SUPER-HERO COSTUME PARTY

This bit where Hawkman intends to attend a costumed event as himself but doesn't quite make it (Flash Comics v1 022, 1941) made me realize that I've missed a few examples of super-heroes attending costume parties as themselves, one of my most favourite tropes in comics! Time for some catchup rectification!

Here's the Red Gaucho being mistaken for someone who was dressed as him, who is then impersonated by a third person in a story that was not called "Too Many Gauchos" but could have been (Nickel Comics 006, 1940)

Similarly, Rex Tyler attends a costume party as Hourman and gets mistaken as part of a whole gang of Hourmen who are planning on sticking the place up (All-Star 003, 1940)

And finally we have USA, the Spirit of Old Glory attending a party in her own costume with no impostors to horn in on her idea. (Feature Comics 048, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 252: EGON

(Flash Comics v1 021, 1941)

This one's got a lot of setup. First, Hawkman sees a spaceship crash, as you do. Venturing inside, he finds a deceased Neptunian couple, their egg son and a Rosetta Stone of a  ship's log. He makes off with the egg and the journal and just leaves the ship and its former crew to rot.

Next night is the Scientist Society Ball, where monocled botanist and creep Noel Ratchford makes a play for Shiera Sanders and is rebuffed. There's an egg-based sequence of events as follows:

-Noel is germinating seeds in eggs

-Carter "Hawkman" Hall thinks this is dumb

-Shiera stumbles across the boy-egg and assumes that Carter is also experimenting with eggs. She steals the egg as a joke and tells Noel about it

-Noel decides to steal the egg and take credit for Carters egg-based research. He ends up hatching out the boy Egon.

Thanks to Neptunian genetics, Egon hatches into a rapidly-growing boy with cool eye-beams and full powers of speech. Noel then hits upon the idea to raise him up to a) hate him and b) believe that his name is Carter Hall, so that he will go out and do evil giant stuff and blame it on Carter, thus presumably sullying his good name enough for Shiera to reject him? it's a flimsy plan at best, but when all you have is a giant you look for rampage-based solutions to your problems.

Everything kind of goes according to plan, except that Carter Hall is of course Hawkman, and that he has the journal and knows all of the Neptunians' weak points and kills Egon and brings Noel to justice. But other than that stuff, A-OK.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 251: BOMB-BABY SATHAN

(Flash Comics v1 020, 1941)

An absolutely ordinary criminal scientist villain completely overshadowed by his criminal rival Big Frenchy in this adventure. Sathan has at-the-time fantastically futuristic guided missile tech, as well as one of my personal favourite bits of super-villain utility tech: the communications cut-in, via which he extorts money from banks lest they get hit by guided missiles.

The only reason Sathan hasn't been relegated to the Criminal and Mad Scientist Roundup queue is this here henchman's inspired nickname game. Bomb-Baby Sathan is a Grant Morrison Making Up a Sixties Villain in the Nineties-style name and it's genuinely joyful to encounter it in a Golden Age comic.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 250: THE HOOD

(Flash Comics v1 019, 1941)

Hey, it's the Hood! I'll be honest: I thought that the Hood was one of those super-villain names like the Masked Man that was super common and that we already had one or more guys with this name but here we are, 250 villains in and welcoming our first.

The Hood is Pratt Palmer, and he's a bog standard scientist-villain of type A: scientist who develops some astonishing new tech and turns it to crime (type B is of course the scientist who turns to crime after being rejected by the hidebound academics they go to for approval, while type C is your classic mad scientist meddling where humanity ought not to).

So yes, Pratt Palmer fakes his own death, forms a gang and is almost immediately captured by Hawkman. There's not much to recommend about him other than his fun bombastic villainspeak, which he really nails off the bat.

The really interesting thing about Hawkman's encounter with the Hood is his tech, which he calls Cold Light, and which functions as a kind of energy blob that wanders around semi-autonomously when not being directed. They don't really explore it much but I reckon that it's pretty cool. More weird tech in comics!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 249: THE SCARLET MERMAID

(Flash Comics v1 019, 1941)

The Scarlet Mermaid is elegant in her simplicity: she's a good swimmer who lives near a river where a lot of rich people hang out on boats, so she swims out and robs them. That plus a great name (and an okay costume - could use a contrasting colour) make for a winning combo.

Even a cool villain must eventually reckon with a super-hero, however, and the Scarlet Mermaid ends up being one of the King's few non-Witch opponents and is captured without much complication, never to appear again. This is a shame, because, like the Black Gondolier before her, I reckon that the Scarlet Mermaid is exactly the sort of low-level supercrook that should be lurking around every city in every super-hero universe. Some great grandniece of hers should be robbing megayachts to this day, dang it. BRING BACK the Scarlet Mermaid!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 248: THE GOLDEN MUMMY

(Flash Comics v1 017, 1941)

It's the Golden Mummy! As I have previously stated, I love fake mummies and had read this issue before, so I was anticipating this fellow's appearance with some joy, and it is with great sadness that I must announce that he's a complete disappointment.

My threshold for fake mummy appreciation is quite low - usually they just steal a few antiquities before getting tripped up by Archie and Jughead or the Scooby Gang, after all - but the Golden Mummy's only admirable quality is his dedication to theme. He has the costume, a cave hideout, a bunch of gangsters that he paid well enough to paint themselves gold and pretend to be called the Sect of the Golden Mummy (and of course the only thing better than henchmen in themed costumes is when they also have a cool name). 

. He even dies lamely, by stumbling into a trap set for Hawkman.

So why do I dislike this guy so much? The reason is twofold: firstly, the whole Golden Mummy thing is just some incel shit: he's a guy named Dr Selkirk getting revenge on his ex-fiance for dumping him by murdering her. This is one of those motivations that sucks some of the fun out of super-villain analysis.

Secondly: the Golden Mummy is a completely unnecessary affectation. He kills her as she's onstage singing opera, via a poisoned blowdart. The Mummy and his Sect spend the entire adventure coping with Hawkman, and it kind of seems like Selkirk made up the persona expressly because he was afraid of Hawkman - I don't know if he'd have gotten away with it by not calling attention to himself with cryptic warnings and golden men but it couldn't have hurt.

Boo to the Golden Mummy. Booo!

THE FATE OF...

(Flash Comics v1 016, 1941)

Have you ever wondered what happened to the ancient Dravidians and their kingdom of Dravidia? No, because they're an extant ethnic group and that would be a bit like wondering about the fate of the Caucasians and their fabled land of Caucasia? Excatly. But nevertheless, here's Hawkman flying into Dravidia, somewhere in Mongolia.

Furthermore, the Dravidian king claims that his people originally came from a now-sunken land called Eden. An intriguing concept - that Eden is truly lost because it sank into the sea. Nothing comes of it though.

The really interesting thing to come out of this adventure is the idea that a prior incarnation of Hawkman might have ruled Dravidia as Keft, known as Icaro, the Redeemer. My experience with Golden Age Hawkman is limited to his JSA appearances, so I don't know if the exploration of his prior incarnations is a running topic or if this is a weird outlier, decades before the idea of Hawkman and Hawkgirl being endlessly reincarnated gained steam.

TROPHY ROOM - HAWKGIRL

(Flash Comics v1 016, 1941)

After an adventure in the lost city of Dravidia, Hawkgirl (well, Shiera Sanders, a few months out from being Hawkgirl) gets a cool brooch!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 247: THE HAND

(Flash Comics v1 015, 1941)

It's old hat by now: like former Hawkman foe Czar the Unkillable Man and his ilk, the Hand is a henchbeing who is far more interesting to read and talk about than their creator. This is the risk you run when you set out to create an autonomous crime-servant via... I'm guessing magical means? It's unclear in the text but magic seems more likely than science.

In this case, the creator is a guy named Edward Thayer, the black sheep of a wealthy family who has decided to turn his amazing talking and flying disembodied hand to the sordid task of killing off his brother Elwin and niece Teddy so that he can inherit enough money to convince some lady to sleep with him. Cue my usual complaints about crooks in super-hero universes not aiming high enough.

Edward never gets to see his ill-gotten money, though, because Sandra (the lady in question) decides to bump him off for a quick buck. Which leads to the above panel: not only a rare hero/ villain teamup but an as-far-as-I-know unique hero/ disembodied hand teamup! Sadly, the revenge rampage ends with not only Sandra but the Hand itself seemingly plummeting to their deaths in a crashing car. Boo, says I! The Hand should be BRUNG BACK post-haste! Give it a bartending job somewhere.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 246: KARVAC

(Flash Comics v1 014, 1941)

Karvac himself is strictly ho hum territory: a would-be world conqueror who leads his army of heat ray-toting goons on a path of destruction before being beaten up by Hawkman. Snoresville, man.

BUT: the method by which Karvac managed to acquire his army of heat ray-toting goons, now that's the kind of comic book nonsense that we love around here.

Karvac, you see, unearthed rites and rituals connected to Scorio, Alligator God of the Phoenicians, and established both a temple and cult of worshippers to Scorio in the Eastern US, in order to cast ancient ritual magics and bring Scorio to him.

AND IT WORKS! Korvac summons a god! And that god promptly tells him how to make heat rays for his army of goons to tote! (it's not exactly clear in the text whether the army of goons are also the Scorio cultists that Hawkman sees performing rituals at the temple earlier in the story, but it's narratively satisfying to think so)

Scorio eventually gets banished back to the otherworldly swamp that he usually hangs out in, and as far as I know has never made a return appearance. But he should! Korvac might've been a dud, but an ancient and vengeful alligator god who can hand out secret knowledge to evil men is a really neat foe for a guy like Hawkman, particularly once his reincarnation bullshit really gets going - Katar Hol might not know Scorio from a hole in the ground but Scorio knows a soul no matter how many times it's been reborn. BRING BACK Scorio!

THE FATE OF ATLANTIS

(Flash Comics v1 1941)

 This Minute Movies ("Secrets of Satan", natch) installment posits that the Atlanteans blew themselves up via black magic and then settled in the Yucatan.

A VEXING CONUNDRUM: KEYSTONE CITY

I short: the state of online wiki-based comics scholarship run by people with poor reading comprehension and an adherence to post-hoc continuity decisions makes it very hard to determine when Jay Garrick explicitly starts operating out of Keystone City as the Flash.

Flash Comics v1 001 features his origin at Midwestern University, which has since been located in Keystone, but does not mention the city by name. For the rest of 1940 at least, he is pretty explicitly in NYC. No idea when the move happens, guess I'll have to keep on reading and see.  

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 245: SATANA

(Flash Comics v1 013, 1941)

 I am torn on Satana! Torn verily in twain!

My standard critique of a comic book scientist-villain is that they would have been better off using their tech in a non-crime endeavor, but Satana is a brilliant and pioneering young surgeon living in 1941 and given what I know about the history of women in science I think it's fair to say that if she had decided to make a go of it in academia then there's a decent chance that all her research would have been stolen by some dude and she might have gotten credit years after her death, if ever. Also, her signature breakthrough involves transplanting human brains (and eyes!) into tigers, which while groundbreaking might be a hard sell to the ethics committee.

On the other hand, her crime scheme is very bad. In short: she extorts rich men with threats of harm, then gets work as an entertainer called Satana the Tiger Girl at rich guy parties and has her tigers kill the ones that don't pay up. She only does it once before getting caught by Hawkman, that we know of, but even if she varied the method by which the tiger was introduced to the rich guy, it's not a sustainable business model. Stylish, yes, but not sustainable.

Perhaps the best part of the story is when Hawkman comes across a couple of tigers engaging in humanlike behaviors and it nearly drives him insane, like he's an HP Lovecraft character. Human habits like... sitting near a newspaper and holding a pipe in their mouth. 

They kinda hint at a return appearance for Satana at the end of the story but she doesn't actually come back until 2004, in the same Hawkman story that brought back the Thought Terror. She's a substantially different character by that point, with ties to the Ultra-Humanite and a focus on making humanoid animals via genetic modification. I'll revisit her when and if I manage to keep doing this long enough to get to that era. It's good that they brought her back! She's a fun character!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 244: THE GREAT ARTURO

(Flash Comics v1 013, 1941) 

Like Crime & Corruption Inc before him, I almost skipped over the Great Arturo or banished him to the ranks of the generic villains, because a) the Great Arturo is a terrible villain name and b) he appears in a Les Watts comic. But the more I looked at this guy, the more it became clear that he was like a savoury stew made up of all the things I love about comic book creepos.

We've already passed judgement on his name (bad), but let's run down some of the other pertinent details of the Great Arturo's career:

Appearance: he's seven feet tall and both dresses like a vampire and also looks like one - whether his widow's peak, fangs and shadowed eyes are natural or stage makeup matters not.

Motivation: According to his henchman Spider, Arturo just "went insane" one day and decided that he was going to acquire the US' new warship tech or destroy it, which is meh so far as villainous origins go, but according to Arturo himself he sometimes believes that he is the Devil, and if you're going to be an insane villain I think it's important to go big. 

Powers: According to his henchman Spider, Arturo was a great enough hypnotist that he held Spider completely in thrall to his will. Emphasis added because it's entirely possible that ol' Spider is just a fast talker looking to save his own hide.

Hideout: He lives in a secret tomb that you enter through a hollow tree in a graveyard - one of the top secret lair types of all time.

In conclusion, he's a seven foot-tall goth hypnotist with a henchman named Spider who lives in a cemetery. Wotta catch!

BONUS: About Les Watts, Radio Amateur

I don't think I'm going to do a full entry on ol' Les, but in brief, he's an earlier example of a character archetype that persists through to today, probably, the Teen Hobbyist (I initially went with Boy Hobbyist, because they are almost all boys). The Teen Hobbyist has a healthy obsession with the hot new tech of the day: ham radios, light aircraft, hot rods, CB radios, computers, the Internet... They don't usually invent things, but they are completely up to date on the latest developments in their field, leaving the adults around them admiringly befuddled.

Teen Hobbyists had their heyday in the 40s and 50s, but were still going strong in the 60s - Snapper Carr and Rick Jones were absolutely from the hot rodder school of Teen Hobbyist - and on into the 80s and 90s as Computer Whiz Kids and so forth. I'm sure there's some version of them running round today.

Les Watts (later renamed Les Sparks for some reason) is a kid who likes fooling around with ham radios, as do all his friends. He specializes in picking up hints of a crime in progress on the radio waves and then zooming to the location with a bunch of teens. That's about it.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 243: CRIME & CORRUPTION INC

(Flash Comics v1 013, 1941)

I almost didn't include these guys because Johnny Thunder lives in a heightened cartoon reality that only exists within the same world as the Spectre or Hawkman because of the technicality of them all being in the same club and hanging out together. But then, is the fact that New York is full of goofy-ass cartoon people in Johnny's reality any more implausible than Alexander the Great blowing up a portion of the city without apparent consequence in Hawkman's? I say thee nay. Besides, Johnny's adventures almost never verge into super-villain territory... we gotta strike while we can!

So: we find Johnny and his best gal Daisy Darling attending a production of "the Creep", starring actor Jan Marrimore (!) as the titular Creep (a stand-in for a real person playing a fictional villain in a super-hero universe: all my very specific interests are colliding!).

At the end of the play, Marrimore reveals that the show is a stunt designed to publicize the existence and uniform of a crime syndicate operating in the city. Johnny of course immediately encounters one of these men, does not recognize him and is pickpocketed by him. After some back and forth involving ridiculous magic powers, the pickpocket swears to reform and all is well. OR IS IT?

It's not! The remaining members of the gang (which we only now learn the name of - thanks for nothing, Marrimore) swear bloody vengeance and set out to murder Johnny. It's only the fact that he's juiced up on Badhnisian thunderbolt magic that saves the poor oaf.

And that's that, really. Just a gang of costumed crooks, but they're Johnny's gang and he almost never gets to fight proper villains. Since they're comedy characters they end up as paper-thin props for Johnny to bounce around, so there's not much to say about them beyond what I will always say about the suit/cape combo: that I love it.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 242: THE WHITE RENEGADE

(Flash Comics v1 010, 1940)

I've alluded now and then to the colonialist assumptions that comics worked off of and that seemingly were endemic to the mindset of the American people. The White Renegade offers an example of the two major prongs of these assumptions, which boil down to the idea that the world is divided into White People and Everyone Else, and that:

1. All offenses committed by Everyone Else against White people shall be repaid with great vengeance. 

2. The greatest crime that a White Person can commit is to side with Everyone Else against White People.

I'm only about 1/10 qualified to talk about this stuff, but I am an English major, so I'm fully qualified to notice it. Someone could probably work up an okay thesis by analysing Golden Age (and all other) comics set in colonized areas.

So: the White Renegade. He's called that because he's a white person siding with South Pacific natives against other white people. The natives would have been in for it regardless, but whenever someone pulls this kind of thing in a comic you know that he's not long for the world. And indeed, Cliff Cornwall tracks him down and takes him out. There's not much to him to talk about really - he looks like a palate-swapped version of the Shadow, which is fun.

The White Renegade! Racism! Colonialism! A cool outfit!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 241: KING JUPO

(Flash Comics v1 009, 1940)

King Jupo is the leader of the Kogats, a race of water-breathing caveman types who live beneath New York Harbor and have a fun mix of technologies, being armed with either stone axes or laser pistols. They've decided to invade the surface world, for no substantial reason other than that it seems like a good idea, and immediately run afoul of Hawkman. Needless to say, this does not end well, and the entire Kogats race, Jupo included, are destroyed when Hawkman collapses their city into an undersea trench, because genociding nonhuman races is okay in comics.

I really like the Kogats - the contrast between the regular caveman guys and enormous Jupo is fun, plus Jupo himself - 10 feet tall, flaming red hair, ram's horns - is visually striking. So what if their actual plan is ho hum regular comic stuff? I'm surprised that Roy Thomas never brought this guy back to fight the All-Star Squadron, but since he didn't, they're ripe to be BRUNG BACK, if only as part of the weirdly extensive network of subsea communities that Atlantis is part of. I wanna see Aquaman try to do diplomacy with this dude!

This issue also features Hawkman meeting Poseidon who gives him the power to breathe underwater. I can't actually figure out if he ever used this power again - it certainly doesn't come up again in any Golden Age stories I've read, but it seems like the sort of thing your Roy Thomas or Geoff Johns would just love to incorporate into a story. Problem is, the fact that Hawkman has this power seems to be a mid-tier popular bit of trivia and finding out whether everyone is just talking about this story or not is a bit more effort than I care to expend.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 240: PROFESSOR KITZOFF

(Flash Comics v1 008)

Professor Kitzoff makes me sad because he is categorically not the Sunspot Wizard. Oh sure, someone at DC or in the fan community went back and assigned titles to all the untitled Golden Age stories and they called this one "the Sunspot Wizard", but that's nothing. I love an unofficial name as much as (probably more than) the next guy, but they have to a) come from the text of the story itself and b) can't just be replacing the actual name by which the character is actually referred!

So, yes, sad. Professor "Boring Name" Kitzoff has followed the popular criminal scientist path of making an astonishing breakthrough based on junk science - in this case the idea that sunspots affect world events. He has a cool ray that supposedly allows him to affect these sunspots and thus the fate of humanity, but luckily for humanity, Hawkman and his pal Doctor French are on the case and Kitzoff is hounded from New York to the Andes until being accidentally shot by one of his own henchmen. Ho hum.

My depression is only lifted by the fact that this is the adventure in which Hawkman is seemingly killed and his seeming corpse is nailed up in a coffin with lots of gaps between the boards for some reason, leading to one of the best images of the Golden Age:

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 239: DR BRINE

(Flash Comics v1 008, 1940)

Dr Brine should be in the soon-to-be-unveiled first roundup of minor mad and criminal scientists who don't quite qualify as super-villains. He's a guy in a purple pin-stripe suit who has a plan to steal a bunch of submarines and then profit from that somehow. There are two very important reasons for his inclusion here:

1. He's either a guy who named himself Dr Brine after getting into the submarine piracy game or (even better) he's a guy who was named Jared Brine or similar and the souped up nominative determinism of the DCU steered him through grad school and right into a job hijacking submarines.

2. His evil science specialty is that he figured outa way to make his henchmen semi-amphibious, and that the method in question, seen above, is that they must go raw vegan. 

10/10 top-tier crime scientist, no notes. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 238: THE CLUE CRIMINAL

(Flash Comics v1 007, 1940)

 

Long before guys like the Joker and the Riddler made leaving baroque clues to taunt the forces of Law ahead of your next crime a super-villain cliché, the Clue Criminal was out there getting things done, with a name that I must assume was used in a low-effort Batman pastiche some time in the late 60s.

Speaking of names, the Clue Criminal steals actual real painting "the Blue Boy" and then goes on to do the same to "famed smiling picture" "Modern Louisa". I guess the Mona Lisa wasn't in Washington DC to be stolen at the time, but guess what, Gardner Fox, writer of Cliff Cornwall? I checked, and "the Blue Boy" was in California in 1940! Checkmate, me!

Anyhow, the Clue Criminal perpetrates three art thefts before inexplicably pivoting to attempted zeppelin bombing - possibly the Clues were more important than the Crimes and it was easier to put one together for zeppelin sabotage than any of the theft-worthy art pieces in town. Whatever the reason, Cliff Cornwall proves as adequate at eleventh-hour riddle solving as Batman and/or Robin and the Clue Criminal is put away.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 031: THUNDERBOLT

(Flash Comics v1 007, 1940) 

The epitome of minor: Johnny Thunder spent one issue as a costumed hero named Thunderbolt. It's possible that he tried his hand at the costumed crimefighter game some other time - I'm hardly a Johnny Thunder expert - but this is the only time I know of.