Friday, February 10, 2023

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:



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