MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 1000: THE MUMMY

Number 1000!!*

(Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941)

The Old Man of the Pyramids summons (F)lash Lightning to his thundercloud lair to warn him about trouble at Midton College, and he is right, as can only be expected of a wise old oracular father figure. This particular trouble is called Professor Vatz and is a professor of chemistry who is ready to give up academia for the heady world of supercrime.

Vatz's new career is founded on two inventions: his "Hotlight," a ray gun that seems to spit out both bright light and great heat sufficient to kill a regular person or knock out a superhuman figure like Lightning, and a radium compound that makes ordinary cloth into a form of armour resistant to conventional attack. Vatz decides to apply this solution to mummy wrappings, and while I can kind of see that being a way to ensure that the his armour is applied as close to his body as possible, but just what his justification is for using wrappings from an actual mummy is completely inscrutable to me.

As always, mummy wrappings are a fantastic look and they are only enhanced by the fact that Vatz either chooses to leave the little flyaway portions of his hair sticking out of the sides or simply does not care that they are. It's some very very strong bald guy energy and perhaps the most significant addition to the mummy look in two thousand years.

The newly-fledged Mummy recruits a few gangsters and goes on a mild crime spree but is soon tracked down by a recovered Lightning. This leaves the problem of the Mummy's invincibility to solve, and Lightning does so with aplomb: if the wrappings are the vehicle for the invulnerability, simply remove the wrappings before applying violence.

(please note that the Mummy had a calling card all ready to go, and it's a cute one. He only ever gets to use it the once, however)

The Mummy returns in Lightning Comics v1 006, in what is effectively a bottle episode. Professor Vatz, given far both too much credit for a rapid reformation and unfettered access to the prison laboratory, is able to recreate his radium solution and take over - but not actually escape - the prison he has been locked up in.

The only thing that the Mummy seems to be unable to replicate in prison is his Hotlight. Instead, he sports a much cooler "Nitro Gun" that shoots explosive pellets. He is also able to whip up a "Lightning Arrester" to drain the electric energy from Lash Lightning's body when he inevitably turns up to foil the Mummy's plans.

Despite the fact that he is able to disable Lightning and throw him into the prison gas chamber, the Mummy does not account for the possibility that his lightning powers might return to him and allow him to escape. He is soon recaptured in the exact same manner as he was in their first encounter and I must say that the fact that Professor Vatz failed to account for this - perhaps by means of a tricky little knot or fastener - really lowers him in my estimation.

In the Mummy's final appearance, in Lightning Comics v2 001, he is broken out of a prison hospital by Lash Lightning's new archfoe Mastermind, who is hoping to learn the secret of Professor Vatz's radium coating in order render himself immune to harm. 

The Mummy makes three key mistakes in his dealings with Mastermind: 1) he tries to negotiate after the initial deal has been struck, proposing that the radium formula be revealed in exchange for the secret to Mastermind's own ability to command lightning. This might work if the Mummy were dealing with a reasonable person, but Mastermind is a super-villain, a class of inherently unreasonable people. 2) The Mummy escalates the confrontation to a physical one without first applying the radium solution and thus rendering himself immune to harm, and 3) he gets himself obliterated by a lightning bolt. he does therefore mess up Mastermind's plans by taking his formula to the grave, but it must be cold comfort when one is a smouldering corpse.

Farewell, the Mummy. You weren't a very good super-villain but you were an entertaining one.

Categorized in: Accessories (Anti-Hero; Heat Rays), Day Jobs (College Professors), Supranormal Beings (Mummies)

*technically Fang Ryan is number 1000 and the Mummy is number 999, but I like mummies more than snake-themed gangsters so I fudged it for the sake of the round number.

MEDIA IN COMICS 013

Today in Media in Comics, we're all about the Movies:

Movie star Dawn O'Dare returns to her home town of Holtville to premiere her new picture Love Me Forever! but the whole affair is almost undone when her understudy attempts to impersonate her and make off with the theatrical take, only to in turn be foiled by local copy boy Hap Hazard. (Lightning Comics v2 004, 1941)

Angry Waves, a sea epic, features a found footage action scene as one of the Strange Twins rescues the other from drowning. (Hit Comics 016, 1941)

It's time for our first movie titled Crime Doesn't Pay, starring police officer Sally O'Neil and featuring a real on-screen murder. (National Comics 010, 1941)

I fear that we will only be able to evaluate all of the Gone with the Wind parody titles once we have enough of then together to compare. That said, Flown with the Breeze, here about to be attended by Allan "the Hunchback" Lanier and date, has to be one of the more goofy of the bunch. (Wow Comics 002, 1941)

This adaptation of Ivanhoe had a troubled production thanks to an on-set protection racket. It is also distinguished by the fact that its arms and armour consultant was Justin Arthur, aka the Shining Knight. (Adventure Comics 068, 1941)

Jungle Justice, another troubled production due to on-set criminals, boasts its own heroic consultant in the person of Congo Bill. (Action Comics v1 042, 1941)

Though Red River Days managed to get made without any notable hiccups, its premiere in the actual town of Red River is marred by organized crime. (Adventure Comics 060, 1941)

Thrills of Africa, is a jungle movie that gives one crook the opportunity to dress up in a gorilla suit and rob the theatre it's playing in after posing as a statue in the lobby for who knows how long. Also, his two pals are there in blackface.

While chasing these problematic miscreants, Hourman passes a poster for The Count of... something. Perhaps Monte Cristo? Whatever it is, it must be printed real small, given the size of that poster. (All-Star Comics 006, 1941)

During the Dummy's tenure ans one of the Five Fingers of the Hand, he heads off to Hollywood to run a kidnapping scheme, and of course this ends up involving a whole plethora of movies. To begin, we have Aircraft Carrier, the premiere of which is ruined when star Rex Mason is seemingly turned to stone but actually spirited away.

Six-Gun Serenade, a Western, features occasional Vigigilante sidekick Billy Gunn as an extra.

While Vigilante is visiting Billy on-set, he gets involved in the latest kidnap attempt on the nearby set of sports film Touchdown Blues.

The crooks' getaway then takes then through the set of Bars and Stripes, which may or may not be a patriotic prison movie.

Finally, the Dummy's men are run to ground on the set of jungle picture Tropic Doom. (Leading Comics 001, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 999: FANG RYAN

(Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941)

We meet Fang Ryan after he grabs a payroll from the recently-deceased messenger who was in the process of delivering it. He then escapes despite the fact that Police Detective Danny "the Raven" Dartin is on the scene to engage him in thrilling gunplay, but drops his signature weapon, a stick with a couple of snake fangs on one end. It's a neat gimmick: the stick has a reservoir full of poison inside of it, so when Fang whacks someone with it they die of what looks like a snakebite. It is therefore a shame that he does not actually use this item in the story (aside from in killing the courier, implicitly).

Since Ryan has lost his weapon, the Raven knows that he will need a new supply of snake venom to make another, and waits in ambush for him at the zoo from which he had previously sourced the stuff. Sure enough, Ryan shows up in time for a fist fight, which ends in... perhaps not the only time that a super-hero is knocked out by a zebra but surely one of a very limited number of times that it happens.

When a supercrook has rendered a super-hero unconscious and captured them, there are a few ways that they can proceed. The standard approach is of course to place the hero in a deathtrap in full costume and then leave the room, followed closely by "go to unmask them but take so long that they wake up and start fighting you again." Fang Ryan instead opts for one of the rarer options and just immediately unmasks the Raven, and thanks to the gunfight from earlier he even recognizes him!

Ryan's next thoughts are both good: frame the Raven for his next job and expose the Raven's identity, thus taking all the focus off of him and his piddly little crime spree. Where it all falls apart that he tries to do both at the same time instead of sequentially, as he calls up Dartin's boss and rats him out before heading out to do the next robbery.

The one-two punch of this means that when an insomniac sees the Raven and reports him to the cops, the entire police force shows up to get him rather than a car or two worth of guys.

Meanwhile Dartin has escaped from where Ryan left him hogtied in the woods and shows up to avenge his honour. He ends up killing Ryan in a shootout, which somehow completely overwrites the part of Police Chief Lash's brain that heard the information about Dartin being the Raven. It's just the luck of the costumed vigilante, I guess.

Categorized in: Animals (Snakes), Body (Nonhuman Parts), Fraud (Identity Theft (Hero Impostors))

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 103

Soon there will be more minor super-heroes than there are humans for them to protect.

the Sentinel:

In 1783, on the Boston Common, the newly-minted Spirit of America charges a cannon with the "powders of patriotism" in anticipation that someday a champion will be needed to defend the new nation from destruction. Finally, in 1941 (the Civil War not, apparently, being enough of a reason), the cannon fires on its own and releases the Sentinel, mystic champion of the American people.

As one might expect, the Sentinel is broadly superhuman: he can fly, is super strong and is immune to most harm. He also has a halo of fire that he can disappear into and shrink to a tiny flame, effectively rendering him invisible and allowing him to vex friend and foe alike with his comings and goings. Oddly, he has no other control over fire. (Liberty Scouts Comics 003, 1941)

Doctor Nemesis:

Doctor Nemesis is really Dr Jim Bradley, intern at Mercy Hospital in an unnamed city (that is probably meant to be NYC but later retconned as San Francisco) who has developed a foolproof truth serum and decided to keep it to himself rather than risk criminals getting their hands on it - presumably the concern is that they would use it to learn bank vault combinations and other secret information. Since he himself continually runs into situations in which a foolproof truth serum is a handy way to solve a crime, Bradley adopts a costumed identity and sets out to achieve a better tomorrow via a series of injections. 

 

Doctor Nemesis might just be the most calling card-using super-person who we have yet encountered. He hands out at least four of them in his first adventure alone.

Doctor Nemesis has a pretty simple crimefighting routine: identify a potential injustice and then drug everyone involved until he has a clear idea of who is responsible, then beat them up and have them give a drugged confession in front of a police witness. The police in turn are perfectly happy to receive these confessions that they technically haven't coerced from people, though there has to be a clever defense attorney somewhere in Unnamed City who is just waiting to get a Doctor Nemesis client so that they can really dig into the admissibility of admissions given under the influence of mysterious vigilante juice.

It's been a while since we have encountered a character who was later revived and incorporated into the Battle-Axis, Marvel's team of disaffected public domain Golden Age super-heroes who went over to the Nazis, but Doctor Nemesis here is one of them under the technically-but-not-really more badass name of Dr Death. As always, it's hard to say just who got done dirtiest by Roy Thomas when he was assembling the Battle-Axis roster but Doctor Nemesis is certainly a candidate, if only because he doesn't even have the Human's Meteor's flimsy "I'm Irish American and fuck the British" or the Spider Widow's "the Commies killed my husband" excuses. Instead, he simply implies that the Nazis are paying him well.

Subsequent writers (specifically Matt Fraction, if I have things right) clearly thought that Doctor Nemesis was worth revisiting. He was given a long career as a Nazi hunter to counteract his short career as a Nazi and briefly became a core X-Man, though nowadays every time I look up what he's up to it seems that he has become weirder and more peripheral to the action than the last. (Lightning Comics v1 006, 1941)

Lash Lightning **UPDATE**:

I haven't been very careful to delineate whether the character has been going by "Flash" or "Lash" Lightning due to the fact that it profoundly does not matter (they just call him "Lightning" in the stories themselves, for instance) but I might as well make note of this, the issue in which the actual change was made. (Lightning Comics v2 002, 1941)

Marvo the Magician **UPDATE**:

Up until the exact point pictured above, Marvo the Magician was unique among magical comic book super-heroes, for though many of them (including Zatara, the big cheese himself) are said to be using their magic to create illusions and fool the minds of others, it is all demonstrably lies (or more charitably a different definition of "illusion" than I am using), as they all produce material effects in the world. Only pure, beautiful Marvo can claim that he uses illusions and nothing more to frighten and confound his foes, and I have been checking.

That is, up to this issue, when Marvo creates the "illusion" of an ocean liner (complete with a crooked sailor who kidnaps her and hands her over to pirates!) that the woman he is helping proceeds to board and sail away on. Unless the implication is that she has been so convinced that the liner exists that she has swum or perhaps hovered her way to her destination (well, part way to her destination), the inescapable fact is that this ship is more than a mere illusion. Nothing is certain in this wicked world, folks. (Lightning Comics v2 003, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 998: THE CHIEF

(Liberty Scouts Comics 002, 1941)

The Chief is one of two things, either a not-very-specific Hitler stand-in who is leading his forces from the front in an attempted invasion of the US, or the representative of such a figure in such an invasion. Either way, he is clearly a pseudo-Nazi. When we meet the Chief he is preoccupied with discovering the identities of the mysterious figures (who we know to be the Liberty Scouts) who have been thwarting his attempts to weaken the US war effort.

Though he makes a decent try at it, the Chief just barely fails at an attempt to destroy both the Liberty Scouts and the President of the United States while they are meeting at Liberty House. Their next encounter, by contrast, ends with him capturing the Scouts and gloating about his plans before leaving them tied up next to a bomb. It doesn't work out, of course, but setting up a deathtrap that will kill the hero while you are in a second location is a core super-villain activity. It's enrichment for them.

The Chief is at the forefront of Axis superweapon technology, with such innovations as a secret naval base in a hollowed-out iceberg off Newfoundland, a fleet of remote-controlled ships housed in that base, and heat ray cannons mounted on those ships, with which New York City as the first move in his invasion of the US.

Though New York ends up taking some heat ray fire, the Liberty Scouts (conspicuously not dead, as is the norm when super-heroes are left in deathtraps) show up in time take control of the robot fleet and turn the rays on the Chief's own forces.

Though the Chief makes a valiant attempt to escape to fight another day, he ends up flying his plane directly into the path of a heat ray and exploding.

The Liberty Scouts face a second Chief in Liberty Scouts Comics 003, who is also attempting to conquer the US on behalf of the same faux-Nazi government (they have the same crossed-knives symbol standing in for the swastika). This time the plan hinges on stealing a super knockout gas developed by Liberty Scout member Smokey and deploying it nation-wide, and once again the Chief's deadliest enemy proves to be aviation safety, and he doesn't even have a convenient heat ray cannon to blame for it: he just up and crashed his plane.

Categorized in: Generica (Chiefs), Ideologies (Crypto-Fascists), Supercrime (Attempted Conquest (United States))