by The Shadow » Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:31 pm
Captain Marvel was the best selling superhero throughout the Golden Age; Fawcett's comic Captain Marvel Adventures alone sold over a million issues a month (in contrast a top selling comic from Marvel & DC today only sells around 50,000 issues a month). But by the early 50s superhero characters were far less popular, so Fawcett who had successfully fended off a decade of lawsuits from DC Comics decided to stop publishing superhero comics and settled with DC Comics to no longer publish any Captain Marvel stories. The executives at DC Comics may have thought they won, but it was a decision that would come back to bite them soon enough.
Late 50s to early 60s the folks running DC Comics are a major part of reviving the superhero comic (Barry Allen/Flash first appears in 1956, Hal Jordan/Green Lantern soon follows in 1959). By the mid-60s Marvel Comics is revived & re-branded as a company and the guy running Marvel (I can't recall his name) decided that his company should have all the heroes that had "marvel" in their name. So either the guy running Marvel or someone else in the company remembers Captain Marvel and approaches Fawcett about buying the Captain Marvel trademark. Fawcett did ask Marvel if they wanted to buy the copyrights to the character (IE the character himself) but Marvel was only interested in the trademark (IE title of the comic, what the character is called for figures & other goods, etc.) because they wanted to develop their own character, the Kree Captain Mar-Vell.
By this time DC Comics was doing really well and they had begun buying the superhero characters from former competitors, many of these were introduced to readers via the annual JLA & JSA team-ups. Eventually someone at DC remembers the Fawcett heroes (Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel, Spy Smasher, Golden Arrow, Bulletman, Ibis the Invincible, etc.) and DC licenses these characters first and eventually buys them (but apparently not until the 90s according to Wikipedia). In the late 70s DC gets in trouble with Marvel for using "Captain Marvel" as part of the title for their new comic and rightly so as Marvel honestly & fairly bought that trademark, all DC has is the copyrights to the original of Captain Marvel. DC shifted their branding focus to the magic word SHAZAM which has been the status quo since then.
Many people (myself included) think that DC and Marvel should come to some agreement so that both companies can readily use the Captain Marvel name without trouble; just like DC and Marvel co-own the trademark on the term "superhero". I had to dig to find it, here's the great Neal Adams offering his opinion on the topic (fair warning, there is a minor cuss word regarding about people being a certain sort of hole)
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?