MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 949: PRINCESS SHEBA

(Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)

1900! Archaeologist Professor Pierce leads an expedition to find the tomb of Princess Sheba in Arabia! Buried alive in a solid gold tomb with a gold cobra perched on her chest, Princess Sheba appears to be meant to be the daughter of the biblical Queen of Sheba. The mummy, her grave goods and praticularly the golden cobra found sitting on her chest are all promptly packed up and shipped back to New York.

Professor Pierce puzzles over the inscription on the golden cobra for the next forty years, until, in 1941, he decodes it and learns that the cobra is in fact a bottle filled with special mummy-resurrection juice.

What can a dedicated Egyptologist do in a situation like this, other than immediately run to the museum and unwrap the top half of Princess Sheba's mummy so that he can give her the juice. After all, if it works it will be a tremendous boon to science, and if it doesn't, well, they probably have plenty of other mummies.

The fluid works, and Princess Sheba is restored to life as a goth. I was initially going to classify this as a lucky event for Pierce, but it does complicate his life considerably as he not only has to cover up the fact that one of the museum's mummies is missing but also has an unexpected nude woman who he has implicitly taken responsibility for.

And a responsibility it is, because Princess Sheba is not only a woman out of time but a complete amnesiac. She learns English and so forth with supernatural rapidity, but Pierce forces her to remain isolated and withholds the information that she was entombed alive because she was born with the ability to control men's minds with a kiss and used that power for evil in her first life. This turns out to have been a good idea, because as soon as he does tell her she stabs him to death to gain control of the cobra fluid and use her power for evil. 

Please note that her mind-control kiss is called "the Kiss of Death" and that that is very annoying to me.

Sheba declares herself the Queen of America and sets about building an army of men to enact her will, though her methodology is a bit weird. She targets powerful and influential men, but the only use she puts them to (that we see, at least) is to cut out their tongues and employ them as gangsters in a pretty conventional crime wave. Is this evidence of a fundamental lack of imagination on her part or is it that despite her rapid learning she is still effectively a child and cannot yet make subtle plans? Or was her brain all shrivelled and dehydrated for a few thousand years too many?

This is when the Daredevil gets involved after capturing one of her Tongueless Ones and making him write out the directions to her lair - tonguelessness as a tool of secrecy has really lost a lot of its cache as literacy rates have gone up. Sheba goes into the old familiar femme fatale's "this is the most handsome man I have ever met" routine, and... c'mon. It makes sense when people do that to Superman or the Spirit, or even Batman, as you can see enough of the face to make some sort of judgment, but this guy? Frankly, her interest read as disingenuous and Daredevil is correct in his decision not to kiss her.

The confrontation between the two ends in a bit of an anticlimax, as Daredevil doesn't really do anything beyond avoiding that kiss. Instead, Sheba throws the jar of life-juice at him in a fit of pique, then shrivels back into a mummy almost immediately. Like every comic book character who is dependant on a serum for survival she seems to have timed her doses to the minute instead of leaving a little wiggle room in case of unexpected delays. Or maybe the cobra was magic somehow, whatever. The day is saved and hopefully the surviving Tongueless Ones can go back to their old lives in some fashion.

AND THEY GO BACK TO DISPLAYING HER MUMMY IN THE MUSEUM

Categorized in: Origin (Resurrected Mummy), Power (Mind Control Kiss), Royalty (Princesses)

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 023

It's an Axis-heavy Round-Up this time, for reasons which will soon become clear.

Adolf Hitler:

Daredevil Comics 001 might not have been the first comic book to feature its title character physically attacking Adolf Hitler on the front cover, but it makes up for this in sheer volume of different characters who are getting in on the act. And the comic itself is also 100% concerned with super-heroes beating up and otherwise inconveniencing Hitler.

Hitler's first appearance in the comic proper also includes a rogue's gallery of Third Reich figures, including Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Admiral von Roeder* and General Walther von Brauchitsch. Also present: the fortune teller who supposedly advised Hitler on a day-to-day basis.

*more on him later 

Though Daredevil is present to merely spy on the well-attended meeting above, he is found out and has to punch out not just Hitler but Goering and Goebbels as well in order to make his escape.

Hitler's second major humiliation in the issue comes at the hands claws of the Claw. He makes a deal with the giant villain on behalf of his Japanese allies, but the Daredevil gets involved in and ruins the whole operation.

Hitler has to pay a hefty bribe just to get out with his skin intact. This is a fine illustration of why most villains don't negotiate this sort of thing in person.

 

Finally, the suprisingly hands-on Hitler is coordinating a Nazi invasion of Africa when the Daredevil and jungle hero Lance Hale get involved, giving the Daredevil the opportunity to land two more punches and a boomerang-assisted trip on the dictator.

Lance Hale, meanwhile, pranks Hitler by giving him a shave with an incredibly accurate arrow, then almost body slams him to death before he is interrupted by Nazis. (Daredevil Comics 001, 1941) 

Benito Mussolini: 

A sad cameo from Il Duce after a portion of his fleet is sunk by the British. (Daredevil Comics 001, 1941) 

Heinrich Himmler:

Is Blackout's Nazi foe Heinrich Himmel meant to be a version of Himmler or is it just a very Nazi collection of syllables? Hard to say. (Captain Battle Comics 001, 1941) 

Hermann Goering: 

Like Hitler, Goering is surprisingly willing to lead from the front in this issue. He loses a dogfight with Cloud Curtis and almost kills himself over it. (Daredevil Comics 001, 1941)

Josef Goebbels:

Goebbels, meanwhile, steals a codebreaking machine devised by by boy inventor Dickie Dean.

He doesn't manage to hang onto it for long before he gets beaten up and mummified by Dean and the Daredevil (and Zip Todd, of course). (Daredevil Comics 001, 1941)

the Koh-i-noor Diamond: 

Once more a big ol' gem is given a name that sounds like "Koh-i-noor," in this case the (baseball-sized!) Kohnoor Diamond. (Captain Battle Comics 002, 1941)

Lord Haw-Haw: 

Lord Garnett here is a bit of a rarity as he starts out as a masked spy who will be appearing in the next Generic Costumed Villain Round-Up and then, after shooting Whiz, King of Falcons (see the next Catalogue of Wounds) flees to Germany and takes up a career in propaganda broadcasting, where his distinctive and annoying laugh earns him the epithet "Lord Hee-Haw."

His new career doesn't last very long, as he is shot down by the Silver Streak while doing some aerial broadcasting. (Daredevil Comics 001, 1941)

Admiral von Roeder:

Who is von Roeder is a very good question, because I can find no evidence that he actually existed. There are four plausible explanations for this:

1. He's a fictional Nazi who somehow got conflated with real ones. 

2. There was an Admiral von Roeder but he was only noteworthy for exactly the length of time it took for this comic to be written and he thereafter sank into such obscurity that he is no longer remembered.

3. The state of internet search is so wretched that a moderately obscure Nazi is currently unsearchable.

4. They couldn't come up with a real Nazi Admiral and so just made one up. 

Regardless of his actual historicity, this von Roeder is beaten up by both Daredevil and a time-travelling Pirate Prince. (Daredevil Comics 001, 1941) 

Winston Churchill: 

Churchill invites both Daredevil and Silver Streak (and the most obnoxious version of Whiz, King of Falcons) to No. 10 Downing St to solicit their help with the war effort. (Daredevil Comics 001, 1941)

More of this kind of thing

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 948: DR HORROR

(Captain Battle Comics 002, 1941)

The Sisters of Fear, a trio of witches who either are the Three Witches of "Macbeth" fame or who take a lot of inspiration from them, have a new scheme: to create a horrible creature to spread death and destruction across the face of the Earth.

As part of the prep for this task they gather together all of their fiendish allies, the Demons of Land, Sea and Air, and I must commend them on being a diverse and fun-filled collection of grotesques

The Sisters do the "double double toil and trouble" routine - either in homage to the great witches of antiquity or as a callback to one of their own classic numbers, depending - and call Dr Horror into being. There are three things worth pointing out about this guy:

1. his pupils are little human skulls 

2. he's a dedicated nudist

3. somehow he is a doctor, despite a) having just been created and b) having an innate antipathy toward human society, the only place where being a doctor has any meaning. But perhaps that's the point - that he cares so little for the mores of humanity that he's going to adopt that title, our puny certification boards be damned

Dr Horror is a pretty straightforward guy: he hates humanity, he has all the terrible power of the elements at his command and thus he spends most of his time post-creation blasting humanity and its trappings to smithereens.

Dr Horror's depredations are unopposed by any hero. Instead, the forces of nature themselves rise up and destroy him by holding him in place with a whirlwind and then exploding a volcano under his feet. There's a strong implication that this is because Dr Horror is a being of darkness and evil and that the essence of nature is bright and good, which is all fine but I really resent the implication that the dinosaurs were also evil and that that is why nature destroyed them.

Dr Horror swears that he will return to avenge himself and the Sisters of Fear (also blown up), but he has not yet managed to do so.

Categorized in: Generica (Doctors), Murder (Attempted Destruction of Humanity), Origins (Magical Constructs)