Saturday, September 21, 2024

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 620: PRINCE FERNANDO DIABLO

(Fantastic Comics 008, 1940)


Prince Fernando Diablo, scion of an unnamed European royal family (though given his name, style of dress and headquarters in the Pyrenees I think it's safe to say that he's heavily implied to be Spanish), has a plan: take advantage of the wars raging in 1940 to violently reinstate monarchy across the continent! Specifically, he and his scientists have developed a horrible plague that they plan on releasing throughout Europe to reduce the population to manageable Feudal levels. He's a real stinker, Prince Fernando Diablo.



The thing about this plan is that it's predicated on the idea that people could get too tired of war to keep going after only a couple of years. It's weirdly optimistic for a story that also includes wholesale germ warfare on the streets of Paris. Also, this is a wild start to your return to monarchical rule: "yes, we killed most of you with disease-spewing tanks, now acknowledge our god-given right to lord over the remaining population." 

I do always love to see a drill-tank.

Luckily for the remaining people of Paris, Samson's pal Professor Brun is a true comic book polymath as capable of whipping up a cure for a new super-disease as he is at designing a teleportation machine. Pretty soon they're being sprayed with a good gas to counteract the bad plague gas. Parisians are going to have a very complicated relationship with mists and fogs going forward, I reckon.

There are quite a lot of hoops to jump through, minions to smash and war machines to destroy but Samson eventually makes his way to Diablo's mountain fastness to beat him up and chuck him off a cliff. No monarchist, he!

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