(Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)
Maybe it's because the MLJ version of the Devil is so fresh in my mind but... this is an underwhelming version of the Devil. He teams up with Death - and it's a measure of how lacklustre this Devil is that I'm going to deal with the Death separately rather than treat them as a duo - to eliminate their common enemy Yarko the Great. Death does all the legwork toward this goal so we'll discuss that later (I am however going to count them as our first Revenge Squad, one of the best things in comics).
Aesthetically, this is a classic Devil, though one missing the trident and tail. And like many interpretations of the classic Devil, it suffers from the fact that it looks like a guy in a costume, down to the fact that the horns seem to be incorporated into a cowl rather than being organic. And that can work! I've seen plenty of interpretations of the purposely foppish Devil getting one over on those who underestimate him. This Devil, by contrast, has a guy named Beppo with a knife and a skin-tone shirt.
The Devil does in fairness manage to capture Yarko by the simple expedient of having his other, non-Beppo henchman (Killer Kirby, if you must know) blindfold his magic eyes. The Devil attempts to roast Yarko alive in a special chamber but Yarko escapes by the simple expedient of wiggling his magic eyes out from under the blindfold, and any deathtrap that a guy can blink his way out of has got to be counted as a dud.
With Yarko free, the devil is immediately
BANISHED TO HELL
and it says something that the coolest part of his whole endeavour is the moment that he was soundly defeated. Frankly, he might as well have been a costumed gang boss as the Prince of the Damned, and it just occurred to me how wild it would be if he was just a guy in a costume trying to put one over on Yarko and getting banished to Hades for his efforts. Real of Fake, the Devil bit off more than he could chew.
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