Post by Batflunkie on Jul 21, 2018 21:42:28 GMT -5
Junior: Learning To Fly
Chapter 1: Free Birth/Higher Ground
They say that when you're near death, the air tastes sweeter. Now I don't know about all that, but being down in the deepest recesses of Fawcett can change your perspective on a lot of things, namely reality. Yesterday, I was little more than a paperboy with a bum leg and the greatest grandpa in the world.
Like I said, it all started last night when Billy and Mary Batson, the only two friends an egotistical creep like me deserves to have, took me to the subway. I've always had an incredibly strange attraction to that place, almost 'kinetic' to use a big word from a science textbook, one that wasn't in my very limited social vocabulary until the 'accident' happened.
The guilt still grips me. I let my coach down, myself down and most importantly, my grandpa down. I was being a little 'cocksure' at baseball practice for my team the Fawcett Chicken Hawks when out of nowhere this guy in all black with a lightning bolt chisled into his mid section grabbed me from behind and tossed me over the fence. "You're a friend of the Batson children, yes?", he laughed," Tell them Doctor Silvania sends his regards."
Air and words escaped me. My grandpa tried to beat him senseless with his bambo cane, but it did nothing but put my grandpa in a coma. The stranger shocked him with like a bajillion bolts of electricity. Enough to shut his brain off, but not his heart. That creep later turned out to be Theo "Black" Adam, a two bit hood working for a mega-donkey-dork-face by the name of Silvania.
Silvania, his name might as well be mud. No, that's too nice, even for him. But it's better not to dwell on hate, that's what I learned from the Batson twins. Afterwards, I had to be my own man, one that I had to learn to live with.
Mister Spirou Dapollo, the older fella that I sold papers for, took me in and put me up. My grandpa was good man and was very good to him when he first arrived from Greece and Mister Dapollo wanted very much to return the favor. "Anything you-a see here Freddi, is-a yours," he told me, "Anything you-a need, just-a ask."
Mister Dapollo knew how much I loved comics and would almost always treat me to overstocked copies or ones that just never sold all that well. It was the depression after all and people couldn't afford 'guilty pleasures' like they used to. My favorites were of course the regular Fawcett home grown titans like Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel, long before I knew that they were flesh and blood like me, but I also liked what other publishers were putting out. Like Lash Lightning, Zippy The Pinhead, Ceech Wizard, Puzz Fundles, Doctor Fate, The Shield, Captain America, Namor, The Human Torch, Hawkman, The Sandman, and most of all, Green Lantern.
What can I say about Green Lantern that hasn't been said, another big word incoming, ad nauseam? Here's a regular everyday joe just trying to earn a decent living as a railway worker when the unthinkable happens, the train jumps off the tracks and crashes into a gully. No survivors except said railway hand, Alan Scott. In the wreckage, what little he can dig through anuway, he finds a glowing green lantern that talks to him.
It tells him that he's been chosen, it tells him that he's worthy, and that he is going to be a force for change in a world that's lost it's way; things that, funnily enough, the wizard Shazam would later reiterate to me in not so many words. Green Lantern showed me a better way, a way that my grandpa tried to show me but....uggh, tears....
A Shazam! Story
Inspired by John Ostrander, Roy Thomas, and Fawcett's "Master Comics"
Chapter 1: Free Birth/Higher Ground
They say that when you're near death, the air tastes sweeter. Now I don't know about all that, but being down in the deepest recesses of Fawcett can change your perspective on a lot of things, namely reality. Yesterday, I was little more than a paperboy with a bum leg and the greatest grandpa in the world.
Now? I'm not so sure, but I feel like I can give Superboy, James Dean, and Elvis Presley a run for their money....
Like I said, it all started last night when Billy and Mary Batson, the only two friends an egotistical creep like me deserves to have, took me to the subway. I've always had an incredibly strange attraction to that place, almost 'kinetic' to use a big word from a science textbook, one that wasn't in my very limited social vocabulary until the 'accident' happened.
The guilt still grips me. I let my coach down, myself down and most importantly, my grandpa down. I was being a little 'cocksure' at baseball practice for my team the Fawcett Chicken Hawks when out of nowhere this guy in all black with a lightning bolt chisled into his mid section grabbed me from behind and tossed me over the fence. "You're a friend of the Batson children, yes?", he laughed," Tell them Doctor Silvania sends his regards."
Air and words escaped me. My grandpa tried to beat him senseless with his bambo cane, but it did nothing but put my grandpa in a coma. The stranger shocked him with like a bajillion bolts of electricity. Enough to shut his brain off, but not his heart. That creep later turned out to be Theo "Black" Adam, a two bit hood working for a mega-donkey-dork-face by the name of Silvania.
Silvania, his name might as well be mud. No, that's too nice, even for him. But it's better not to dwell on hate, that's what I learned from the Batson twins. Afterwards, I had to be my own man, one that I had to learn to live with.
Mister Spirou Dapollo, the older fella that I sold papers for, took me in and put me up. My grandpa was good man and was very good to him when he first arrived from Greece and Mister Dapollo wanted very much to return the favor. "Anything you-a see here Freddi, is-a yours," he told me, "Anything you-a need, just-a ask."
Mister Dapollo knew how much I loved comics and would almost always treat me to overstocked copies or ones that just never sold all that well. It was the depression after all and people couldn't afford 'guilty pleasures' like they used to. My favorites were of course the regular Fawcett home grown titans like Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel, long before I knew that they were flesh and blood like me, but I also liked what other publishers were putting out. Like Lash Lightning, Zippy The Pinhead, Ceech Wizard, Puzz Fundles, Doctor Fate, The Shield, Captain America, Namor, The Human Torch, Hawkman, The Sandman, and most of all, Green Lantern.
What can I say about Green Lantern that hasn't been said, another big word incoming, ad nauseam? Here's a regular everyday joe just trying to earn a decent living as a railway worker when the unthinkable happens, the train jumps off the tracks and crashes into a gully. No survivors except said railway hand, Alan Scott. In the wreckage, what little he can dig through anuway, he finds a glowing green lantern that talks to him.
It tells him that he's been chosen, it tells him that he's worthy, and that he is going to be a force for change in a world that's lost it's way; things that, funnily enough, the wizard Shazam would later reiterate to me in not so many words. Green Lantern showed me a better way, a way that my grandpa tried to show me but....uggh, tears....
