MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 579: COLOSSUS

(Colossus Comics 001, 1940)

I included this cover here in order to indulge in a little personal nostalgia but instead I feel like I am going a bit mad. See, I know this cover very well, from somewhere. I thought it was from Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Supervillains, which I read through about one million times as a youth, but when I decided to check out the entry on Colossus in that book I could not find one. Ditto for the Encyclopedia of Monsters and even the Encyclopedia of Superheroes. As far as I can tell the oldest book I own with this image in it is Jon Morris' the Legion of Regrettable Supervillains, and that came out when I was 36 years old - will I ever learn where I encountered it as a young skeleton?

But enough of my memory crisis. The real important thing to note about this cover is that That's Not What Colossus Looks Like, or at least Dresses Like. Perhaps if this issue weren't his sole appearance he might have adopted something closer to the... well, I can only really describe it as a metal bondage outfit. The metal bondage outfit that he's wearing on the cover, then

Colossus is originally Richard Zenith, a humble lab assistant of the year 2640. He works for scientist Doctor Blitzmann, who is a good enough boss to know that Zenith's secret wish is to be a burly six-foot tall man like their colleague Bryn Hale (rather than *squints* his current burly five-foot-ten or so) but also a terrible enough boss that he says this in a shitty and humiliating way while injecting Zenith with growth serum.

Blitzmann's daughter Eve also works at her father's lab and it seems like she might not have gotten the job on merit because when she prepared the syringe of Hyper Catalyst VII growth serum for Zenith so that he would stop referring to himself as a "short king" she mixed it roughly 20 000 times stronger than needed. 

The serum seems to be more than merely biochemical in nature, as Zenith grows to thousands of times his original size without collapsing into a pile of viscera and broken bones. Plus, his clothes grow with him!

The power inherent in being a big big man immediately goes to Zenith's head and he declares himself "Colossus, Ruler of All the Earth!" and sets out to extract a surrender from Gregory Graves, head of the Tri-Planetary Federation's Solar Patrol, by threatening to destroy the Federation capital of Urbania. It's you classic case of a nerd being given power and immediately turning into a fascist.

In a fortuitous coincidence Earth's old enemies, the very cool Plantaliens are also attempting to conquer the planet at the same time as Colossus and so there is a bit of a turf war that is handily won by the unstoppable 2000 foot tall man. Too bad, Plantaliens! Try again in another 60 years!

Colossus Comics was reportedly a test by Sun Publications to see if it was worth getting into this crazy new industry, and if that was indeed the case then the answer was "no" because this is the only appearance of Colossus (next month, i.e., never, "Colossus over Europe"!)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 578: SEMMURABI

(Champion Comics 010, 1940)

Have you ever wondered what happened to the Chaldeans, the ancient Mesopotamian people whose height was from the 9th to 6th centuries BCE, who were mentioned frequently in the Bible and whose name was lent to a Babylonian dynasty? Well wonder no longer! They were merely tucked away in a little hidden city less than a day's travel via horse from Jerusalem! At least until 1940, that is, because that's when the city's leader, a fellow named Semmurabi, made the mistake of being too horny. Or maybe he'd been kidnapping clueless tourists (sincerely clueless: they were roped in by an offer to show them the remains of Noah's Ark on Mt Arrarat) to add to his harem forever and this was just the first time he'd done it to someone who knew a super-hero.

In Semmurabi's defense (for not knowing to keep a lower profile, not for kidnapping women) this is a very early Dr Miracle adventure and he can be excused for assuming that he wouldn't meet opposition from a tuxedoed magic-man (but again, he will not be excused for the kidnapping). This also might explain why he makes the classic mistake of challenging a more powerful opponent to a magical duel in the astral realm: because he simply didn't know better.

Ignorance is no excuse in magic as in law and Semmurabi meets his end in the depths of a star. Sorry, Chaldea. You were ruled by a dope and now you pass into history. (Champion Comics 010, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 019

Look at all these dang guys

Lobo, the Flying Sleuth: 

Lobo, the Flying Sleuth, aka the Lobo, had a pretty short run. But! He's a cowboy and a pilot and a detective. That's a lot of things! (Champion Comics 006, 1940)

Doctor Miracle:

We've seen guys like Dr Miracle before: the nigh-omnipotent magician with so much power at his fingertips that his only real challenge is in finding a foe tough enough that he doesn't defeat them instantly. He's even got the obligatory Huge Asian Manservant, a Nepalese man named Akim depicted with all of the racial sensitivity that one might expect from 1940s comics.

Dr Miracle's real mark of distinction is that he is also a scientific hero, as likely to be blasting a foe with disintegration rays as to be slinging spells. 

It's a neat bit of variation in his adventures and of course it gets dropped almost immediately, as his second appearance establishes him as a student of the Elders of the aptly-named City of the Elders in Tibet. After passing a test to show his magical aptitude, Dr Miracle is sent out into the world to battle injustice, with Akim coming along as a... gift? Unsettling. (Champion Comics 009, 1940)

Doctor Hormone:

Doctor Hormone exemplifies a particular sort of cultural ingestion/ regurgitation of scientific ideas that permeates all fiction but really found a home in the medium of comic books. Any sufficiently impressive scientific discovery can be reinterpreted as being tantamount to magic, the major example of which is of course the part that radiation would play as a catch-all origin in the Silver Age (and nanotech and genetic engineering in turn as time marched on) but as in any field there are many also-rans for every big hit: vitamins and radio waves and transistors (in the case of Silver Age Iron Man) as science-magic that can accomplish any task. With Doctor Hormone it's hormones. Obviously.

As we join the Doctor and his destined-to-be-bullied granddaughter Jane Hormone, he has just been saved from age-related death by a youthening hormone. He and Jane subsequently set out to help the beleaguered nation of Novoslavia defend themselves from the depredations of Germany/Russia analog Eurasia.

Hormone's first major antagonist is Rassinoff, aka Assinoff, a Novoslavian official secretly working for Eurasia and dosed with donkey hormones by Jane due to his initial bad vibes. Assinoff is exactly the jackass that his form reflects and is a very satisfying villain to see be repeatedly defeated and humiliated.

Highlighting some of the more noteworthy hormone effects: the youth hormone (calibrated to make anyone who takes it 25 years old) is cool and fun when used on the elderly but the implications of using it on the young swiftly become horrific. At least the baby was turned into an adult man to save his life - these poor boy scouts are signing up to be adult child soldiers.

It's not particularly visually interesting but Hormones second appearance concerns his deploying a gas-based hormone that turns Eurasians into Novoslavians, which raises the question of just what they thought a hormone was over at Popular Comics.

In Popular Comics 056, Assinoff tries to destroy Hormone's credibility by injecting Novoslavian citizens with random samples from a captured selection of Hormone's work, which completely backfires when it turns out that the Novoslavian national character is extremely okay with being turned into some random animal. It's a nation of furries! 

These eagle-men pilots are the first of many Novoslavian animal-man hybrids, btw.

Issue 57 of Popular Comics involves Novoslavian locust, wasp, termite and rat hybrids going out into the world to gather up plagues of their respective animals to unleash on Eurasia. Pictured here is the rat-man, my personal fave.

The ultimate expression of Hormone's hybridization efforts are these five Novoslavian volunteers who were turned into fleas and then restored to human form. Though they no longer look like fleas, they retain proportional jumping, flea-strength, etc, Spider-Man style. And the transformation is very gross-looking!

So that's Doctor Hormone in a nutshell: a bit light, plotwise, but full of charming characters and a cavalcade of new and interesting concepts in body horror. (Popular Comics 054, 1940)

Martan the Marvel Man:

 I feel a bit bad making Martan follow Dr Hormone, honestly, because his adventures are at least as wild, but they aren't as unique. In brief: Martan and his wife Vana are Antacleans, aliens from a super-advanced race a few million light years off. They kind of accidentally land on Earth and almost immediately get mixed up in the affairs of primitive humans. At first it's regular old "they war amongst themselves, how foolish!" stuff but eventually they discover in incipient invasion by Antaclea's ancient enemy the Martians and really throw their weight behind the Earth cause: supplying technology, setting up a world government etc. - Martan and Vana's impact on the world is much greater than your typical comic book characters'. (Popular Comics 046, 1939)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 577: THE BLACK LAMA

(Champion Comics 010, 1940)

It's a small consolation but this guy isn't actually a lama! Unlike the Mad Lama or the Four Lamas before him (and more than a few to come), this fellow is merely a bandit chief presumably called the Black Lama because he is Tibetan! It this better than a whole class of holy men being portrayed as evil scheming villains? A little! I also want to say that it's because his headquarters are a former lamasery but I don't know if I just made that up.

The Black Lama is the third antagonist of twelve faced by adventurers Dash Dolan and Nalya Randolph (aka the Golden Goddess) on their quest to reunite the twelve diamonds known as the Dragon's Teeth so that their patron Dr Ying can sell them and use the proceeds to defend China from a dastardly warlord. It's a very video game or 80s cartoon setup: the two are taking the gems to sell when they are waylaid by the warlord's soldiers and must use the Dragon's Teeth as a distraction to save their lives. Twelve soldiers then grab one gem each and immediately scurry off to sell them to seemingly the most evil man they could think of, because each one is in the hands of a grade-A creep - most of them just kill the soldiers rather than pay them!

The Black Lama is remarkable among this group mostly for his name - it's that extra 5% that elevates him from mere villain to minor super-villain. Also he captures Nalya and attempts to marry her against her will, a classic villain move if ever there was one.

The Lama has plans to dispose of Dash Dolan by dunking him into a cauldron of molten gold, This is a good and very gruesome deathtrap! It also should not surprise you to learn that the Black Lama himself meets his end in that very cauldron. You know what they say: you live by the cauldron of molten gold, you die by the cauldron of molten gold.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 576: GRUNDO THE GREAT

(Champion Comics 010, 1940)

There are a few things to like about Grundo the Great: his mustache, his name which sounds like it's what Miss Grundy would be called in a 1960s Archie Comics fantasy series about the heroic students battling the teachers as evil warlords, the fact that he has a "crew of mad chemists and technicians" in his mountaintop castle somewhere in the Midwestern US... Lot of good stuff. His ultimate aim, to take over America, is a little standard but you have to admit that it's villainous.

If Grundo (his real name, by the way: Lars Grundo) has a major flaw, it's in going too big, too early. In order to raise funds for his mad science crew he pulls a heist of the fabulous Taj Mah Jewels while they are being transported by plane, exactly the kind of crime that attracts the attention of a super-hero like the Human Meteor.

(side note: this is the second "Taj Mahal Jewels" sound-alike I've encountered from the year 1940 - the first being the Green Mask and the Taj Lamah Jewels - and that's the sort of coincidence that makes me think that there was a famous Taj Mahal Jewels exhibition in 1939 or 1940. Turns out that "Taj Mahal" is one of those search terms that really blows out your results with a lot of unrelated information. There was a "Taj Mahal Emerald" on display at the 1939 NY World's Fair but that's about as far as I'm going to get without doing actual research so I'll just assume that that's what inspired both)

The Human Meteor does take an interest, and makes his way to Grundo's mountain fastness. Grundo employs a really fantastic deathtrap: a door that opens up onto a sheer cliff that a puruer can be baited into charging through. It only works on an enemy who can't fly, unfortunately for Grundo.

Grundo and his crew are so completely outclassed by the Human Meteor that it's a bit of a mercy when they are all blown to high heaven by their own bombs. Perhaps they would have had more of a chance to shine if they had faced off against a slightly less superhuman foe.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 575: NAD NEUROD

(Champion Comics 009, 1940) 

Nad Neurod is a gang boss with an ambitious and not-uncommon-in-comics scheme: knock out the power and other utilities so that you can take advantage of the resultant confusion and loot an entire city (NYC in this case) at once! Even more importantly, he and his gang provide the perfect test/demonstration of the Human Meteor's powers in his first foray into the outside world.

(Nad Neurod is also exactly the kind of moniker that makes my Backward Name Senses tingle, but I'll be danged if I can find any evidence of anyone named Dan Doruen existing ever, let alone in 1940. I'd put money on it being a reference to something, but sadly I must place it on the big Pile of Unsolvable Puzzles and move on with my life)

Neurod and his cronies have a particular role to play, and that is to be a reasonably credible threat that a super-hero can thrash on their first outing, and they serve their purpose admirably - they completely flummox the authorities of New York City (probably) and are themselves flummoxed (and mostly killed) by the Human Meteor.

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 004

More of those pesky real people have gotten into my comic books!

Andrew Jackson:

Character Keith Kornell, aka the West Pointer, is a descendant of Andrew Jackson, something you would perhaps be more proud of in 1939 than today. (Top-Notch Comics 001, 1939)

Benito Mussolini:

He's a fairly oblique reference to Benito Mussolini but I reckon that up-and-coming Filipino dictator Remy Mussoni fits the brief. (Wonderworld Comics 008, 1939)

Billy the Kid:

Appears in a questionably true story told by character Windy Parks (Western Picture Stories 004, 1937)

the Dionne Quintuplets:

"Ad-Ventures at the Circus" was a recurring feature throughout the life of Star Comics (1937-1939), and it's a fascinating artifact of the time that someone more qualified than me should write about some day. Long story short it was a twee little comic about advertising mascots going to the circus to watch other advertising mascots perform. There's maybe a 75/25 split between the Surprisingly Familiar and Surprisingly Unfamiliar mascots with regular appearances by Surprisingly Racist ones. It's a bit like a Neolithic Foodfight!. 

Everything about this feature is weird, from the slightly uncanny valley illustrations by Raphael Astarita to the fact that it doesn't really seem to be sponsored content (other than a command appearance by NRG, mascot of heavy Star Comics advertiser Baby Ruth). And then the final extant installment comes around and we get the weirdest advertising mascots of all as the Quaker Oats Man leads the Dionne Quintuplets onto stage - five living humans given the same status as the Crackerjack kid or Mr Peanut or some anthropomorphic orange who used to work for Sunkist. It's a grim reminder of just how commodified those poor kids were, right down to their "act" being a pantomime of them going about their day, just like they did in the weird zoo they grew up in. (Star Comics v2 007, 1939)

Gene Autry:

An adventuring version of the singing cowboy in modern times (the Funnies 030, 1939)

George VI of England:

This here visit by King Arnold and his unnamed Queen is certainly meant to evoke the 1939 tour of Canada and the US by King George VI of England and Queen Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother. (Wonderworld Comics 005, 1939)

George Washington:

Not quite an appearance by Washington as adjacent to him, but the fact that one of the Wizard's ancestors is given credit for a key part of the history of the American Revolution is worth noting. (Top-Notch Comics 001, 1939)

FDR:

Misc Minor Appearances: Thanks secret agent K-51 for saving foreign royals (Wonderworld Comics 005, 1939) 

the Mona Lisa:

As the "Lona Dizzi", painted by "Lombardo da Ginki" ("Dixie Dugan" strip, 1931)

Paul Revere:

Ride witnessed - and hide saved - by American Revolution-era child-patriots the Liberty Lads. (Champion Comics 008, 1940)

Robert E. Lee:

Wizard ancestor Thomas Whitney accepts the surrender of Robert E Lee at Appomattox, whether in place of Grant or prior to his showing up cannot be said. (Top-Notch Comics 001, 1939)

Tom Mix:

Like Gene Autry, Tom Mix was a movie cowboy who starred in adventure comics as a larger-than-life version of himself having rootin' tootin' Wild West adventures. Unlike Autry, Tom Mix generally starred in stories set in the Old West, as himself but in the past. Tom Mix also holds the special distinction of appearing in comics from this earliest example (that I have found, at least) to at least the early 50s, long after he had died in October, 1940. (The Comics 001, 1937)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 574: DUKE DAROLDI

(Champion Comics 007, 1940) 

Someone is kidnapping foreign dignitaries and then hanging their skeletons in public spaces! Weird! Sinister! Diplomatically complicated!

The culprit turns out to be gang boss Duke Daroldi, who is killing the diplomats as part of an attempt to involve the US in WWII and then step in and take over once the combatants are all sufficiently weakened. This is a stunningly hubristic plan, especially considering the maybe five other guys in Daroldi's gang. I assume that the steps goes something like:

1. kill diplomats

2. draw the US into the war in Europe

3. ????

4. profit

We never get to see Duke Daroldi's plan come to fruition, because Johnny Fox is on the case. He infiltrates Daroldi's yacht using the surefire "get captured" method, escapes, is recaptured, learns that the diplomats are being skeletonized using the old classic method: a school of piranhas, escapes again and finally engages Daroldi in a high-stakes fistfight in the yacht's crow's nest. 

Daroldi ultimately meets his end, not in his own piranha tank as would be narratively satisfying, but in a simple fall after being uppercutted out of the ship's rigging by Johnny Fox. No followthrough. No commitment to the bit. Finis.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 018

More of these guys and their antics.

Johnny Fox:

Johnny Fox is a guy* from the Florida Everglades who visits his grandfather one day to find him the victim of a treacherous murder. And what's worse, the murderer, one Peter Pokane, did so in order to steal a supply of "sun-shots", i.e., invisibility pills.

*and by "guy" I mean "Native American guy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida" but it's a tricky thing to work into a concise sentence. Also tricky: the racial politics of the Johnny Fox comic! Johnny is a college-educated Seminole and thus free of a lot of the overt stereotypical behaviour of the day but also is a near-superhuman even without the invisibility pills, explicitly due to his Noble Savagery. Plus Peter Pokane's major villainous trait is that he's a "half-breed" which... must I explain why that sucks? What I'm saying is that it's complicated.

Johnny gets the sun-shots back by yeeting Peter Pokane out a penthouse window and begins fighting crime, invisible-style. Keeping in mind, of course, that he has to take a pill to turn invisible and another to turn back. Unless he gets hurt, which will turn him back immediately. Which happens a lot, because Johnny may be invisible, but his shadow never is. As far as invisibility goes, this version might have the most caveats I have ever seen. At least he doesn't have to be nude.

After a while the writers seem to get tired of the invisibility gimmick and have Pokane return just long enough to take the sun-shots to a watery grave (and it's a rare villain who gets killed by the same hero twice). Johnny Fox is now just a regular bow-wielding New York City Private Detective... for about two issues and Johnny's grampa's ghost returns to teach him how to make them. (Champion Comics 006, 1940)

the Human Meteor:

Duke O'Dowd was just a regular Texan serving as a French Foreign Legionnaire until a couple of issues in, when his writers presumably realized that comics about the French Foreign Legion are boring, repetitive and usually pretty racist (though they probably cared more about the first two reasons). So they made Duke homesick, had him earn an honourable discharge and sent him on his way in a plane piloted by fellow Texan Kerry Flynn - an unlucky break for Flynn as it turned out, because somewhere over the Himalayas the two were caught up in a mysterious tornado and blown to the hidden city of Bayakura, a journey that only Duke O'Dowd survived.

Hailed as the Great Deliverer, O'Dowd is introduced to Bayakuran scientist Dr Wah Lee, who outfits him with the Wonder Belt, a superscientific device which provides him with super-strength, the power of flight and invulnerability to metal. Plus he gets a stun ray gun! And a very fun and goofy outfit!

Duke puts down a rebellion by the very low-achieving heir to the throne of Bayakura (his aim was to take the riches of Bayakura to the outside world and live like a king but he decided to do so via a huge heist rather than the traditional and much safer option of embezzling from the kingdom while in power) and installs Wah Le in his place befpre heading to the outside world himself.

Sadly, once O'Dowd rejoins the outside world he trades in the amazing Bayakuran national costume for a more traditional super-hero getup (though the Bayakurans seem to have varied up their outfits as well - perhaps their fashion industry was revitalized by O'Dowd's fresh new looks). He also switches names, from the Great Deliverer to the Human Meteor, which is admittedly more snappy. 

The Human Meteor is also the first character we have encountered who will someday be done dirty by Roy Thomas in 1993's Invaders v2. Briefly, Thomas had the idea to field a team of super-heroes who had defected to the Nazis against the Invaders and since he wasn't allowed to use any actual Golden Age Marvel characters he instead opted for the public domain. 

While my initial instinct is to reject this idea... I must admit that it's not without merit. Plenty of otherwise rational people were also charmed by the fascists - it's unreasonable to think that no superfolk would ever compromise one aspect of their morality for another (it is a badly-written comic, because it's a very 1990s comics). So what we're going to do is not assume that we'll get to it later (three years into this project and I still haven't gotten to 1942, after all) and instead we're going to evaluate just how much of a stretch it was for each character to end up as a Nazi.

While Duke O'Dowd is an adventurer and thrill-seeker who joined the French Foreign Legion for a larf and never really expresses complex morality as opposed to simple justice-seeking, his stated reason for joining the Battle-Axis is that his Boston Irish blood demanded it, which... is plausible as a motivation for attending a few meetings but a huge stretch when it comes to attempting to kill Captain America. (Champion Comics 008, 1940)

Robinhood Jones:

"Rich guy who gives it all up to become a do-gooder hobo" wasn't the most popular trend in early comics but I can conjure up at least half a dozen examples. Robinhood Jones has the added distinction of being a pretty direct pastiche of - you guessed it - Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Some highlights:

Robin Hood - Robert Harrison Jones III

Friar Tuck - Fry Tucker

Little John - Little Jack Lee

Will Scarlet - Bill Scarlet

Alan-a-Dale - some guy named Allen

There's also a fairly delightful swap of archery for horseshoes as an all-purpose solution. Funnily enough, though Robinhood Jones squared off against the same crooked Sheriff of Sherwood City on thereabouts on two separate occasions he never encountered a clear Prince John analog. Or a Maid Marion, for that matter. (Champion Comics 007, 1940)

the Black Ghost:

AKA the Black Rider, the Black Ghost was an alternate identity adopted by cowboy hero Bronc Peeler (himself the character prototype for the slightly less outlandishly-named Red Ryder) on one of the many occasions in which he was framed as a crook and had to prove his innocence. Of note mostly for his very cool outfit consisting of jet black cowboy gear with a white bandit mask. (Popular Comics 039, 1939*)

*Originally a comic strip that was reprinted in Popular Comics, if you're truly interested.