Saturday, February 11, 2023

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.

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