In the 1930s, the people creating comic books weren’t the kind that cared about whether a god was Greek or Roman and how that would explain the “-verse.”
Can’t 9-year-old you just say the magic word so we’re arguing with adult-you instead?
It is not that new, but it is from the DC era, probably after they gained complete rights to him (was definitely the case in the late 90s) and it’s extremely inconsistent. (The Shazam backup in the 2011 Justice League had it, but the current Shazam series suggests they’ll change whether they want to or not…)
There’s a reason that I pretend comic books don’t exist. 
Black Adam had another list of “gods” that still made up the letters SHAZAM, at least he did in the 90’s. I won’t list them out, mainly because I can’t recall them offhand. Still referred to the wizard, though.
Until they decided to give him the incredibly dumb new alias of CM3. Not Captain Marvel III, or anything like that, just the two letters and a single number. I assume it was 3 because both Billy and Mary were going by Captain Marvel at the time. At least they gave Mary some white duds to make her look a little different. AFAIK, Freddie still had to say “Captain Marvel” to transform, Billy, Mary, (and Adam) of course saying “SHAZAM”.
If you are casual don’t bother…as someone said, its like a soap opera. Don’t get started on Batman’s sidekick Robin, for instance. Into the Spiderverse makes fun of the various versions of Spiderman just in Marvel (yes, there is a SpiderHam). And there are plenty of characters in the DC universe that have doppelgangers in the Marvel universe - plus there are a lot of smaller comic houses that have existed over the years…that’s just the industry. Sometime the have the same name, but different powers, sometimes it just look like a rip off between the same idea (some day I’ll bother to keep Dr. Fate and Doctor Strange straight in my head).
File the 1970s Saturday morning Shazam!/Captain Marvel under “Electra Woman and DynaGirl” and move on.
Mary Marvel had her own god-list, too; Selena, Hippolyta, Ariadne, Zephyrus, Aurora and Minerva.
They were Eryptian gods, to fit Black Adam’s origin in ancient Egypt:
Shu (stamina)
Hershef (strength)
Amon (power)
Zehuti (Thoth) (wisdom)
Anpu (speed)
Menthu (courage)
There’s also Sabbac,* who has a similar deal, but instead of getting his powers from Shazam, he gets them from Hell, by invoking the names of powerful demons:
Satan
Aym
Belial
Beelzebub
Asmodeus
Craeteis
Also, Ibac, who gains magical power by saying a name made up of a bunch of humans who were real assholes:
Ivan (the Terrible)
Borgia (Cesare, specifically)
Attila
Caligula
*Not to be confused with sabaac, which is a card game in the Star Wars universe.
No, of course not. They just came up with whatever names they could remember. They didn’t care if krypton was a noble gas or a planet. But “Shazam” is a particularly notable mish-mosh of names.
Interestingly, it seems that “Shazam” didn’t start appearing in print (outside of comic books) until Gomer started saying it in 1962.
[hijack]
I’d of course noticed before that Krypton was doing double duty as a planet in the comics and an element in real life, but I don’t think I’d ever noticed that it was just following the example of Mercury being a planet in real life and an element in real life and the Roman god in the mish-mosh of names that is “Shazam”.
[/hijack]
As an aside, “Mercury” as the name of the element has a convoluted history. It used to be called “quicksilver” (and sometimes still is, in poetical contexts), or “water-silver” (hydrargyros, whence “Hg”). But the old alchemists were very secretive about their trade, and so often kept their notes in a sort of code based on astronomical notation. And the symbol used for quicksilver was the symbol for Mercury, the planet. When chemistry moved from the secretive alchemists to being a proper scientific discipline, the secret code-name stuck.
Interesting. I would assume that it was connected with Mercury, the messenger of the gods, because it moved so rapidly in droplet form (hence quicksilver). And the planet was connected with the god because it moves across the sky more rapidly than any other planet.
I see that the element is called the same way in French and Spanish (mercure, mercurio) but in German it remains Quecksilber (while the planet is Merkur).
Very briefly, Captain Marvel was also a splitting android.
ETA: And I assumed that ‘quicksilver’ meant ‘living silver,’ in that it was somewhat silvery, and it flowed.
That appears to be the original etymology. However, that does not preclude its later association with Mercury (the god and/or) planet being due to its rapid movement.
There’s a very long standing identification of the seven classical metals with the seven classical planets.
Sun - Gold
Mercury - Quicksilver
Venus - Copper
Moon - Silver
Mars - Iron
Jupiter - Tin
Saturn - Lead
I hadn’t realized that there were seven classical metals. Since we’re on the subject of comics, I have to bring up one of my favorites, Metal Men. The group corresponds mostly to the classical metals, except for dropping Copper and substituting Platinum for Siliver.
I’m curious how Jupiter got associated with such a commonplace metal as tin, seemingly the least valuable of the group.
It isn’t worth much now, but in ancient times it was worth a lot because it was rare and it was also required to create bronze weapons, which held a harder edge than plain copper. Bronze weapons were the super weapon of their time when they were first invented.
But how far do these associations go back? The Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in Italy was around 1000 BC.
According to Wikipedia, they were the only elemental metals known “until the discovery of arsenic in the 13th century”, and they’d been known since prehistoric times. As for the planetary associations, that seems to have arisen from the practice of alchemy, which was fraught with religious symbolism from the Babylonian/Greek eras.
So, a long, long time ago. And I may have to find books on this, because interesting.
That was really my question. Even if tin was valuable in the Bronze Age, it would have been much less so by the time of the alchemists, making the association of one of the basest metals with the noblest planet puzzling.
The other planetary associations aren’t too hard to figure out. Gold for the Sun and silver for the Moon are obviously references to their color. Copper was used for mirrors, which was the symbol of the lovely Venus. Iron was used for weapons, linking it to Mars, the god of war; the planet’s rusty color may have been another link. Mercury, the fastest planet, was linked to quicksilver, and Saturn, the slowest planet, to heavy lead.