Monday, September 4, 2023

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 335: THE THREAT

(All-Flash 002, 1941) 


The Threat is an example of a type of morality tale that was very popular in 40s and 50s comic books but never really went out of style: a tale of promise squandered in service to a life of crime. In this case, the subject is a crook named Tough Joe Connor, who swears revenge on Jim Kelley, the prosecutor who sent him to jail for ten years. 

My summarizing powers are not up to this task, ergo, a timeline:

1911 CE:

-Jim Kelley sends Tough Joe Connor to jail. Connor swears revenge.

-believing that Kelley got the better of him because he was more clever, Connor devotes himself to study.

1917 CE:

-Connor has become a model prisoner. He is a qualified lawyer, doctor and research scientist specializing in chemistry and physics. He is paroled 4 years early. On the outside, he is already wealthy due to research he did in prison.

-Connor goes to visit Kelley. Ostensibly a good will visit, it is actually in order to provide an alibi: when thugs he has hired burst in and steal Kelley's newborn baby, Connor takes a carefully choreographed bullet to the arm while "attempting to stop them".

-Connor meets and falls in love with a woman named Annie Crowley. They marry and he briefly goes straight (but keeps the baby).

1923 CE:

-Annie dies (possibly in childbirth, as they have a daughter). Connor resumes his quest for revenge and begins telling the boy, Roy, that Kelley killed his mother in order to turn him into a weapon against his own father.

1937 CE:

-Connor has consolidated underworld power in the region, becoming the Threat. He makes his first attempt on the life of now-Mayor Jim Kelley but both his criminal activities and his murder attempt are disrupted by the Flash. Roy heads to the family farm to lie low with his step-sister Ann.

1941 CE:

-The Threats's power continues to grow. A second attempt on Mayor Kelley's life ends with Joe Connor back in prison as one of his own henchmen.

-Connor escapes in an old lye barrel. Severely burned, missing an eye, he adopts a series of new identities: an unnamed garage owner, plastic surgeon Doctor Cravath, mechanic Jake Boles. He finds Roy hiding out in the country and together they make an attempt on gubernatorial candidate Kelley's life but once more the Flash steps in.

-Connor makes one last push to kill now-Governor Kelley: he breaks Roy out of prison and arranges a big confrontation. All is for naught, as the Flash, Joan Williams and Ann Connor have pieced together the clues and revealed to Roy his real parentage. Faced with this and the futility of his life of revenge, Connor smokes a poisoned cigarette and dies.

-Roy and Ann are now in love, which happens in these kinds of Secret Step-Sibling situations an unsettling amount.

There are several interesting things about this sequence of events. The first, as seen above, is that young Roy, at age 5, chooses the name Roy Revenge for himself as part of his vendetta and keeps using it into his mid-twenties. It is, frankly, great - it's exactly the kind of henchman name that a villain called the Threat would assign in a campy 60s comic, but earnestly, in the 40s.

The second involves the fact that at this point Keystone City is not a thing and the Flash explicitly lives in New York City, which means that Jim Kelley was presumably Mayor of NYC (eroding La Guardia's term by about four years) and Governor of New York (impacting Herbert H. Lehman).

Meanwhile, the chronology of the story is fairly tentative - the actual timeframes are correct, but the dates are speculative. The crucial point is that four-year gap between Roy Revenge''s first attempt on Kelley's life and the remainder of the story: as presented the bulk of the story is set in 1941, the year of publication, but the Flash is running around three years earlier than previously established. BUT! if we start the story in 1941 the bulk of the action takes place in 1945, which is even more temporally messy. Fun stuff for the old timeline!


The Threat, ultimately, is a bit of a nothing villain but I like him nonetheless. Too bad about the wasted life, better luck next time, Joe.

JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 0/1 

(I know, he's focused on the lawyer, but "judge and jury and prosecutor revenge killer" is just too long and even then someone is going to go after the witnesses and bailiffs. Better to be succinct)

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