(Flash Comics v1 003, 1940)
Big fan of Una Cathay! The criminal scientist-type super-villains that you get in the Golden Age could get a little samey after a while - even if they all had their individual weirnesses, they were all of a common stripe - and it's amazing how fresh a well put-together lady-villain makes the old tropes seem.
Una's main deal was extracting the secret of eternal life from a young scientist named Dick Blendon who, unfortunately for her, was an old college pal of Carter "Hawkman" Hall.
Like our old pal the Lord of Life, Una's preferred technique was to administer to her victims a drug that simulated death and then grave-rob their bodies and pretend that she was bringing them back from the dead instead of reviving them. Unlike the Lord of Life, she kept her faux revenants in big jars that she claimed to be full of life-sustaining fluid. Love love love a guy in a big jar with his head poking out. Amazing visuals.
Una also brings a kind of ambiguously ethnic element to her villainy, which of course means that she has voodoo powers that she nearly manages to kill Hawkman with except that Shiera somehow knows the warning signs of an incipient voodoo execution and saves his ass.
Everything comes crashing down for Una Cathay after that: Hawkman lets all of the men out of their jars, her pal Count Torgoff falls off a roof while trying to stab Hawkman to death and she herself dies in a Hawkman-caused car accident. It's almost like you shouldn't turn to violent crime in your search for immortality, lest violence be meted back unto ye. Or something!
No comments:
Post a Comment