MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 650: RANGO OF SLAVONIA/ MINOR SUPER-HERO: THE MASTER MYSTIC

(Green Giant Comics 001, 1940)

We join Rango, a science villain of some description, after he has failed to conquer Europe. His next move: total destruction.

After absolutely devastating a city in what is probably Slavonia, Rango heads for the United States by the simple expedient of swimming across the Atlantic.

And now we encounter the main attraction, Master Mystic! What a character! Master Mystic is very much ahead of his time, both in his art style and degree of superhuman omnipotence.

Master Mystic's entire battle with Rango feels like something out of a 60s underground comic, slightly unreal and rubbery and full of visual excess. Appropriately, Master Mystic was created by Victor E. Pazmino, whose other credits tended more toward the funny animal content that informed so much of the underground comix scene.

(see also Pazmino's other super-heroic creation, TNT Todd, for some fun costume compare-and-contrast)

It really is a shame that Pazmino didn't do more work along these lines, assuming that he wanted to. Stuff like this visualization of the Master Mystic's telekinesis stands out as innovative by any era's standards.

Master Mystic eventually melts Rango into horrible goo and then returns to his Arctic stronghold to resume his protective watch over humanity North America, and if the super-powered one-upsmanship of their battle felt like something out of 60s counterculture comics then this detached, omnipotent man routine feels very 1980s post-Watchmen, or at least one step away from that. Should some entrepeneur BRING BACK the Master Mystic the next time metatextual super-hero analysis characters like Miracleman come into vogue? It's worth a shot!

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 026

Just look at all these guys.

Power-Man:

Power-Man, aka Rip Regan, private detective or possibly just nosy guy, gets his powers in one of the classic ways: his friend Dr Austin gives him a special suit. It's the simplest of origins and also one that puts a lot of weight on Austin's assessment of Regan's character.

The Power-Man suit is one of the more hand-wavy bits of comic book super-science I have encountered, when you get down to it. Billed as chemically-treated metal woven into cloth, the suit simultaneously makes the wearer light enough to perform superhuman feats of jumping, grants super strength, provides total protection against penetrating weapons like bullets and knives but also crushing damage from a collapsing building and also somehow protects the wearer's head despite it not being covered. It truly is a miracle of science. (Fight Comics 003, 1940)

Mantoka, Maker of Indian Magic:

Mantoka is a comic book magic user, with all of the nigh-omnipotent power that that entails: manipulating the elements, transforming humans to animals, giving himself superhuman attributes like flight, intangibility, size control, etc. It is slightly unclear if he receives his powers from being bitten by a magic snake or if the snakebite is merely a part of a ritual to transfer his father's powers to him. Either way, it's an extremely radical and cool as hell way to become a magic man.

I keep wanting to give the Mantoka strip credit for being a not-racist comic starring a Native American character but then I look at it again and it is in fact built on racist tropes. After a few cycles of this I realized that I was thinking this way because it doesn't go out of its way to be extra racist - the characters are being portrayed at about the racism level of a comical Cockney or a Chinese American c. 1943. Still not great but not as bad as it could be*. (Funny Pages v4 001, 1940)

*only one out of three Mantoka adventures is actually easily available, so all of this applies to that comic only. 

the Owl:

The Owl is an otherwise-unnamed man named Jack who is on a quest for revenge against the gangsters who cost his father his legs and by extension against crime in general. To that end, the never-named father has invented an owl-themed flying suit capable of speed of up to 200 mph. Also, he invented himself what I can only describe as the most unstable looking motorized wheelchair I have ever seen.

The Owl and his dad live in a swamp near an unnamed city in the Southern US, and Jack spends his days working at a library under an assumed name and sweeps up any dirt that falls off of anyone's shoes so that he can take it home to be analyzed in their swamp shack/laboratory. Presumably this is part of some sort of organized plan relating to the leg-revenge quest but the Owl only ever had one adventure and so in effect it's just the weirdest version of Clark Kent working at the Daily Planet or Bruce Wayne palling around with Commissioner Gordon to hear about crime. It does work in this issue though. (Funny Pages v4 001, 1940)

the Green Giant:

The Green Giant! Cover model and namesake for the one and only comic put out by Pelican Productions! Thanks to me spending my formative years with my nose buried in a copy of Jeff Rovin's Encyclopedia of Superheroes that image of him bounding over those buildings was forever seared into my brain as the definitive non-Marvel/DC Golden Age comic book cover, despite the fact that the actual comic probably wasn't really distributed.

I've never really found any information on the Green Giant beyond people pointing out that he wears pants on the cover but not in the actual story, so I kind of went in assuming that he was so bare bones as to be unremarkable but no, the Green Giant is as fleshed out as any single appearance character of the time.

The Green Giant's real name is Brentwood (no first name given), the owner of both a Wall Street Hall Street brokerage firm and a presumably high-tech belt, the latter of which allows him to grow to various enormous heights. I had kind of assumed that the fact of his sheer size and the problems it might cause was not really explored in-comic but there is a mention of the belt having anti-gravity properties as well. That's why he isn't, for example, crushing that building on the cover! How great and more well thought-out than I had assumed! This anti-gravity also explains how the Green Giant hops around like an off-brand Hulk even when at regular size.

One thing that really stands out about the Green Giant's sole appearance is that the problem he is dealing with is a targeted attack on his own brokerage firm. I reckon that an ongoing comic might have featured him acting in a more selfless light but as it stands all the evidence is of him being solely motivated by his own self interest. Do better, Green Giant, sheesh. (Green Giant Comics 001, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 649: THE MONSTER

(Funny Pages v4 008, 1940)

Betty Thomas is the recipient of the sort of inheritance that seems to be aimed at causing trouble: her uncle Henry has left her a fortune, provided that she is of sound mind thirty days after the will reading. If she isn't, the money goes to a secondary inheritor. This is of course the cue for someone to employ a huge hook-handed goon and start a nightly campaign of terror designed to drive her out of her gourd, and the entire rest of the Thomas clan are suspects! Is it sarcastic bad boy Bob Thomas? Crime novelist George Thomas? The sinister unnamed housekeeper? Surely it couldn't be the saintly Dr Freman Thomas?

It is of course the saintly Dr Freman Thomas, who like his employee the Monster learns the hard way that the Arrow doesn't cotton to gaslighting in his New York.

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 002

Once again I present the worst that comics has to offer.

The Great Green Turtle:

The Great Green Turtle is just your standard Yellow Peril Chinatown ganglord, albeit one with a fantastic name. He does try to throw Sub-Zero, a man with ice powers, into a shark tank so we can safely say that he is not a villain with fantastic intelligence. His gem-smuggling ring gets thoroughly kiboshed. (Blue Bolt v1 004, 1940)

The Lama:

The Lama is a bandit chief, essentially, albeit one with a name from one religious tradition and henchmen - Thuggees, natch - from another. He hijacks a plantation and then gets beat up by aviator Captain Kidd. (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

The Fire God:

If there's one thing that Captain Kidd likes, it's finding lost explorers, so when a fellow named Benson goes missing he's off like a shot. He finds Benson about to be sacrificed to the Fire God, a masked figure who a well-placed kick reveals to be a Hitler lookalike in a mask (the Hitler thing is either a coincidence or just kind of meant to indicate generic megalomania in the Fire God's character). This one not only has a white guy easily convincing a group of credulous natives that he is a god but an instance of White People Vs Everyone else as Captain Kidd fruitlessly tries to get out of a sticky situation by playing the race card.

The Fire God ultimately meets his end in the classic writer's cop-out when they don't want to make their guy do a murder: he falls and hits his head on a rock after a sock to the jaw. (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

Mad Ming:

Part of me wants to give Mad Ming some credit for not being as racist a Yellow Peril villain as someone like the Great Green Turtle, but he basically is and I am being tricked. Ming talks and dresses like a normal person and so all of his outrageous villainy is recontextualized, and maybe he would be worthy of reconsideration if all of his schemes and his henchmen and his nom de crime weren't still mired in the muck of the Oriental pulp villain, but as it stands he's just mildly better than his peers, racist stereotype-wise. (Funny Pages v4 001, 1940)

CREEPS OF THE WORLD: THE LIVING PLANET MONSTERS

(Fight Comics 010, 1940)

I wanted to do a fun title goof where "World" was crossed out in favour of "Space" but it seems that I don't have that ability. But yes, it's true! These Creeps of the World are not in fact on the world! Any world! They are in fact one of my favourite sci-fi tropes: living beings so large that they are mistaken for planets!

These particular creeps show up in the solar system early in the 21st Century and after an expedition to explore them goes missing they are visited by Saber, the Spy Fighter, who at this point is pivoting a bit from exclusively fighting spies to general super-hero pursuits. He also gets a massive power boost in this issue, gaining the ability to fly through space unprotected and under his own power as well as to grow to planetary sizes in his own right.

This sequence, in which Saber discovers that the missing expedition is building a colony inside of the monster using its own bones as building materials, is 100% the reason for this post. What an image! Even before the horde of Martian warriors came charging up the rib cage this was one of the weirdest sci-fi locales I had ever seen.

A good thing like an endless bone-filled plain inside of a moon-sized monster man can't last, however. After getting the expedition back to thir spacecraft (and tossing the Martians into interplanetary space), Saber beats up all three of the Living Planet Monsters and then throws the three of them so hard that they disintegrate.

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 006

More real people and their analogs. Lotta Hitlers in this one.

Adolf Hitler:

Hitler analogs c.1940 were often quite visually distinct from the actual man. Samson foe and dictator of Ratonia Dragor honestly looks more like a bald Stalin, and you might be excused for thinking that he was more of a pastiche of all extant dictators. The real clue is in the invasion of Belgium. (Fantastic Comics 002, 1940) 

Meanwhile this as-yet unnamed dictator of the future super-nation of Russmany is a pretty clear Hitler-alike. (Fight Comics 001, 1940)

Misc Minor Appearances:

Hitler-alike dispatches the Tankonaut to sow terror in the US. (Exciting Comics 005, 1940)

Hitlerian dictator Rigo funds Samson foe Kilgor's robot army. (Fantastic Comics 006, 1940) 

Benito Mussolini:

He doesn't actually appear in the comic but "Gasolini" is one of the better dumb stand-in names I have seen for Mussolini. Weirdly, the Dictator mentioned above is so generic that he's not really enough of a reference to any one person to include here. (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

Depicted with his pal Hitler as a background gag in a room full of faux Mayan statuary. (Fantoman 003, 1940)

Fiorello Laguardia:

At this point it's worth noting any time that a generic Mayor of New York City shows up, just to have a record of them. (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

Franklin D Roosevelt:

Misc Minor Appearances:

Meets up with Dr John "Son of the Gods" Thesson to discuss the threat of the Tankonaut. (Exciting Comics 005, 1940)

Confers with Thesson and a panel of others about the threat of the Invincible Five (Exciting Comics 006, 1940) 

Briefly kidnapped by super-gangster Rip-the-Blood, rescued by Stardust the Super Wizard (Fantastic Comics 002, 1940)

Henry Ford:

Motor king "Henry Lord" is kidnapped by the Miracle Men (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

Hollywood Crowd Scenes:

Comic strip "Olly of the Movies", about young actress Olive Lane's travails in Hollywood (seen here as a comic book reprint) is chock full of cameos - and under actual names! Marie Dressler, Mae West, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Jimmy Durante are the ones named, but there are a whole swath (that I am not qualified to identify) in that second panel alone. (Famous Funnies 006, 1935)

Saladin:

Every Crusader hero eventually has to meet Saladin and the Golden Knight is no exception. The creators always have to balance the fact that they obviously think that Saladin is very cool with the idea that he is supposed to be the villain and this is a story where it is not quite pulled off: Saladin spares the Golden Knight because he is such a valiant battler and shows him great hospitality, while the Knight wanders around all surly and churlish talking about how he'd like to kill everyone present. Saladin definitely comes off better in the interaction. (Fantastic Comics 002, 1940)

Saladin and the Golden Knight meet up again a few issues later and the encounter ends with the Golden Knight killing Saladin, a wildly ahistoric event but not a unique one, as you might see if I ever work my way through the hundreds of Real Person in Comics entries I have in spreadsheet form. For the record, Saladin died of a fever, still in control of Jerusalem, a full year after the Third Crusade ended. (Fantastic Comics 008, 1940)

Selection of Old-Time Boxers:

Boxer and heavyweight champ Kayo Kirby has a stress dream in which he meets and is beaten up by successive old-time champs John L. Sullivan...

... Gentleman Jim Corbett...

... and Bob Fitzsimmons (with special appearance by his wife Rose).

He also receives some training from old-time boxer Charley Mitchell, not that it does him much good against the spectres of his own mind. (Fight Comics 009, 1940)

Unknown:

Given that he was kidnapped immediately following "Henry Lord", above, there is a strong possibility that "John Rancab" is also a stand-in name. As "Bacnar" does not appear to be a name and the only John Branca I can find was born in 1950, I am stumped - is it just a bad anagram of "banker"? Maybe. (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 648: GARR STORM

(Fight Comics 008, 1940)

The geopolitics of the future as represented in Spy Fighter stories sure is complicated! At first, the far future world of 1997 contained only three megacountries: Mongo, Russmany and Greater America, but soon enough Greater America was menaced by aggressor nations such as Grotonia, Prussany and Antarctica. Simultaneously, the timeline advanced from 1998 to a more ambiguous "early in the Twenty-First Century." Is the unspoken background story the fracturing of these enormous countries back into something resembling the world today? If it is, then this adventure certainly ties into that as it is concerned with the succession of the Southwest US from the rest of what looks suspiciously like the United States. Whither Greater America? Has it too become fragmented?

The leader of what is only ever referred to as "the States" is the fantastically-named Garr Storm, who either has a tremendous gift for persuasion or is tapping into a legitimate rift between the States and the federal government. Don't start your succession with a war, you guys! It's a bad idea.

But Garr Storm doesn't stop there! He's not just a traitor but a double traitor, as his interests lie not with the people of (scrolls back up to squint at map) California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico but with an unnamed Asian power, possibly Mongo. Was this whole civil war solely for Garr Storm's benefit or was he forced to broker the deal to secure the arms he needed to take on the US Army?

Regardless of his motivations, the revelation that Storm had sold them out is surprisingly effective in cooling the revolutionary spirit of the Southwest and the nation is once again united in harmonious patriotism. What a fantastical future world!

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 025

Just a great bunch of guys.

David:

I read the Samson stories in Big 3 before those in his home comic Fantastic, so while I knew about his sidekick David I didn't really know what his whole deal was. I had read that Samson just found him sitting around somewhere and assumed that that was hyperbole but no, it's not: Samson is investigating some mysterious plane crashes in the Rockies when he just finds a kid, who turns out to be the only survivor of the latest crash, and just... brings him along. There's no real attempt to address the fact that he must be an orphan now (or if not and he was travelling alone for some reason, that his family now thinks he is dead) or to find him a familial guardian - heck, his name isn't even David. It's low-key one of the weirdest sidekick origins in comics and that's before he gets his own pair of fur briefs. (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

UPDATE - the Fantom of the Fair:

The Fantom of the Fair gets his own short-lived book that sees him spending more and more time fighting crime outside the New York World's Fair, if you can believe it. To that end he adopts the more generic name of the Fantoman. The costume changes (blue instead of black, uncovered lower face) happened at the end of 1939 and technically I've read more Fantom stories in which he had the new one than the old but it never feels right to me. At least you can still see his hair through the cowl.

Though he has a new name and a not-so-new look, Fantoman retains one of his most iconic properties: every time you start thinking of him as just another masked adventurer he busts out another heretofore-unseen superpower or bit of lore suggesting he is a thousand year old demigod or something. See above as he either teleports or passes through matter for the first and last time. (Fantoman 003, 1940)

the Spy Fighter:

It kind of says something about the mood of America in 1940 that there are multiple comic book series that take place in the 1990s after what we know as World War II has stretched on for fifty years (Marvel's Breeze Barton is the other one that I can recall off the top of my head, while MLJ's Doc Strong is from a future ravaged by a whole century of WWII). In this version of that, the war has resulted in an amalgamation of the world into three rival nations: Russmany (Europe and Africa), Mongo (Asia) and Greater America (the Americas), and in this world of super nations, a super spy is required to ensure the sanctity of the Greater American way of life.

That man is Saber, the Spy Fighter! Who does eventually put on a shirt. Saber starts out as physically gifted telepath who roots out enemy agents by reading their ill intent in their own minds and then beats them up for it. Over time, the challenges he faces get larger and less specifically espionage related, and he develops new abilities to meet them, including that of changing his own size at will, to the point that he is eventually able to travel through space on his own power to fight planet-sized enemies. And what can Mongo do to challenge that? (Fight Comics 001, 1940)

the Skull Squadron:

Chip Collins' Skull Squadron is extremely unremarkable but at this point I have to make note of every skull-adjacent comic book thing. They operate somewhere in between a commando group and the Suicide Squad and barely even have skulls painted on their planes. SKULL SCORE: 1/2 and only for the name. (Fight Comics 001, 1940)