Sunday, March 19, 2023

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 259: THE POWER STEALERS

(Hit Comics 008, 1941)


I gotta say: I really like these guys. Now, obviously they're stinkers of the highest order - their plan involves siphoning all electrical power in the US until they are paid an unspecified amount of big bucks or possibly even placed in charge - but when you spend a little (or a lot of) time thinking about supercrime in a super-hero universe you get opinions about these kinds of things. If these guys had developed this technology I'd have something to say about the risk/reward of crime vs commercial application, but they're clearly a bunch of criminal goons and probably stole it, so using it for crime makes sense!


Further, they are genre-savvy enough to recognize Hercules as the only super-hero in their particular pocket of the Quality Comics proto-universe. Setting out to preemptively take care of the super-opposition never actually works, but I always appreciate the effort involved.

(also I love that they call Hercules a hick. So often the little interesting details about a character fall by the wayside - it's great that Hercules is consistently the super-hero from the country)


The guy in purple is a bad liar.


The guy in green is a loveable jerk.

The gang of shirtless goons is everything I could wish in a bunch of cannon-fodder henchmen, down to the guy with a knife clutched in his teeth.


Finally (well, for my purposes. Finally finally, they get beat up), they actually have a plan! They manage to chuck Hercules into quick-drying cement and cheekily make him into a statue to be displayed on their front porch! And he's there for weeks! Very good job, boys.

(though if they hadn't chiseled off all that extra cement then maybe he wouldn't have managed to get free. Food for thought, dead fictional men)

No comments:

Post a Comment

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 619: GYP CLIPP

(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)  Mr Clipp here is our first villain with "Gyp" or "Gypsy" as a part of their name, and ther...