(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)
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