Captain Marvel Jr #88 (1950)

A water shortage has finally ended after some months, but snow and rainfall have added to the reservoirs, fixing things out. Freddy Freeman is relieved and enjoys some water and the water fountain without inherent internal guilt. He says he's lucky that there isn't any air shortage… before he suddenly becomes weak of breath. A man above painting a building on a scaffold becomes so dizzy that he falls off of his unrailed work area, so Freddy calls CAPTAIN MARVEL to save him as Captain Marvel, Jr. He soon finds a Daily Gazette delivery driver has passed out and in a hot extra edition that Prof. Emil Wolfe has announced there's definitely an air shortage! Junior flies off to find him and the balding scientist says that the atmosphere is slowly leaking into space, claiming that a similar thing has happened on the Moon, which lost all of their atmosphere. However, he says this will take at least years for it to go away entirely, but it has created an air shortage, which he says he can fix with a large, complex machine he's built. Junior decides to start rationing air and starts to throw out handbills saying not to “waste air” and to “breathe slowly.” Junior makes sure to tell people that if they just breathe a little bit less, they'll save billions of cubic feet of air with no lacking benefit. Junior soon stops a man trying to run after a streetcar and orders him to not leave his car running (which also consumes air.) Junior draws another big sign saying that Friday is an Air Holiday which means you can't light fires and shames people for being “air hogs” otherwise. He soon goes back to check on Prof. Wolfe… only to find that he's selling stocks in prospective “air wells” he intends to find. Junior recognizes this as being exactly the same as selling oil stocks (before actually finding it.) However, Prof. Wolfe claims that he can drill for breathable air, showing him a diagram that says it lies under shale, rock, “sub plasma” and also oil. Junior says he hasn't really proved any part of this, so Prof. Wolfe has him fly him out to their airfield, where they are drilling for air and soon find some! However, a derrick ends up breaking from air-pressure and Junior pushes it back into place… only for Wolfe's men to cap the air off and Prof. Wolfe to reveal he intends to sell air to people by the cubic foot for a high price. What's more, he shows he has a deed for the land he's drilled into, so legally, he has every right to sell air to whoever he likes. Junior flies off, consternation in his face, and says that it is legal, but not right for a scientist. He decides to look into if Prof. Wolfe has some kind of criminal record and finds out from his good friend, Officer Jim Bellows, who says that he's actualy known as “Dr. Foxx,” and is a known swindler who has a record of selling oil wells, fake gold bricks and imaginary diamond mines. Junior figures that the air derrick is probably fake and turns back into Freddy to look into the drilling site. Freddy hangs on the back of their Jeep as Wolfe and a beefy goon check out “the Intake Machine,” which is more or less a gigantic air compressor that creates the illusion of the drilled air. Freddy makes some kind of noise that alerts them to his presence and his goon punches him in the head, knocking him out. Freddy wakes up, as usual, bound and gagged, but this time he's in a cave and Prof. Wolfe says that he's been pumping the air into an underground cave using his Intake Machine to create the air shortage itself. They prepare to throw Freddy into the gears of the massive machine to let it mangle him, but he slips his gag on the gears instead and calls CAPTAIN MARVEL to become Junior again. He soon breaks the machine, unleashing a “gusher” of air that makes everyone breathe easier in New York City.