(Fight Comics 002, 1940)
After spending so long with Sub Saunders in the far-off year 10 000 it's a bit strange to detail an undersea menace that he isn't battling but here we are and our focus is present-day adventurer Kinks Mason, who sets out with nothing but a helmet that extracts oxygen from seawater to solve the mystery of just where all these missing ships have been getting to and ends up discovering an underwater civilization of seaweed people.
(I really like the Weed People, as they are referred to in the text a couple of times - their krinkly kelp frond aesthetic is very pleasing to me. It's quite different from the look of Kozar's Sea-Weed Men but I enjoy them in a similar fashion. Just something about humanoids made of seaweed, I guess)
Weed Person society is dependent on a giant whirlpool-powered chlorophyll manufacturing plant. Just where this infrastructure came from and how the Weed People existed without it is not elaborated upon - did their primitive ancestors subsist on naturally occurring chlorophyll or spend their days basking in the sun photosynthesizing and then completely abandon that lifestyle once some unnamed Weed Person genius created the machine? Plausibly!
Chlorophyll isn't just the Weed Person staff of life, however. It also turns humans into Weed Creatures, which, though they look and are named similar to the Weed People are in fact distinct and who serve as slaves of the Weed People in their bid to take over the world.
The Weed People and their Queen have made the crucial mistake of not being genre savvy enough to know that any lone adventurer, particularly one with an action hero-y name like Kinks Mason, should be killed immediately and they end up dead for their trouble. Specifically, Kinks goes ahead and blows up the chlorophyll machine, dooming all Weed People society to extinction. Hopefully there's some hipster Weed Person subculture on the fringes of society still harvesting chlorophyll in the ancient ways because it tastes better, if only for the sake of Kinks Mason's conscience.
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