MINOR SUPER-HERO 045: YANKEE EAGLE

(Military Comics 001-008, 1941-1942) 

Yankee Eagle is the code name of Jerry Noble, an uncostumed adventurer who can communicate with and command the loyalty of all animals. Aside from some nice art, Yankee Eagle is a fairly run of the mill character until you drill down into his origin: being rich. His mother left him a fortune and he used it to buy a private zoo and that 's how he learned to talk to all animals. Step aside Bruce Wayne! Move over, Tony Stark! There's a new chairman of the Rich Boy Super-Hero Club!

MINOR SUPER-HERO 044: THE Q-BOAT

(Military Comics 001, 1941)

This is stretching the idea of what a "minor super-hero" is quite a bit but I ultimately had to defer to my judgment rule about criminal groups: if one person were doing this would it make sense to categorize them such? And it would! The Q-Boat is just that, a warship disguised as a harmless four-masted schooner in order to prey on Nazi convoy raiders. Swap out the disguised ship for a submarine and you have the Red Torpedo, a personal fave!

There are two interesting things about the Q-Boat the first is the fact that although it was a one-off story, whoever wrote it (probably Henry Kiefer?) left a lot of details to be filled in later. Specifically: what the heck is going on with the Q-Boat?

As presented, the Q-Boat is not just a battle-capable schooner but a super-advanced miniature warship. It is crewed by Captain Foghorn (descended from John Paul Jones, speech balloons indicate that he's speaking at top volume at all times) and a bunch of teen boys, including Bob Wayne, Dick Martin and Marmaduke "Freckles" van Weyden. Questions such as "where did the Q-Boat come from?" "why all the teen boys?" and "why is Freckles so good at making guided missiles?" all go unanswered (Captain Foghorn's son-in-law is mentioned as having developed some of the tech on the Q-Boat but that just adds "who the heck is this son-in-law?" to the list).

The second interesting thing about the Q-Boat is the fun sibling dynamic between the child soldiers.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 043: MISS AMERICA

(Military Comics 001-007, 1941-1942) 

I am not the first to note this by a country mile but it must be said every time she comes up: she wishes to have all of the powers of the Statue of Liberty and then the Statue of Liberty visits her in a dream and gifts them to her. If USA didn't exist then this would be a shoe-in for "most outlandish patriotic hero concept" but as it stands I reckon that they're tied.

Those powers, by the way, aren't "being enormous and made of bronze" like you might expect but rather a host of generic Golden Age magical abilities such as teleportation, telekinesis and transmutation - particularly of goons into birds and trees and such.

Miss America gets brought back every once in a while but the most noteworthy thing about her, her wild origin, was retconned in the Eighties. Now instead of wishing for the powers of the Statue of Liberty and then getting them (absurd, laughable) she wished for the powers of the Statue of Liberty near the entrance to a secret government project underneath the statue and was given powers by them (high concept, realistic).

In conclusion: I quite like Golden Age Miss America but find it hard to get excited about her later incarnations.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 042: THE BLUE TRACER

(Military Comics 001-016, 1941-1942)

The Blue Tracer is your standard guy-with-a-super-vehicle hero: "Wild Bill" Dunn, an American engineer serving with the British in Ethiopia, finds himself the only survivor of an ambush by a race of would-be world-conquering superhumans called the M'bujies. He and Anzac Boomerang Jones team up to build the multienvironment supercraft the Blue Tracer and foil the M'bujie plans (by killing them all).

There seems to be a consensus online that the vehicle is the Blue Tracer and Bill Dunn is not but I will not be joining them in that: there is a long tradition of super vehicle pilots sharing a name with their craft and anyone who goes to the trouble of putting together an outfit as ostentatious as Dunn's is deserves to have a code name.

The Blue Tracer itself just might have the distinction of being the ugliest super vehicle I have ever seen - it looks like something that really was kitbashed together out of random WWII vehicles in a homemade workshop. It's so ugly, in fact, that I find it charming. 

I looked up whether it was ever referenced again and evidently one of the Freedom Fighters teams used a cool plane called the Blue Tracer. Booooooo! Bring back the ugly Blue Tracer! The Blue Tracer can't be cool.

Also charming: Boomerang Jones, Bill Dunn's Australian gnome of a sidekick. It is both weird and refreshing to encounter an Australian character in an era before the tropes of the accent were really embedded in the popular consciousness.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 364: THE BLACK DRAGON SOCIETY

(Master Comics 021, 1941)

The Black Dragon Society is nothing new: a bog standard Yellow Peril spy and sabotage ring that has a couple of weeks of success before being trounced by Minute-Man.

The one interesting thing about them is that they were based on an actual Japanese secret society that was still extant at the time the comic was published. Despite the fact that the story is just as disseminating as pre-Pearl Harbor comics usually are about the exact country of origin of the Society, the fact is that this is our first Japanese super-villain, even if it's a bunch of spies and even if it's a technicality. History!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 363: MR H

(Master Comics 001 (behind the scenes) or Master Comics 007 (first mentioned) or Master Comics 008 (first appearance on-panel)-Master Comics 020, 1940-1941)

 

Mr H, the mastermind behind all crime in the city of Carterville and its unnamed state, gets up to all kinds of schemes through his proxies. For example:

-running an illegal casino in a hard-to-catch gambling blimp

-robbing a munitions plant in order to outfit a small army of gangsters and enact a criminal takeover of Carterville

-stealing an experimental bomber from the US Army and attempting to sell it to crypto-Nazis

-having his gang murder random Carterville citizens in order to drive down confidence in the police

-stealing an experimental paralysis gas in order to disable and rob the entire population of Carterville 

-attempting to destroy all public transit in Carterville for unclear reasons

-attempting to blow up the Carterville Dam for unclear reasons

-sundry murders and robberies

At first, Carterville's major crime figure and the inspiration for regional super-hero the Devil's Dagger is a guy by the name of Jeff Marlowe, but he falls off of a roof in Master Comics 007, necessitating the introduction of his boss, Mr H. Over the course of his 12-odd appearances Mr H has a variable amount of hair and a selection of different cloth masks. The consistent aspect of his adventures (aside from his orange suit) is his habit of getting away in some sort of motor vehicle at the last second.

Then, in Master Comics 018, Ken "Devil's Dagger" Wyman gets a new coworker, police reporter Holfax. I won't beat around the bush: Holfax is Mr H - introduced, I suspect, because the feature was coming to an end and they needed somebody to be the villain. The great thing about this is that Holfax/ Mr H thus becomes an evil equivalent to Wyman/ the Devil's Dagger, something that I'm always excited to see.

And the piece de resistance is of course the capture of Mr H and the subsequent retirement of the Devil's Dagger in Master Comics 020, a rare ending not just for a Golden Age super-hero but for any super-hero ever.

Mr H might not be terribly exciting in and of himself but I would still love to see a legacy Devil's Dagger BRUNG BACK and who better to act as his foil than an ancient Holfax, out of prison and running Carterville once again.

ADDENDUM: I almost forgot to highlight the fact that Mr H employs one of my favourite costume elements: the mask with attached bald cap.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 362: THE SON OF COUNT DRACULA

(Master Comics 020, 1941)

The Son of Count Dracula: 100/100 for theming and commitment to the bit, 0/100 for practical planning. 

So: a team of private detectives named Splithair and Undermeyer are hired to investigate a series of disappearances associated with Vampire Castle, located in the castle-rich hills of New York State. Splithair is quickly captured by the Son of Count Dracula (tSoCD) and Undermeyer is only saved by the timely intervention of a nosy Bulletman. TSoCD retreats from the dawn and Bulletman escorts a panicky Undermeyer home.

The next day Bulletgirl, justifiably upset at being left behind on the first outing, does some investigating of her own and is promptly added to tSoCD's collection of prisoners, and then Bulletman shows up to save the day.

The Son of Count Dracula turns out to be Splithair, of course, and while I admire his imagination and sticktoitiveness I must note that it is entirely his fault that he was caught. Beyond even the question of whether he should have taken the job to investigate his own crimes there is the simple fact that he didn't need to run a vampire-themed kidnapping ring out of Vampire Castle. Run a regular kidnapping ring somewhere inconspicuous, man! Make yourself at least a little hard to find!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 361: THE THROTTLER

(Master Comics 019, 1941)

Imagine my excitement when I saw that Zoro the Mystery Man was facing a guy called the Throttler so soon after his bout with the Choker: a theme! A villain theme! Huzzah!

And imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the Throttler moniker was a fiction developed by two butlers to cover for their fairly inept kidnapping scheme. There wasn't even any throttling!

Still, I do have to tip my hat to them on one front: in a super-hero universe, pretending to be a guy with a special name and a gimmick is absolutely the way to give your ransom note a bit more gravitas. Too bad for them that it's also absolutely the way to get beat up by a guy with a pet cheetah.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 360: MISTER MASK

(Master Comics 019, 1941)

If you're ever at a party and a guy shows up with a mysterious bequest for the host and then is murdered by an unseen party before he can hand over what turns out to be a huge diamond then take it from me: you are in a comic book. If there's a guy named "Rajah Kohur" there to declare the diamond to be cursed, well that's just what we call further evidence.

Now you're going to want to watch out for costumed crooks - in this case they've gone for a vague Indian/ religious theme to play up the cursed nature of the gem and are using a weird tube that shoots darts made of crystallized poison to kill people because simplicity and costumed villainy don't mix.

Anyway, you're going to want to keep an eye on any guardians, uncles, family lawyers, that sort of folk. Mister Mask turns out to be the heiress' foppish cousin Dariustrying to get her to sell the "cursed" diamond cheap (Rajah Kohur is of course a con artist). His biggest error was in trying all of this at an event attended by the Companions Three - there's no reason to handicap your own attempt at an already difficult task.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 359: THE UNHOLY THREE

(Master Comics 017-019, 1941)

The Unholy Three! A little guy (Nosey), a huge guy (Brutus) and a gorilla (Herbert)!

Oh and of course we must not forget the fourth member of the Unholy Three, their boss "Doctor" J. Twiddley Fairchild (quotation marks his). Details in the actual story are sketchy but it seems as if Fairchild was jailed for larceny, escaped, assembled the other three as his minions and set out to get revenge on those who were responsible for his imprisonment - in other words an old fashioned Judge and Jury Revenge Killing scheme.

This is where things get a bit annoying for me personally. JaJRK schemes are quantifiable based on the number of attempted slayings divided by the number of successful ones. The problem is that while we know that the Unholy Three end up killing all but one of their targets we do not in fact have any idea of how many targets there were - it's more than three but up to something like twenty+ if the defense team and witnesses are included.

Sadly then, JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLING SCORE: n-1/n

The Unholy Three (all four of them) end up getting caught by Bulletman and Bulletgirl before managing to finish off the last of their targets, but someone at Master Comics must have liked them because they returned for a two-issue story. Too bad for J. Twiddley Fairchild: he didn't make it out of the initial jailbreak alive. Leadership of the group passed to Nosey and Bulletman became the new target for revenge.

The actual action is whatever - the Unholy Three kidnap Bulletgirl and try to kill them both with a deathtrap and the second part opens with Bulletman thinking that Bulletgirl has died while the Unholy Three think that Bulletman has. This doesn't really go anywhere interesting.

Ultimately the Three attempt to flee the country and Bulletman kicks them off a cliff to their demise.

OR DOES HE? Because the Unholy Three are collectively our second villain to be resurrected off-panel in time to sign the Crime Exchange petition. Like Mr Murder they never appear again but just knowing that two guys and a gorilla are out there somewhere is enough for me.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 358: THE BLACK HOOD

(Master Comics 018, 1941) 

Okay, I am a big fan of the Black Hood. Let's count down the reasons:

One: very exciting to see the classic super-suit being worn in the early days of suits and robes. This look won't take long to become ubiquitous once it catches on but it's still pretty rare in 1941.

Two: not only is he a fashion pioneer but he is a thought leader in the field of henchman couture. Dressing your guys in a slightly worse version of your own costume (in this case bright rather than dark blue) is a surefire move in the villain game and it's going to be a while before we see it with any kind of regularity.

Three: The Black Hood is introduced as El Carim's arch-enemy, despite never having appeared before' and there are allusions to El Carim having broken up "four of his best rackets" etc. Implied lore is admittedly an easy way to build up a story's interest but I guess I'm a sucker for it.

About the only real criticism I have for the Black Hood is for all that he has experience battling El Carim (potentially years of experience, depending on the rate at which he sets up rackets) he is entirely unprepared to deal with Carim's dank majiks. His approach is a completely straightforward trap and kill attempt and it goes very badly. A real shame.

Nonetheless. regular costumed crooks like the Black Hood are the backbone any supercrime economy and he or his heirs should be BRUNG BACK post haste.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 357: MUMBO JUMBO

(Master Comics 016, 1941) 

I always have an instinct to skip the really racist ones, but I think it's better to acknowledge them? There's lots of messed up shit in old (and new) comics, folks. 

Anyway, Mumbo Jumbo is a guy named Graynor who poses as a voodoo god/ priest in classic (often quite racist) comics style and uses the believers at his command in order to... get revenge on his old boss. It's a shocking lack of ambition on top of everything else - just as well that he gets murderated by Zoro the Mystery Man's pet cheetah.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 356: OLBAID THE GREAT

(Master Comics 016, 1941)

I almost missed the fact that this guy is an evil equivalent of El Carim! I somehow read that opening blurb and thought that his name was Diablo but it's not, it's Olbaid - he has a backward name like El Carim!

What's more, Olbaid has roughly equivalent magical powers to El Carim, and uses magical items to supplement them just like him. In Olbaid's case, this involves the Snake Pool, a magical pool of water that turns humans into constrictor snakes, suitable for use as snakey minions.

While Olbaid is not a stage magician like El Carim, he does have a show business tie via his stable of ex-circus performer henchmen, including cowboy Rifle Ralph, lariat artist Roper Pete and an unnamed knife thrower.

Sadly for Olbaid, the similarities between him and El Carim end when it comes to power levels and their magical duel ends with Olbaid in jail and the snakes restored to humans who hopefully can't remember being used to squash a bunch of people.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 355: MR MURDER

(Master Comics 015, 1941) 

Mr Murder is your "pay or die" style of extortionist and a) has a pretty great name and b) is presumably in an early stage of his career as there is a lot more "die" going on than "pay".

Mr Murder also has a great understated costume: tunic, hat, cape, scarf, gloves. Just a bit off of what you might see someone actually wearing - nice and menacing in a Shadow sort of way.

And of course Mr Murder turns out to be Reilly, the loudmouthed lawyer from the beginning of the story, presumably using his position to determine opportune targets for extortion and employing my fave the rubberoid mask to disguise his identity. It's a fine outing over all but nothing special. The interesting stuff comes with Mr Murders further appearances:

Mr Murder reappears in Master Comics 027, 1942 and there are several weird things going on. The least of these is his decision to incorporate the rubberoid mask into his costume despite his identity no longer being a secret, but I guess that's no weirder than villains who continue to wear regular style masks in such circumstances.

More interesting is the fact that there seems to have been a Mr Murder/ Bulletman clash some time in between, during which a) Mr Murder found out Bulletman's secret identity and b) Bulletman was thought to have killed Mr Murder. As far as I can tell, this story was never published (I reckon that it's equally likely that a story was produced but never published or someone misremembered Mr Murder being in a story he wasn't), but the upshot of it is that Mr Murder is out for revenge and armed with the knowledge to do the deed. He kidnaps Jim Barr and almost succeds in bumping him off but has seemingly forgotten about the existence of Bulletgirl, leading to him getting his but kicked and dying for real.

OR DID HE? This marks our first encounter with the CRIME EXCHANGE, an organization run by future Minor Super-Villain the Crime Broker, the details of which are not germane other than the fact that at one point the Exchange members petition the Crime Broker to bump off Bulletman, a petition consisting mostly of deceased Bulletman villains. It's madness! A huge (dead) portion of Bulletman and Bulletgirl's rogues gallery, returned to life (or, less incredibly, sprung from prison) in a single panel! Madness!

Okay, maybe this is more exciting to me than anyone else but it is neat. And as someone whose official stance is that super-villains are more interesting when they're still alive I heartily approve.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 354: THE MASKED MAN

(Master Comics 015, 1941)

This really illustrates how the life of a mysterious adventurer is different from that of the rest of us: while driving through Florida, Zoro the Mystery Man stops at a random mansion, is rebuffed when he seeks admittance, and decides to snoop around. While you or I might discover, say, a private birthday party or merely a normal family who don't particularly want to entertain every stranger who knocks on their door, Zoro instead finds a masked figure who is busily mutating the mansions inhabitants into ape-men. I guess once it happens to you a couple of times you just get an instinct for it?

Hi-jinks of course ensue, culminating in the revelation that the culprit is Garvey, the black sheep of the family who presumably chose the ape-man route of seeking revenge because it was cooler than merely shooting up the joint. The point is, his name is Garvey Rantrill.

HONOURS

(Master Comics 015, 1941) 

Minute-Man receives the "highest award for valor" from the South American nation of Rinaldo for stopping a load of Nazi stand-ins from blowing up their Washington embassy.

(Master Comics 016, 1941)

The Companions Three receive the Decoration for Valor of the European nation of Cabarro for facilitating and then stopping the theft of their crown jewels.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 353: THE PURPLE HOODS

(Master Comics 013-014, 1941) 

I'm not going to lie: when I started reading this story I got excited for one of the more niche reasons I ever have. See, the prior Buck Jones story - the one with the Ghost Killer gang - was still wrapping up and I had a moment where I thought there would be some very exciting gang continuity if any of the former Ghost Killers, already relict of the White Arrow gang, had joined up with the Purple Hoods. That's an unprecedented three gangs! Alas, Snake and Cope were sent to jail and the counter reset.

Ephemeral hopes and dreams aside, the Purple Hoods are crass capitalist crooks: their big scheme involves kidnapping Mexican farm labourers and pressing them into slavery in a secret oil refinery. Ah, the romance of the Old West!

And speaking of the Old West, this story is a perfect illustration of the weird liminal space that the West occupied in the 40s imagination: is Buck Jones an Old West marshal or a contemporary one? Does this issue offer any clues? The ascent of oil as a valuable resource does overlap with the Old West, and steel oil barrels of the kind pictured above are a 20th Century invention, but one of the major conflicts of the story is a business rivalry between two competing stagecoach lines and while I can find evidence of stagecoaches being used into the early 20th Century I doubt that they were such a going concern as that.

What I'm getting at here is that I don't know which way the anachronisms are going: is Buck Jones an Old West marshal with forward-thinking villains or a modern marshal in an overly romanticized setting? Who knows!

(I must note that I do appreciate the Purple Hood leader getting his own special version of the gang costume)

ADDENDUM:

Two issues later (Master Comics 016, 1941), the story is clearly set in the Old West! Answers have been forthcoming at last!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 352: THE CRYSTAL

(Whiz Comics 015/ Master Comics 014, 1941)

Basics first: the Crystal is nothing particularly special. He's a businessman or something named Mr James who has a wealthy ward named Ronnie Keller and covets the money that he is charged with administering. It's a pretty common turn of events in comics and Mr James is part of the significant minority of greedy guardians who decide to skip the simple embezzlement and advance straight to costumed thuggery. He's got goons and everything!

There are two other things about the Crystal, an annoying one and a tragic one. The annoying one is that due to the way that early anthology comics were shuffled around fairly frequently, the first of the two-part Companions Three story he appears in is in Whiz Comics 015 and the second is in Master Comics 014. Thus, 80-odd years later and reading books in a collated way rather than as they arrive on the shelves of your local newsagent you never ever end up reading them concurrently. It's maddening! For me! About once every ten years!

The tragic one is simply that the Crystal has a pretty great costume! Just look at that dome! But ten years later the Red Hood would really just blow this costume out of the water. It's not even close! The Crystal's good costume was doomed to obscurity in that moment.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 351: THE CHOKER

(Master Comics 013, 1941) 

The long and the short of it is that the Choker is an old-fashioned escaped homicidal maniac of the sort who indiscriminately kills everyone who crosses his path - more akin to a rampaging monster than a villain, plot-wise. He gets into a couple of scrapes with Zoro the Mystery Man (who, by the way, proves susceptible to the worst little old lady disguise in comics history) before meeting a rare Death by Cheetah.

Also: a seldom-seen shoeless villain!

NOTES - OCTOBER 2023

Ripped from the headlines:

The acclimation of a new Dalai Lama must have been big headlines in 1941 because not only did Zoro the Mystery Man save him from being kidnapped for ransom... (Master Comics 014, 1941)

... but over on Earth-Two, the Three Aces did the same! (Action Comics 032, 1941)

Great Folk:

Wizzar, Father of All Magic, teacher and mentor of El Carim, dead and returned as a spirit who appears "when some great crime against the dead remains unpunished" is that all-too-frequent thing in comics: a cosmic plot-hook-delivering entity used only once and never seen again (Master Comics 015, 1941) 

Also, Wizzar sends El Carim to the planet Zaam to battle the tyrant Rashtala and basically everyone on Zaam has an amazing look:

Just great.

Grandfather Oyster, the big oyster that eats people when they try to get the little oysters, is a really terrific sea monster concept. Is this the only hostile oyster in comics history? Probably! (Master Comics 017, 1941)

Memes of Yore: COWARD!

Very unsympathetic crowd of Goat-People watching space hero Captain Venture fight a space dragon. (Master Comics 021, 1941)

Nobody ever delivers a long monologue on why kicking people is an unmanly way to fight but there are a lot of expressions of distaste, like Spike of the Companions Three is uttering here. (Master Comics 021, 1941)