Friday, September 6, 2024

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 606: THE BLACK DEATH

(Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

In Fantastic Comics 004 Sir Richard of Warwick, aka the Golden Knight, seeking his Crusading companions, arrives in the small village of Namara and learns that it has been cursed for the past ten years after a young girl fell down a well and her father blamed everyone but himself for it and cursed the village. The Golden Knight of course heads down that well because where the heck did that girl go? After a few battles with giant spider-scorpions and the like he finds the now-adult Alice ruling a race of underground winged people and they fall in love.

(side note: the reason that the Golden Knight couldn't find his companions was that the writer forgot that he was in North Africa somewhere between Fantastic Comics issues 002 and 004 so he was teleported back to Europe)


Sir Richard and Alice leave the city of the Winged People and are immediately set upon by a quartet of evil knights in service to the Black Death, owner of a nearby castle and dedicated jerk.

The Black Death tosses Alice in a locked room and proceeds to torture the Golden Knight for information on the Winged People but hasn't reckoned with just how proactive Alice is compared to your average Golden Age adventure heroine. For his underestimation of her he is rewarded with a dagger in the back.

Amid all the chaos subsequent to Alice stabbing the Black Death it comes out that he is, in fact, her father Bawala. Rather than merely curse one village and move on from the mysterious disappearance of his daughter, Bawala instead settled down nearby and became a horrible murderous tyrant. Only now, as he is dying does he see the error of his ways in the person of the daughter he allowed to wander off and fall down a well. He was not, in fact, made into a horrible person by the circumstances of his life but was a horrible person all along.

It's a rare heroic patricide!

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