SAMSON DOES THE THING

What is Samson's signature move? Pushing down two pillars while standing between them. What do we want to see? That!

Honorable mention:

(hover for issue numbers)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 628: PROFESSOR DONALDSON

(Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

Sometimes it's nice to read a story about a straightforwardly criminal scientist, and that's just what Professor Donaldson is. He's invented an "electronic exploder" which can turn steel to dust and by gar if he isn't going to use that to extort some money out of people with steel things that they would like to stay intact, such as the superstructure of a skyscraper.

Donaldson is also prepared to pivot: when his original attempt to set up a protection racket fails he attempts to extort NYC itself. This also fails, because Samson is in the city and the Generic New York Mayor has a guy on staff who knows how super-heroes work. Why, they often don't even ask to be paid!

But Professor Donaldson just won't stop pivoting! If extortion isn't going to pay off then a steel-dissolving ray is the perfect thing for bank robbery!

The bank robbery is, alas, Donaldson's last pivot before Samson and David catch up to him. He puts up a very brave front but ultimately a pasty-faced lab rat, even armed with a fire axe, is no match for David, let alone Samson.

At least Donaldson's death is somewhat poetic, as he is run down, or "wrecked" by a train, just as he himself had wrecked a train in his earlier campaign to extort the city.

Shout out also Professor Donaldson's unusually large number of named henchmen. Good luck looking for new employment Buck, Butch, Silky, Mike, Slinky and Bill. Except not Buck because Samson killed him. Rest in peace, Buck.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 627: CHONG

(Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

Chong is basically just a pirate, but there are three things worth noting about him. The first is that his name is Chong in a comic book published in 1940 and he is not a horrendous Asian stereotype of one sort or another. It's a low bar and he cleared it with aplomb.

The second thing is Chong's weapon of choice, an enormous spiked wheel that rises out of the depths to wreck ships. It's not precisely a War Wheel but so far it's a close as we've seen and since the real thing doesn't actually debut until 1952. Is it the most efficient way to loot ships? No. Is it a huge spiked wheel? Yes.

The third thing is just how bad Chong is at killing Sub Saunders. Sub handily avoids the ersatz War Wheel, two goons and two explosions in quick succession and while, yes, not getting killed by villains is basically a hero's entire job they usually end up getting knocked around a little bit at least. Chong doesn't even manage to ruffle his foe's hair.

Even the appearance of Zobbo, Chong's amazing man-ape bodyguard, barely fazes Saunders. Chong is just that bad at his job.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 626: THE SUPER FIEND

(Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

The Super Fiend (aka the Super Fiend of the Lost Planet) is, if not the archetypal Fletcher Hanks villain then certainly representative of one of the major Hanks villain types, the civilization hater. He's got no stated motivation but the Super Fiend hates civilization so much that he's out to destroy it on a planetary scale, starting with Mars and moving on to Earth as an encore.

The Super Fiend's Thermal Ray Spore does the job on Mars, rendering the question of whether non-Hanks Stardust stories actually canonically occurred a bit moot - if Dr Martinious and the Brain Men did actually exist then they're just so many charred bones now.

Though Mars is toast and Earth is in the crosshairs, unfortunately for the Super Fiend Stardust the Super Wizard only allows one genocide per story, and with a cry of "You're going bye-by!" he whisks his foe off to face justice.

Like Wolf-Eye before him, the Super Fiend is made big and strong for the final righteous beatdown - presumably this keeps happening because Fletcher Hanks recognized that even the righteous Stardust looks like a bit of a bully beating up people 1/3 his size.

The Super Fiend is left behind on Mars to contemplate his actions among the bones of his victims for the rest of his life - a classic Stardust punishment and in fact the same one meted out to Moloka in the non-Fletcher Hanks story in the previous issue. This raises the schoolday spectre of the compare-and-contrast vis-a-vis Moloka and the Super Fiend. On paper, they are very similar villains, but Moloka never felt quite right as a Stardust foe while the Super Fiend did. Why? Simple clarity of purpose, perhaps? Molka's goals remain undefined throughout while the Super Fiend was lightning focused on destroying civilization, one planet at a time.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 625: BOLOCH

(Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

Sub Saunders is just cruising around in the ocean when his submarine is swept into an underground cave, the home of the fantastic Cave Things! I was very excited when this comic started but sadly this is the most we see of Cave Things slithering and creeping around like this. They still have a lot going for them as far as humanoid creeps go but it's real sad that we don't get to see more creeping and crawling.

Anyway, the Cave Things worship a god called Boloch and of course there's a guy inside exploiting them via a speaker setup. His plan hits a real snag when Sub Saunders notices the big open door on the front of Boloch's idol and just hops inside.

Boloch (the man inside the statue is also named Boloch, which suggests that he named his fake god after himself?) bangs his head on a table after being socked by Saunders and passes away. And since Sub Saunders emerged from the flames of Boloch unscathed, he himself is acclaimed as Boloch in human form and allowed to leave peacefully.

The trope of an advanced outsider taking advantage of an isolated community by posing as a god and/or repurposing an idol or other religious infrastructure to their own ends is a long-established one, but the real head-scratcher with regard to Boloch is just how in the heck he even knew there was a community of weirdos to take advantage of on the ocean floor, let alone how he set everything up. We shall never know, thanks to the efforts of that brave table.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 624: MOLOKA

(Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

Moloka is our second Stardust the Super Wizard foe from a story not penned by Fletcher Hanks and I'd say that our unknown scribe gets things mostly right: there's certainly enough wanton destruction for this to be a Hanks comic. Moloka is a humanoid alien who has developed world-wrecking super weapons and as the comic opens is using them to blast away at various inhabited planets.

Where exactly this is happening is a little unclear. If Fletcher Hanks' idea of how outer space is structured is a little fuzzy then his stand-in is even more vague on the particulars. It's equally possible that Moloka is based in another star system and using weapons with an interstellar range as it is that he's in our own Solar System and there are just a heap of extra planets to blow up.

Moloka's goal is also a bit unclear. I think that he's looking to become some sort of Galactic or Solar Dictator but he spends an awful lot of time just blasting away at inhabited planets without really asking to be put in charge. It's possible that the power is an excuse and the blasting is the point.

Moloka is based on Pluton, which is either an alternate spelling of Pluto (that I have seen before to be honest) or as mentioned above a completely extrasolar one. There's no way of working out which it is though I will say that none of Pluto's satellites were discovered before 1978 so I have no idea where Nemus is supposed to be.

Moloka does give some hints as to his mental state when he mistakes a vengeful Stardust for some sort of elemental being created by the hellish energies at his command. It's kind of charming! It's also wildly out of character for Stardust "the shortest distance between two lines is a punch" the Super Wizard. Stardust's goal with this little ruse is to goad Moloka into firing his weapon at Earth, then using his own patented ray-reversal technology to redirect it back to its source.

As to whyhe bothers to do this when he's perfectly capable of blowing the whole of Pluton to hell and gone? I guess it's a bit more of an ironic punishment to leave a warmonger stranded on a planet that they themself have devastated? Sure, we'll go with that.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 623: THE CYCLOP

(Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

Captain Kidd is once again back in Africa, this time in search of a lost explorer named Perez, and has once again bribed a local into taking him somewhere dangerous only to get that local killed (this happens about a third of the time with Kidd - not quite often enough to make a very depressing supercut).

Kidd and his unfortunate hireling Wango track Perez to the Lost Valley, where they discover and are captured by a tribe of one-eyed Beastmen, respectively.

Surprisingly little is made of the fact that the Beastmen worship a hypnotically paralyzed woman. Ordinarily a reveal like this would be lead to the woman's rescue being the focus of the rest of the adventure but this panel is her only appearance - is it possible that Captain Kidd thinks that she is merely a statue? A grim fate indeed. 

Also: RIP Wango.

The Beastman leader (referred to as "the Cyclop" throughout) of course turns out to be Perez, who went mad upon his discovery of the valley and somehow became the leader of the whole place. If I'm honest, the theoretical comic about the sequence of events that lead to that happening (and presumably to that poor woman becoming a goddess-statue) is more interesting than what we got.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 622: PROFESSOR SIMM

(Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

We open on a very exciting scene! Professor Simm has unleashed giant monsters on an unnamed US city! Chaos reigns!

I unironically love these monsters. They have that half-baked quality that you get in generic kids toys - the kind of thing you got as a cheap way for your parents to occupy you on a trip and because they have no built-in lore you end up inventing a whole backstory for them. That picture of the humanoid reptile standing next to the giant anthropoid would be on the packaging.

Having front-loaded a lot of positivity (one last dollop: look at the cavemen riding away on the creatures! It's very cute!) I must now reveal that this is a pretty bad comic book adventure. I don't know what was going on at Fox Features in mid-to-late 1940 but they were wildly swapping writer/artists in and out of serials - this very issue features both a Stardust the Super Wizard and a Space Smith story drawn by someone other than Fletcher Hanks!

While this is a minor problem in terms of narrative consistency - this is as far as I know the only time that Samson it depicted as being three times taller than an average human, for example - it also feels like the story was put together in haste or as the third or fourth thing on someone's mind. Nothing quite hangs together - Professor Simm starts out demanding control over the US government and later is purely interested in money, for example.

Once Samson makes his way to Simm's island castle the story becomes a series of loosely connected vignettes: Samson finds a cage full of cavemen and gets inside, only to immediately leave again. Samson finds a room full of prisoners and skeletons and frees the prisoners. Samson confronts Simm, who escapes. Samson frees more prisoners. Samson kills Simm. It could all be assembled into a coherent plot but very much is not.

That said, it certainly is a comic full of incident, such as this scene in which Samson sets off a volcano to destroy all the monsters (and hopefully not the prisoners. Hopefully they escaped off-panel) and flies away on a giant bird.It just doesn't all hold together as a narrative. Things can only get more coherent as we make our way through the Golden Age, right? (SPOILER: not necessarily)