fit for these powers.  Or something.  That's not really explained in issue #1 either - it's actually just Captain Marvel fighting mystical stuff for an issue, and then a cliffhanger which is really just impenetrable.

None of this is a good start.

But the problems are more fundamental than that.  Bluntly, this seems a completely wrongheaded take on Captain Marvel.  The trick with any character is to find something that makes them genuinely unique, and to build a story around that.  Captain Marvel suffers from being a fairly generic Superman-type hero, so it's especially important to find something distinctive about him.

Fortunately, there are two very distinctive things about his stories.  First, there's the idea that he's a child who turns into a superhero.  That's a good strong concept, which remarkably few people have ripped off.  (There's always Prime, but that was years ago.)  With a title like "The Boy & The Man", you might think that Winick was focussing on that, but really, he isn't.  Billy Batson is now fifteen, which is a fairly standard age for a superhero anyway, and there's nothing in this story that really turns on the age discrepancy.

Second, Captain Marvel's world used to be light and cheerful - in fact, practically whimsical.  He was the guy with a whole Marvel Family in his supporting cast, and a talking tiger.  Now you might find it all sickly sweet, and it's certainly something I can live without.  But at least it's distinctive - especially in the context of today's miserably self-important DC Universe.

Those are your two basic angles for Captain Marvel.  That's the concept.  If you're not going to do either of those angles, then for god's sake do us all a favour and don't bother doing him at all.  Because you'll end up with something like this, which takes Captain Marvel's central concept as being "fights magical stuff" (eh?) and then proceeds to play it grim and gritty, complete with abducted children for virgin sacrifices.  As a story, it's just slightly dull; as a take on Captain Marvel, it's miles off the mark.  It drags the character so far from everything that makes him unique that becomes a waste of time using him at all.  Why not just create a new character if you want somebody to serve this function in the DC Universe?  (Because, perhaps, it would expose the threadbare nature of a concept that seems to amount to nothing more than Dr Strange Meets Superman.)

Howard Porter debuts a completely new art style, working in digital paints.  The storytelling is ropey at points, but I have to admit it's a major improvement on the work he used to do on JLA (the last time I actually read anything by him).  I'd say it's too murky for Captain Marvel, but to be fair, it's only too murky for Captain Marvel done right.  It's pitched reasonably well for a story like this.

Winick is a good writer, and while Captain Marvel isn't really to my taste, he's still a distinctive character with plenty to offer as long as you run with what makes him unique.  Take that away and you end up with something like this - far below the possibilities for all involved.

Rating: C

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