If you think you know all about Captain Marvel Jr'.s influence on Elvis Presley ... think again! Because the World's Mightiest Boy didn't just influence the King of Rock and Roll's hairstyle ...- Captain Marvel Jr. helped shape Elvis' entire lifestyle.
It all began on the battlefields of the first World War, with soldiers enduring bombs that whizzed right over their heads like a lightning bolt, then exploded nearby with a tremendous bang. Wilford 'Billy' Fawcett, a former police reporter for the Minneapolis Journal, was a World War I Army captain.After the war, Fawcett began printing a small two-color pamphlet containing barracks humor meant to entertain disabled servicemen in veterans hospitals. The title of Fawcett's self-published pamphlet came from his own former army rank and nickname, plus a reference to one of the 'whiz-bang' bombs of WWI. The magazine was called 'Captain Billy's Whiz Bang'. But the monthly collection of off-color jokes, sexy stories and racy cartoons wasn't a bomb -- it was an instant hit. A wholesaler picked it up in 1919 and started selling it in hotels and drugstores. It soon became an American standard, published continuously for the next thirty years.Vernon and Gladys Presley had married in 1933 and moved into the shotgun shack pictured right, in East Tupelo, Mississippi -- a two-room house Vernon built himself, for $180. Gladys soon got pregnant, and she gave birth to twin boys right in the Presley's modest home, on January 8, 1935.