Jerry Ordway's version of Beautia Sivana: What went wrong?

[Lorendiac]

A while back, I was rereading a bunch of issues of Ordway's "Power of Shazam!" title from the 1990s. I discovered I'd almost forgotten about the existence of the Rebooted Version of Beautia Sivana.

I also figured out why I had almost forgotten about her: Ordway gave her lots of attention in the first storyline (#'s 1 and 2 of the series) . . . and then pretty much ignored her!

During #1, Captain Marvel shows up at some sort of fancy ball. Beautia is there, wearing a white gown that shows plenty of leg, and she greets him by moving in close and wrapping her arms around his neck as she presses her body up against his. Cap's entire head turns into one big blush as he stammers out the name "B-B-Beautia Sivana!" (He obviously hadn't expected to see her at this gathering.) She says modestly: "Just Tia, please. 'Beautia' merely belabors the obvious." [Or words to that effect -- I'm going from memory here.]

The implication of this -- and of other things she says and does throughout the story -- is that they have already met several times before this scene, and that Beautia has long since decided she wants Cap to be her boyfriend . . . which makes him feel very nervous, so he usually tries to avoid her! (Since he's really a 14-year-old boy who's shy about girls, much less about "gorgeous female grown-ups," but of course Beautia has no way of knowing that!)

Then the party is attacked by a criminal called The Arson Fiend, whom Captain Marvel eventually defeats. I believe Beautia seizes the opportunity to "reward" the Big Red Cheese by giving him a kiss before he flies off.

So it seems clear that Ordway was carefully establishing his own version of "Beautia Sivana" for future use -- but then, over the remainder of his four-year run, he only used her once in a blue moon, and never again in any lengthy scene that was integral to the main plot of any given story!

For instance, in POS #7, I believe Beautia appeared onstage in one panel when young Billy Batson was being introduced to the kind lady who had volunteered to give him private tutoring so he could keep up with his schoolwork. (His grades had been slipping lately, and the school administrators might have needed to recommend to WHIZ Radio that they stop hiring him if his radio journalism activities were squeezing out time he needed for his studies.)

And POS #23 contained the first and only time we ever saw Beautia actually tutoring Billy -- on just one page of the story. I believe she complained that Captain Marvel seemed to be avoiding her. (Presumably the hope to see him again, when he dropped in to visit his friend Billy, was the main reason she had volunteered as a tutor in the first place! She didn't realize that as long as she had Billy in sight, Cap would never materialize.)

She also got a few cameos in other issues along the way -- sometimes getting to say a few words, and sometimes just standing there in the background looking ornamental while other people did all the talking -- but after the two-part opening of POS, she never again played any significant role!

So my question is: Why not?

Does anyone have any inside information on just what the heck Jerry Ordway was originally planning to do with Beautia during his run, and/or on why he ended up doing virtually nothing with the character after he had taken the trouble to introduce us to his own rebooted version of "Dr. Sivana's gorgeous blond daughter" during the first two issues?

[Bdiggs]

I guess it was politically incorrect to have a grown woman making passes at a 14 year-old.

[Lorendiac]

I guess it was politically incorrect to have a grown woman making passes at a 14 year-old.

But there was never a panel that showed the scary image of a grown woman throwing herself at a 14-year-old boy.

[Bdiggs]

So, if the boy looks like a man, there's no harm?
How about if a girl looks like a woman?

[Lorendiac]

So, if the boy looks like a man, there's no harm?
How about if a girl looks like a woman?

Well, it's not as if this were a brand new situation in comics (or other forms of entertainment). All sorts of excuses have been used to have a kid's mind in an adult's body; an adult mind in a kid's body; or an adorable youngster who turns out to be a youthful-looking-but-mature midget who always dresses as a child (perhaps to avoid being suspected of being a professional burglar) . . .

I really didn't think concerns about Political Correctness would cause DC to order Jerry Ordway, in the mid-90s, to never again write a script which called for an illustration which would simply show a grown woman hugging and/or kissing a grown man if the artwork was taken at face value. (In fact, although I didn't mention it before, I believe Beautia Sivana insisted upon kissing Cap again in "POS #20" -- a Final Night tie-in. Her excuse was that it seemed the whole world might soon freeze solid, and this would be her last chance!)

If DC were going to veto any display of physical affection between "Captain Marvel" and "a grown woman" on that basis, wouldn't they do so all the time, no matter who was writing or drawing any given story?

Although come to think of it . . . I've paid so little attention to anything DC has done with Cap, Post-Ordway (except for his membership in the JSA title in the early 2000s) that now I suddenly realize I don't know how often other grown women have been allowed to hug and kiss him in "modern" comic books of the early 21st Century!

[Bdiggs]

I don't think it was possible to have a regular set-up of a flirtatious woman manipulating the mind of a 14 year-old boy.
You could have occasional displays of spontaneous affection making Billy uncomfortable to help illustrate the dichotomy of having a boy's mind in a man's body, sure.
But, you couldn't have a woman luring Billy with her beauty - especially not into danger. And especially not in a way that could open the door for Sivana's plots.

[Lorendiac]

I don't think it was possible to have a regular set-up of a flirtatious woman manipulating the mind of a 14 year-old boy.
You could have occasional displays of spontaneous affection making Billy uncomfortable to help illustrate the dichotomy of having a boy's mind in a man's body, sure.
But, you couldn't have a woman luring Billy with her beauty - especially not into danger. And especially not in a way that could open the door for Sivana's plots.

Just a couple of points:

1. Beautia, in Ordway's version, was never a participant in any of Dr. Sivana's evil schemes; she never showed any interest in luring Cap (or Billy, or anybody else) into dangerous situations. It was eventually revealed in a flashback that many years earlier Mrs. Sivana had walked out on her husband Thaddeus, and kept custody of their two children, because she was tired of his being such a cheating skunk. She'd given him chances to repent and clean up his act, and he kept conspicuously failing to do so, and she just wasn't going to put up with it any more.

The clear implication was that Beautia had not grown up under her father's thumb -- she might not even have spoken to him in a long time. In other words, she had a mind of her own and was only interested in Captain Marvel because of an honest personal attraction; not because she was a professional femme fatale with a hidden agenda!

I don't blame you for wondering, though, because I'm old enough to remember buying the first issue of Ordway's run when it came out . . . and as soon as I saw her name mentioned in dialogue, I was worried that she might just be doing a favor for her daddy by trying to snuggle up with Cap as part of Dr. Sivana's latest diabolical plan!

But Ordway eventually made it clear that I needn't have worried.


2. You seem to be assuming that if Ordway had given her meatier roles in some of the later stories of his run, she would have stayed in the status quo of "I want to get romantic with Captain Marvel! I want to get romantic with Captain Marvel! I want to get romantic with Captain Marvel!" -- and that would be pretty much all the "character development" she ever got.

But what if Ordway, in those first two issues, was only setting her up for future character development which would go off in completely different directions . . . if he ever got around to writing those storylines? For instance, what if Beautia had finally gotten tired of shamelessly chasing Captain Marvel when he kept showing his painful lack of interest? What if she had started dating someone else instead?

Or what if Beautia had somehow discovered Captain Marvel's secret identity without anyone knowing she had done so? Suppose that then she suddenly stopped flirting with Cap, and instead became much more protective of Billy's best interests, now that she realized what sort of burdens he had to bear and had decided to be more like a "big sister" to him, and to leave his Cap identity strictly alone because she didn't believe in "robbing the cradle"?

Or something else entirely could have happened! Instead of Beautia just repeating her behavior from the first couple of issues, over and over!

[Bdiggs]

The whole point of Beautia Sivana is to be a vivacious lure for Captain Marvel.
It doesn't really matter whether she intentionally traps him or not.
If it's not going to be leading up to an eventual complication due to the relationship with Dr. Sivana, there's no point in using that character.

In any case, it's really no different than having Captain Marvel encountering a flirtatious school teacher who frequently puts tries to initiate a romantic relationship. Since Cap has the mind of a 14 year-old kid, it wouldn't be possible to pursue that with a recurring character.
Can't have a Selina Kyle or Lois Lane or Cat Grant type relationship for Cap when he has the mind of a child.

I don't think there's much point in the Beautia Sivana character if her beauty is not causing romantic tension and conflict for Cap.

[Lorendiac]

I suppose I've always worked on the optimistic assumption that Ordway was bright enough to have consciously anticipated the possible problems you have mentioned, and to have carefully considered how he would actually handle Beautia's infatuation in later storylines, before he ever polished up his pitch for a regular "Power of Shazam!" title and finally persuaded DC editors to give it a fair chance!

That's why my original post ended with a plea for "inside information" about what Ordway actually had in mind at the time. I was hoping someone would say: "Sure, I remember a magazine interview in which Jerry said his original game plan for Beautia Sivana was to have her [fill in the blank], but then [fill in the blank] happened and he just put her on the back burner instead."

That's what I was hoping for, but it sure doesn't seem to be happening! (Neither here, nor on two other sites where I posted the same query.) We can speculate all we want about what sort of problems might have belatedly occurred to him, causing him to suddenly lose interest in the character after he had taken the trouble to set her up as Billy Batson's private tutor . . . but sheer speculation doesn't really settle anything.

[Bdiggs]

bwa haha
OK.

[Lorendiac]

Someone on another forum reminded me that Ordway himself later showed another grown woman being very attracted to Captain Marvel during that same POS run! And Ordway handled it in a way that made it clear he was keenly aware that some people would find this to be a disturbing situation.

Frankly, I'd forgotten! I hadn't reread those particular issues lately, but I finally did so over this past weekend.

Basically, it goes this way: In #32, Captain Marvel meets a grown woman who is Major Deanna Barr, USAF. She is also the daughter of Jim Barr, the original Bulletman. Twice in this issue she spontaneously kisses Cap. (Much to his own surprise in each case; he hadn't been trying to flirt with her, but she definitely wanted to flirt with him!)

In #33, we see that a gossip item in a local newspaper includes a picture of Cap and Deanna having dinner together in a restaurant. I think they were even kissing at the time.

In #34, young Billy Batson gets kidnapped by two thugs who keep him gagged. They don't know he's also Captain Marvel; they just had orders from their mysterious employer to keep him gagged. A couple of other people get badly wounded in the process of trying to rescue Billy. One of them is Jose Delgado, aka the superhero "Gangbuster" who'd been a regular in the Superman comics of the early 1990s. (Incidentally, an elderly charter boat captain named "Lance O'Casey" also appears in this story. When I first read this story, years ago, I had no idea who that was! This time, I recognized him as another Golden Age Fawcett character who, like Billy himself, debuted in "Whiz Comics" way back in the early 1940s and starred in his own feature within those pages for a good long run!)

Billy finally discovers that the man who had hired these kidnappers is Jim Barr, aka the Golden Age Bulletman. Jim has seen the recent media coverage about a "romance" between Cap and Deanna. Jim has also become friendly with Billy in the past and is one of a handful of people who know all about the secret identity thing. He was so worried about his daughter that he decided he had to have a serious man-to-man talk with Billy, and obviously the only way to do it was to hire someone to abduct Billy and drag him to where Jim would be waiting!

It is not clear that anything much more serious than kissing has been going on. It is clear, however, that Jim Barr had lost his marbles on the subject -- I tend to blame it all on "senile dementia," myself. As Billy himself angrily points out, if you want to have a serious talk with the guy who is dating your daughter, you could simply try picking up the phone and asking him to come see you for a face-to-face chat! Why drag in hired thugs to stage an abduction before you had exhausted the politer methods of trying to get someone's attention?

Billy also says a few other things, all of which were perfectly true:

1. Deanna was definitely the one who had suddenly started coming on to him; not the other way around.

2. He's only human and he recently hit puberty; he was flattered by the unexpected attention and never had any intent of hurting her in any possible way. (He doesn't offer any explanation for why Beautia's equally forward behavior hadn't impressed him as favorably; he never mentions Beautia in this issue.)

3. But he agrees that it's an awkward situation for a grown woman to be dating a guy who is (sometimes) a legal minor, so he'll break it off now. (And apparently he did, though I don't think we ever saw him having any long talks with Deanna after that.)

4. However, the vast respect Billy had previously felt for Bulletman, one of the old-time superheroes, has just crashed down in ruins. (I'd be amazed if it hadn't!)

P.S. I can't help thinking that it would have made more sense for Jim to be worried about his grown daughter corrupting the morals of a minor than it did for him to be worried about that legal minor somehow "taking advantage of" his much older daughter! But what do I know?