Captain Marvel debuted in Whiz Comics #2, cover-dated February 1940, selling over 500,000 copies, and Captain Marvel Adventures (1941) became the decade's best-selling superhero title, the first superhero adapted to film in the 1941 Republic serial. National Comics sued Fawcett for copying Superman; Fawcett settled in 1953 and quit the character. DC licensed him in 1972, acquiring the very hero it had bankrupted.
The myth structure is ceremonial: an orphan descends into an underground cavern, meets an ancient wizard on a throne, receives power through the spoken name, and emerges transformed. It is an initiation scene wearing a superhero costume, and readers in the 1940s responded to it accordingly, buying it in numbers no one has matched since.
The magic word itself functions as a divine-name formula, the same mechanism as abracadabra or the golem's shem: speak the name, reality rearranges. Occult-minded critics point out that comics taught millions of children the grammar of invocation decades before anyone called it that.
A magic word that invokes six gods at once to remake a child into power: in what tradition is that not an incantation?