This is how I would have handled ToS, IF I had been assigned to write it. First off, it would have been about half the length, but twice as epic and all three kids would have been involved. It would have negated what came afterwords, too.
The paragraphs below are the how the first issue would have played out, with more to come in later posts. Enjoy!!
Issue # 1
Opening: Captain Marvel stands weak-kneed and panting in front of Amalgamated Broadcasting Tower, feeling what’s left of his mighty powers slowly drain from his body. Though he, Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel, Jr. have defeated and killed wave after wave of demons, they are still surrounded and outnumbered by them, and all three heroes are battered, bloodied and bruised by the constant assault.
Why are Cap, Mary and Junior losing their powers? Because the spirit of vengeance, the Spectre, has been turned against all magic, both light and dark, and mounted an earlier assault on the center of all space and time, the Rock of Eternity, itself. The Spectre cornered the ancient wizard, Shazam, inside his palace and drained the old man’s power down to its nadir in a mad attempt to destroy the guardian of Eternity. The Spectre ultimately fails to do the deed because you can’t kill a spirit. Shazam somehow escapes, but is so weakened by the battle that his beloved children will completely lose their powers at any moment.
Frustrated by his failure, the Spectre tears open a rift between the human world and the infernal realms, and sics a horde of mindless demonic critters on downtown Manhattan. He puts only one thought in their microscopic minds: kill the old wizard’s “children,” the Marvels, and carry their corpses off to Hell where he thinks they belong. He considers any mortals killed along the way collateral damages that the Marvels will ultimately be responsible for, not he.
About three hundred yards West and three hundred fifty yards up, Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Junior hover in the air where they’ve been fighting off a horde of winged horrors. Suddenly, the young heroes are blindsided by a pair of flying demons and begin a long, and possibly lethal, fall to the Earth. As the pair plunge to the hard concrete and tarmac below, Captain Marvel Jr. grabs Mary around the waist and twists them both around so that he’ll protect her and take the brunt of their landing on his back.
He is also trying to grab a hold of anything to help slow their fall. He swears to himself that he won’t let anything happen to Mary, even if it costs him his own life. With fifty feet of empty air left between the kids and splatsville, Junior’s hand catches hold of a flagpole. The speed they’ve reached causes his shoulder to dislocate as he feels his rotator cuff tear, then he loses his grip and cries out in pain.
Horrified at seeing his young partners plummeting to Earth, Captain Marvel quickly hurls the bodies of several dead demons to where the kids are about to crash, hoping to cushion their landing. It takes the last of Cap’s strength, but it works. Mary and Junior land hard, but other than the severe injury to Freddy’s arm, they seem none the worse for it until Junior tries to stand up. His power is completely gone, leaving him basically Freddy Freeman in a pair of blue and gold tights.
Mary helps Junior up and lets him lean on her. The only powers that haven’t deserted them yet are the warrior’s courage that augments their own bravery and the wisdom to figure out what their next move should be, and they use it. It’s a risky plan, but no risk, no reward. The risk would be to the lives of Billy Batson, Mary Batson and Freddy Freeman; the reward would be the complete and utter destruction of the demons that threaten the city and them.
Using the last dregs of his speed of Mercury, Cap flies to where Mary and Junior are. A last, desperate plan is forming in his nimble mind; taunt the demons into piling on him, then call out the wizard’s name, and use the magic lightning as a final strike to destroy the monsters and save the city. The plan might get them killed, but it would also take out the rest of the demons in one fell swoop.
As he lands, he can already see that the kids have thought of the same plan, and all that matters now is how they time it. Gripping his “little” sister’s free hand, Cap begins hurling taunts at the horde of demons, with Mary and Junior joining in a moment later. The demons charge at the heroes and begin piling on them like two teams of rugby players on a loose ball.
Before they’re completely overwhelmed, Cap, Mary and Junior scream out their magic words, and are answered by a triple blast of lightning from an uncaring sky. The magic lightning strikes the Marvels, then it ripples upwards and outwards like a pebble hitting a pond of still water, enveloping every last demon in a corona of energy and reducing them to ashes within seconds.
When the air clears, the members of a rescue crew find an unconscious Billy, Mary and Freddy laying where their heroic alter egos had stood just seconds ago, still holding on to each other, then load each of the three up into an ambulance for transport to the nearest hospital.
I didn't read all that.
