MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 974: TYRANNUS

(Fight Comics 015, 1941)

I sniffed at the chronal implications of Super-American coming back in time to help out 1941 America, but it's very possible that it is only by his intervention that his future comes to exist at all. By the time he arrives, Tyrannus, leader of an unnamed organization perhaps a couple of levels tougher than your average group of bundists, has already managed to install himself in the Oval Office. Senators are being machine gunned in the streets!

Despite the fact that he seemingly has control of the entire apparatus of American government, Tyrannus is concerned with the formalities: he wants Congress to formally hand over the reins of power to him. Under the barrels of several machine guns, sure, but what regime change hasn't come with a little ultra-violence?

Tyrannus, no fool, legs it while Super-American is saving an off-model FDR. Will we see him again? Yes, right now.

Fight Comics 016 sees Tyrannus in Europe working for the Hitler-alike dictator Vultro. It's unclear if the implication is that he was already Vultro's agent in America or if this represents a career setback for Tyrannus - their swastika-adjacent insignia are different, if that means anything. 

Even if Tyrannus is no longer his own boss, he still gets to do what he loves, as Vultro is just as interested in the military subjugation of the United States as he is. Amd thanks to the insidious Dr Bund and his freshly-perfected aerial torpedoes he is ready to begin the process!

Super-American takes a dim view of this scheme, and beats the holy hell out of Vultro's forces until he is able to corner the dictator himself and bully him into promising not to do war any more. He does essentially say "I'm a little stinker" and scamper off the instant that Super-American's back is turned, but it's a noble effort nonetheless.

As for Tyrannus, he murders Dr Bund in order to secure the only escape plane for himself and is then almost immediately captured by Super-American and returned to the US to face trial for all the crimes he did in his previous appearance.

Categorized in: Generica (Ends in -us),  Ideologies (Crypto-Fascists), Supercrime (Attempted Conquest of the United States)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 096

Even the most minor of super-heroes gets the chance to shine brightly in the Round-Up.

Super-American:

I can't decide if I'm surprised or not that the development of the archetype of the patriotic hero was so rapid as to produce a character called "Super-American" less than a year after the debut of Captain America. He's simultaneously straight out to the sketchbook of a 60s underground comix guy (or indeed a more modern edgy comics guy) and a perfectly ordinary 1940s comic book character. Regardless: Super-American!

Super-American is an unnamed resident of the year 2350, who journeys back in time after Dr Allen Bruce uses his Chronopticon device to ask the President of 24th Century America for a little help with all the fascist spies and so forth who are causing trouble in 1940s America. 

This is way too early for a pop time travel story to get too worried about issues of causality and so forth, so I guess we must assume that Super-American uses the kind of time travel where your time travel escapades already happened so you can't actually change your own present. Or maybe the kind where the time you leave from is inevitable, so your actions in the past merely cause it to happen in a different way. Or even the kind where messing around in the past causes a divergent timeline, but the new futures he creates are similar enough to still produce a Super-American.

Thanks to good old-fashioned futuristic technology, Super-American is endowed with powers such as super strength and speed, invulnerability and flight. Plus, he's super-duper patriotic! Like, annoyingly so! As one might expect of someone who willingly wears that helmet. (Fight Comics 015, 1941)

Categorized in: Language (Superlatives (Super)), Locations (Specific Locales), Origins (Displaced in Time)

Captain Fight:

Patriotic hero Captain Fight is actually Jeff Crockett, gym teacher at Freeville High in Freeville, Maryland. Despite being held in contempt by his male students for turning down a career in prizefighting due to a conviction that violence should not be used frivolously, Crockett does not hesitate to don a sporty outfit and deal out fistic justice to the enemies of America when they show their faces in his specific small town. (Fight Comics 016, 1941)

Categorized in: Activities (Fighting), Day Jobs (High School Teachers), Generica (Captains)

Yank Adams: 

Unusually for a boy sidekick, Yank Wilson is not an easily-adoptable orphan, instead, he is one of Jeff "Captain Fight" Crockett's students and also the son of local inventor and espionage target Professor Adams. Yank recognizes Crockett through his weird mask pretty much instantly and a crime-fighting team is formed. (Fight Comics 016, 1941)

Categorized in: Day Job (High School Student), Origins (Sidekicks)

Zanzibar the Magician:

Zanzibar is a standard unit of magical super-hero who adventured in a variety of Fox Features books from 1939 to early 1942. Though his adventures are decently entertaining fare I'm afraid that the most interesting fact I can give you about Zanzibar himself is that at one point he switches from a red fez to a blue one. (Mystery Men Comics 001, 1939)

Categorized in: Locations (Place Names as Proper Names), Magic Users (Magicians), Powers (Various Magic)

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 026

Once again we point and go "Hey. It's that guy."

Adolf Hitler:

Captain Courageous has to deal with a few pseudo-Nazis working for Hitler-alike Hinkler. (Banner Comics 003, 1941) 

Real Hitler takes a scheme-foiling by Vulcan pretty hard. (Four Favorites 001, 1941)

Devil's Island:

Captain America and Bucky infiltrate Devil's Island to free a prisoner who is not only a victim of carceral justice taken to unjust extremes but also as an arm of the Nazi government in France. (Captain America Comics 005, 1941)

the Duke and Duchess of Windsor:

The Duke of Windsor, aka the former King Edward VIII of England and his wife Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, welcome Speed Martin to the Bahamas in the Duke's wartime role as the Governor General of that territory. (The Funnies 051, 1941)

FDR:

Super-American rescues the most obscured-by-shadow (and completely silent!) FDR we have yet seen from the evil Tyrannus. The usual shadowed-features treatment that he usually gets is so over the top in that it looks like the President is going to be dramatically revealed to be some sort of frog monster in the next panel. (Fight Comics 015, 1941)

By contrast, here's a very recognizable FDR congratulating newsreel cameraman Speed Martin on returning from Europe with some vital intel on the Axis war machine. (The Funnies 051, 1941)

And by contrast with that, here's "Mr Jones," the mysterious government official who recruits Captain Midnight into his country's service and who is heavily implied to be a disguised FDR, even though he lacks the President's famously large head. (The Funnies 057, 1941)

(don't worry: someone thought about the big head issue and inflated it by The Funnies 058)

the German-American Bund:

Very rare appearance of the German-American Bund under it's own name, even if the actual group was already in severe decline at the point this book was published. (Captain America Comics 005, 1941)

Harold R. Stark:

He's not named, but the Chief of Naval Operations seen here sure looks like the man who held the position at the time, Harold R. Stark. Did they do a photo reference this one time? (The Funnies 055, 1941)

Joe Dimaggio:

"Joey Diraggio," star player for the Brooklyn Badgers and victim of the Black Toad. (Captain America Comics 007, 1941)

the Venus de Milo:

The Venus de Milo is stolen by Zeus and brought back to Ancient Greece so that he can turn it into a human woman to be his wife. Zanzibar the Magician rescues the statue woman and brings her back to the present with him, but the question is never resolved: does he chop off her arms and turn her into a statue again? Is the Fox Features Universe minus one statue and plus one blonde lady? (Mystery Men Comics 002, 1939)

Winston Churchill:

Personally thanks Vulcan for escorting a convoy to England. (Four Favourites 001, 1941) 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 973: THE MASTER MIND

(Fight Comics 011, 1941)

Just when the futuristic (i.e., early 2000s) nation of Greater America thinks that it can relax, it is simultaneously attacked from both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans! Acting quickly, Saber, aka the Spy Fighter, super-powered Head of Greater American Espionage, sets out to discover who is behind this dastardly deed. 

Saber uses his telepathic abilities to trace the impulses that are directing the armies to an isolated outpost where he finds a fellow variously referred to as the Hermit, the Hermit Militarist and the Lonely Genius but most frequently and most accurately the Master Mind. Saber finds that not only is the Master Mind a fellow telepath but that he has discovered the secret to transferring his mind to the mental plane, meaning that merely killing him will not stop the invasion as he will continue directing it as a disembodied intelligence.

Undaunted, Saber acquires an experimental disintegrator ray and uses it to wipe out the Atlantic force (wild that he feels the need to do so after demonstrating the ability to grow to the size of a small moon not one issue earlier). Returning to confront the Master Mind, he ends up blasting him in self-defense, and true to his word, his (master) mind lives on to direct his remaining forces (and no, I do not know why the disintegrator isn't used on them as well).

In a bit of a sad anticlimax, Saber and the disintegrator's inventor Professor Lerno just buckle down and tinker for a week before snuffing out the Master Mind's mind with a short-wave radio signal.

Categorized in: Body (Minds), Power (Mental Communication, Mental Projection), Supercrime (Attempted Conquest) 

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 049

Yesterday we met Tuk, caveboy of the year 50 000 BCE. Today we meet all the various humanoids and hominids that populate his world.

Shaggy Ones:

The Shaggy Ones are a kind of Missing Link-style ape man species that we don't really get too much of a sense of because Tuk's foster father Ak is the very last one. If we extrapolate the whole species out from him, Star Wars-style, they were a fairly altruistic species, if a bit given to mysticism. (Captain America Comics 001, 1941)

Hairless Ones:

"Hairless Ones" is not exactly a species, but a catch-all category for human-style hominids used by ape-style hominids like Ak, and therefore by Tuk. The first Hairless Ones we meet are Tuk's parents Phadion and Rhaya, exiles from the fabulous city of Attilan and therefore retroactively Inhumans. For our purposes today we will count them as Hairless Ones, however.

Phadion is almost immediately skewered while defending his family from a woolly rhinoceros. Ak takes Rhaya and Tuk back to his home and worships Rhaya as a goddess for several years until she is killed by a lion.

Hairless Ones also encompasses other hominids such as Tuk's Cro-Magnon companion Tanir. (Captain America Comics 001, 1941)

Goreks:

The Goreks, who "worship stone and eat brains" are somewhere between Shaggy and Hairless, I suppose. They serve as low-level antagonists for Tuk to overcome with the help of his new friend Tanir. I really dig their Caveman Viking aesthetic - sadly they only show up the once. (Captain America Comics 001, 1941)

the Hairy Ones:

A different kind of man-ape than the Shaggy Ones, the Hairy Ones very briefly menace King Amir and his subjects (yet another population of Hairless Ones, natch) in the landlocked city of Crete (!!!) before being routed by Tuk and Tanir. (Captain America Comics 002, 1941)

the Witches of Endor:

Yet another group of Hairless Ones, the Witches of Endor live in a valley that is naturally filled with soporific vapours and add to their numbers by scarring captives' faces with acid. As with the city of Crete, this is another interesting example of a thing from moderate antiquity (the Biblical Witch of Endor is historically tied to c.1100 BCE from what I can gather) transposed into comic set in 50 000 BCE. 

Given my experience with Jack Kirby's later work, I imagine that this is intended to be a kind of pre-legendary ancestral origin story for these things rather than a flattening of history in which everything sufficiently old existed at once, but filtered through the limits of Golden Age comic storytelling and Kirby's own inexperience. (Captain America Comics 002, 1941)

Atlanteans:

Speaking of which: after escaping from the Witches of Endor, Tuk and Tanir escort their fellow former captive Princess Eve back to her home, the City of Atlantis. The first time I read this I thought that it might have been the place that Tuk's parents came from, but no, just like the contemporary Marvel Universe, both Atlantis and Attilan are extant.

The Atlantean people are yet another group of Hairless Ones. They're running around in at least the Bronze Age while the rest of the world is just coming to grips with stone. They are also an absolute monarchy, which Tuk and Tanir have to help Princess Eve wrest back from her evil uncle. (Captain America Comics 002, 1941)

Cave People:

Finally, we have some traditional, full-on cavemen. These guys are oppressed by the wicked Bonzo the Brute until Tuk and Tanir take a hand and slay him. (Captain America Comics 004, 1941)