Whiz Comics #112 (1949)

Doctor Sivana plots to launch Plot# 88-B, which involves a preponderance of booby traps. To start, he sneaks into Station WHIZ and breaks into Billy's office to wire his chair to a bomb to just kill him the second he sits down in the morning. However, the next day, Billy Batson comes in and instead options to open the window for fresh air and then calls SHAZAM, since Captain Marvel is the one reading the mail. Captain Marvel instead sits down, being mildly embarrassed by the exploding seat that has reduced the chair to cinders. Captain Marvel thinks on how this simple letter from Johnny saved Billy's life, but puzzles as to who was the sinister mind behind this. Sivana, watching from a nearby rooftop via a telescope, fumes and prepares to unleash his next trap, a fixed microphone that will electrocute Billy. Before it can though, it instead kills a fly near the microphone, leading him to call SHAZAM to have Captain Marvel disarm the electrified apparatus. Sivana fumes from his vantage point once more. Later that morning, Billy finds a cobra in his desk, managing to pin it by closing it fast enough, but is shaken by the multiple attempts on his life. Sivana is furious still, but takes some solace in knowing that Billy is becoming a nervous wreck, freaking out that the water cooler might be poisoned in front of a coworker. Billy decides that he's too unnerved to do his job right now and goes to tell Mr. Morris he's going home to lock himself into safety. Soon, he arrives home and is forced to call SHAZAM just as he opens his door, since a booby trap nearly drops a stone large enough to crush him to death over his head. Naturally, it shatters against Captain Marvel's. Sivana seems to finally realize that this won't work if Billy isn't around himself, so he instead decides to unleash his booby traps on the rest of New York City instead… The next day, Captain Marvel finds a sinkhole appearing under a sidewalk swallowing two passersby, so he flies in to carry them to safety, finding that the sidewalk was removed and replaced with fake cardboard like a tiger trap. Meanwhile, a woman goes to get some fresh air on the fire escape, only to find that it's been forcibly detached from the building. Captain Marvel catches her before she hits the ground and he worries that this is going to happen a lot more often, soon after encountering a man who drives into a stone wall painted to look like a normal turnoff on to the parkway. From his laboratory, Dr. Sivana broadcasts that he's unleashed the booby traps all over the city and that they can kill anyone at any moment, only to reveal after the broadcast ends that he hopes that plenty of people will blame normal accidents as “booby traps” and become worried and unnerved. This soon becomes the case with many people blaming mistakes they've made all themselves or as real accidents as “Sivana's Booby Traps” as Sivana begins to weaponize this by stating the only way to avoid all the Booby Traps are to buy his secret list of them with one kidnapped Billy Batson delivered to Central Park for him, starting up a mob of people who have decided to protect Billy, touching Captain Marvel that they are so nice as to do so. To get the list of traps, Captain Marvel starts to come up with a plan where Billy Batson will have to make “the supreme sacrifice of his life!” The next day, Dr. Sivana finds what he believes to be Billy Batson bound and gagged in a plastic bag near a sign telling Sivana to come pick him up, only to find that it's Captain Marvel dressed as Billy Batson and the cellophane bag was “optically treated” to make him look smaller, punching over the World's Wickedest Scientist. Later, Billy signs off saying that Captain Marvel proved that crime is the biggest booby trap in the world!