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"After the Fall...": Jim Barr, Alan Armstrong and Jack Weston are the featured guests of a radio interview with Fritz, the Night Owl. All three are former super-heroes who fought against the Nazi threat in the 1940s. They were respectiv

Quote1 You took the only family I had away from me, so don't expect me to care if you get banged up a bit! Quote2
Captain Marvel, Jr

The Power of Shazam! #8 is an issue of the series The Power of Shazam! (Volume 1) with a cover date of October, 1995.

Synopsis for "After the Fall..."

Jim Barr, Alan Armstrong and Jack Weston are the featured guests of a radio interview with Fritz, the Night Owl. All three are former super-heroes who fought against the Nazi threat in the 1940s. They were respectively known as Bulletman, Spy Smasher and Minute-Man. They regal the listening audience with tales of one of their last adventures together.

Flashback, April, 1945
Captain Nazi has captured the adventurer known as Spy Smasher and secured him to a dungeon wall where he is interrogating him. He tries to discover what Spy Smasher knows concerning a freighter ship called La Paloma. Smasher knows that the freighter is scheduled to extradite Nazi generals to South America before the Allied forces can completely seal off Berlin. Spy Smasher keeps this information to himself however, and heckles Captain Nazi despite the brutal torture.
Bulletman and Minute-Man blast into the dungeon and engage Nazi's soldiers. Seeing his friend in pain, Bulletman loses his temper and begins viciously fighting the armed guards. They free Spy Smasher, but Captain Nazi manages to get away.
The three heroes retreat to Spy Smasher's Gyrosub and begins trailing the La Paloma. They find Captain Nazi extricating something from the cargo hold, but they are unable to stop him. However, they do manage to sanction La Paloma.

After the interview is over, the three venerated heroes leave the studio, and Bulletman has a chance encounter with Billy Batson.

Meanwhile, Freddy Freeman awakens in his hospital bed. He is mad with grief over the death of his grandfather and wants revenge against Captain Nazi. Mary Marvel tries to calm him down, but Freddy speaks the words, "Captain Marvel" and a bolt of magic lighting strikes him, instantly healing him of all of his injuries. Further, he is garbed in a blue costume with a lightning bolt across his chest, similar to that of Captain Marvel. Junior bursts out of the room and flies off in a rage to find Captain Nazi.

At the Crowley prison hospital, Captain Nazi revives from his and kills one of the orderlies by spitting his medication at him like a bullet. In the bed next to him rests Theo Adam. Realizing that Adam might help him in his goals, he brings him along with him and flies away from the hospital.

Captain Nazi soon tires of Adam and drops him in mid-flight. Captain Marvel, Jr. swoops down and catches Adam before he reaches the ground. He has no idea that Theo is responsible for murdering Billy Batson's parents. After Adam is safe, Junior flies off towards Captain Nazi. Theo meanwhile, has a chance encounter with the demoness, Blaze.

Junior stays on Captain Nazi's tail and follows him all the way to Miami, Florida. He catches up with him and pounces on his back, smashing him with a flurry of blows. The two embark in a brutal aerial fight, but Nazi manages to elude him long enough to reach his destination – a stasis container. The container has been resting in the water outside of Miami since he placed it there in 1945. Inside is the body of Adolf Hitler – kept in perfect suspended animation. However, when Nazi opens the seal of the container, only a skeleton dressed in a Nazi uniform spills out. He is horrified to find that his beloved Führer is dead. Captain Marvel arrives to take Captain Nazi into custody.

Appearing in "After the Fall..."

Featured Characters:

Supporting Characters:

  • Spy Smasher (First appearance) (Flashback and main story)
  • Minute-Man (First appearance) (Flashback and main story)
  • Bulletman (First appearance) (Flashback and main story)

Antagonists:

Other Characters:

Locations:

Items:

Vehicles:

Notes

  • Spy Smasher, Bulletman and Minute-Man are all characters previously owned by Fawcett Publications. In 1953, National Periodical Publications concluded a twelve-year lawsuit against Fawcett citing that their flagship character, Captain Marvel was a creative infringement upon their own intellectual property, Superman. As such, Fawcett discontinued all of their super-hero line of comic strips and Spy Smasher, Bulletman and Minute-Man lapsed into obscurity. By 1980, DC Comics purchased the copyrights to the characters, but they only made scant appearances during the Silver Age.
  • The flashback sequence from this issue is told from the perspective of Bulletman.
  • The final fate of Adolf Hitler is a matter of speculation in the DC Universe. Unknown Soldier (Volume 1) #268 establishes that the Unknown Soldier killed Hitler and briefly took his place in order to prevent the launch of a Doomsday weapon in 1945. The final page of this issue intimates that the skeleton corpse that spills out of the stasis tube may not in fact be the real Hitler.

Trivia

  • Unlike Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel, Freddy Freeman does not say the magic word "Shazam" to change into Captain Marvel, Jr. Instead, he actually invokes "Captain Marvel" in order to switch back and forth between identities. This causes various problems for Junior as he can never refer to himself by name or else he will automatically summon the magic lighting. This inconvenience will later cause him to refer to himself as CM3.
  • In the letters column for this issue, Mike Carlin foreshadows an upcoming character guest appearance with the cliché "shake a stick at (hint, hint)". The character he is referring to is Ibis the Invincible, who employed a magic wand called an Ibistick. Ibis makes his first modern appearance in The Power of Shazam! #11.


See Also

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Links and References

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