MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 030

Some real obscurities from the Hillman House of Ideas:

the Sky Wizard:

The Sky Wizard is an otherwise-unnamed super-scientist who seemingly dresses in his futuristic super suit 24/7. There's not too much else to him other than that because he's one of those characters who has so many gadgets and gizmos that all the narrative focus goes to them rather than him. A partial list: wing suits, super planes, super strength serum (the amazingly named "powerstrength formula"), a paralyzing Q-Ray gun...

... and by far the coolest of the Sky Wizard's accessories, his laboratory base, the grounds of which are composed of the elastic metal rubberium and which can be filled with helium so that the entire estate becomes a mobile floating island. (Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

Dash Dixon:

Dash Dixon works for an unnamed police department in an unnamed city in an undefined role (he is described only as a "top athlete with the police force" in his first appearance), Assigned to protect one Dr Lorenz and succeeding in doing so, Dixon is rewarded with a chance to be the subject of an experiment in which he is injected with "perpetual life rays" which render him super strong, at least partially invulnerable and presumably immortal.

To counter the fact that the ray would seep out of Dixon's body within 24 hours, Lorenz equips him with a suit of pliable metal that he will presumably have to wear for the rest of his presumably immortal existence. Two things about this suit:

1. Dr Lorenz has a fantastic look with his lab getup and green dome helmet. Why Dixon's suit is charitably Very Bad Looking is beyond me.

2. It might not be clear from this picture but the suit includes a haircut-shaped black helmet held on by a strap. It can thus be implied that the ray will leak out of Dash Dixon's scalp but will not do so from his face and hands.

Frankly the whole suit thing gives me mild anxiety. If I were Dash Dixon I might just opt to receive my immortality treatment daily.

One last thing about Dash Dixon is that the first issue seems to imply that he exists in a near future world with air taxis and commuter rockets but it doesn't really come up otherwise. A mystery for the ages. (Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

the Scorpion:

A regular-style two-fisted vigilante, hated and feared by the underworld, occasionally wanted by the police, etc. The real thing that makes the Scorpion (aka Hal Ward) stand out is that he doesn't really bother with a mask or any other way to not be immediately recognized by all of his mortal enemies. (Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

Blanda the Jungle Queen:

Blanda the Jungle Queen really lives up to her name by being the most by-the-book version of the White Goddess style of jungle adventurer, right down to the fact that she immediately abandons her adoptive people and their ways in a wave of horniness the second that a mediocre white guy hoves into view. (Miracle Comics 001 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 673: THE UNHOLY ONE

(Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

The Unholy One is the major antagonist of scientist-hero the Sky Wizard for three of his four appearances, although for the first two of those appearances he is present only as a voice on the radio directing his American agents Hawk Armand, Vera the Tigress and Butch (a fourth crook, Spud, doesn't make it past the first encounter with Sky Wizard). And here I must lay out my major problem with the Unholy One: he is a bad boss. He has set his agents a task - to acquire the plans to the Sky Wizard's new stratospheric jet plane - and no matter what progress they report toward that goal he yells at them and threatens to kill them. And they always have progress to report! If these three were managed well then I have little doubt that they could do the job set to them but the Unholy One does nothing but sow dissent and stress among his underlings.

The other big problem with the Unholy One is that he's just a boring Yellow Peril criminal mastermind who just kind of sits around in a secret Himalayan city telling his much more interesting henchmen (note the winged Himalayan Snow Man in the above image) to do things and threatening people with the Death of a Thousand Slashes, which ultimately turns out to be a room with a spiked ceiling that lowers and squashes/impales you.

The Unholy One ends his run by falling off of the Sky Wizard's flying island after an unsuccessful attempt to stab him to death and good riddance, I say.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 672: KARDO, THE MONSTER MAKER

(Masked Marvel 002, 1940)

Kardo, Maker of Monsters, is not quite a super-villain but that's about the closest thing to what he is and I'm not making up a new category for every guy who doesn't quite fit the existing ones. What is Kardo then, you ask? A world-famous scientist with the soul of a clown and a compulsion to make creatures and beasties - when we first meet him he is sharing a drink with his friends Dr Melvyn Hunt and Rosalind Rogers and reminiscing about all the trouble he caused the last time he made a monster.

The fact that Kardo is continuing with his experiments is revealed when he accepts delivery of a human foot, and even then his friends treat him like someone who needs an intervention for hoarding or medium-grade drugs instead of someone treading in realms man was not meant to.

Of course the monster wakes up unexpectedly and is hostile to all human life because why wouldn't it be. Kardo really earns my affection here by being a perfect straight man to the creature's "he's right behind me" routine.

Kardo rounds out his perfect combination of comedy villain traits by being a complete coward and leaving Hunt to battle the monster on his own.

Thus ends the intervention. We love you Kardo and that is why we have impaled your unholy creation on this fence. Now promise that you won't immediately relapse. *Kardo* is immediately considering how best source human brains*

God I love this man. He just can't stop making monsters!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 671: THE ERASER GANG

(Masked Marvel 002, 1940)

The Eraser Gang, aka the Erasers, aka the Dead Erasers, are a gang with a gimmick: they don't just hijack armoured cars, they make the cars and their occupants disappear completely, to the consternation of the authorities.

But just why do they do this? It's never actually spelled out but as the Masked Marvel discovers when he is captured by them their actual weapon of choice is not a dissolving ray or a powerful acid but a deadly gas. Presumably disappearing the bodies and the scene of the crime using a powerful helicopter hoist was a way of keeping the authorities from learning that all they needed was a few gas masks to kibosh the entire operation.

Unluckily for the Erasers, the Masked Marvel has rendered himself "impervious to all gasses" and so is able to escape and blow all or most of them to kingdom come.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 670: WINGS

(Masked Marvel 001, 1940)

Wings is the otherwise-unnamed leader of a gang with a pretty good gimmick: model planes loaded with explosives and rigged with a device that homes in on magnets. Using these, they cause a series of "mysterious explosions" at banks, etc, and loot to their hearts' content in the ensuing chaos.

The real key thing about a scheme like this is that it works best when there is a sense of fear and confusion. If you don't know how, why or when these explosions are happening then they are effectively impossible to guard against, after all. The problem with this is that neither Wings nor his gang are constitutionally suited to subtlety. Some examples:

-beating up a kid in public in order to secure a lost model plane.

-attempting to assassinate the Masked Marvel several times, including once when he was just mildly suspicious of the guy who beat up the kid, once by blowing up a police station and once in such a way that he was able to completely figure out how the plane-bombs worked.

-demanding that the city turn over the Masked Marvel to the gang or else they would conduct a series of bombings across the city.

-signing the ransom note "Wings".

All this malarky erodes the gang's mystique and allows them to tracked down and captured with relative ease. A model plane is only innocuous if you don't know about model planes with bombs in them after all.

The Masked Marvel continues to rule, by the way.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 669: ARCO

(Jungle Comics 011, 1940)

Arco, aka "the immortal mummy of Ancient Egypt! Old Arco, the super-scientist of long ago!" comes to the attention of Fantomah when he begins blinding the inhabitants of her home jungle using a ray with the fairly awesome name of the Scarlet Shadow. His ultimate goal - like so many Fantomah foes - is to conquer the jungle and establish an empire for himself.

(Arco is also, somewhat surprisingly, our first actual mummy. The current ratio of fake to real mummies stands at 5:1)

While an ancient mummy attempting to take over a quasi-mystic omnijungle using a blindness ray might be relatively normal as far as comic book plots go, Arco's next move is amazing. In order to finalize his conquest he requires a population, and what better subjects for a mummy emperor than more mummies? What seems like most if not all Egyptian mummies in the world are reanimated and flown in on the wings of Arco's ancient magics. Presumably he also protects their dry, dry bodies from the jungle humidity, perhaps using another ray to do so.

Arco of course rejects Fantomah's ritual attempt to warn off her foe. In his defense he is riding a justifiable high based on the fact that he and his followers are all already dead - how could he know that his mummy troops, so effective at attacking blind and confused people, would prove easy prey to the most powerful beasts of the jungle?

(I can't imagine what a blow this must have been to the fields of Anthropology and Archaeology in the world of Fantomah. Museums all over the world must be full of little plaques saying "this sarcophagus formerly held the mummy of Amenhotep III, preserved from 1353 BC until the Great Mummy Reanimation of 1940. Recent expeditions have brought back evidence that the mummy was subsequently dismembered and partially consumed by a lioness (see bone fragments in case to your left)")

Arco attempts to blind Fantomah in revenge for the defeat of his forces but finds himself on the receiving end of sequentially, his own ray, a fall, and a river full of crocodiles. What an end for an immortal mummy man.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 668: THOTH

(Jungle Comics 011, 1940)

We begin with a very comic book (or monster-of-the-week TV show) setup. Camilla notices and comments on the ancient Magician's Pool and then is almost immediately compelled to enter that same pool and disappear from the realms of man.

Camilla's aide/paramour Sir Champion turns to local wizard Warlock (not that Warlock the Wizard, but it is wild that there are two of them) for help and learns that the Magician of Magician's Pool fame is Thoth, an evil jerk who the people of the Lost Empire tossed through the pool to another dimension hundreds of years earlier. Also, it turns out that the pool links to another dimension on nights of the full moon.

Meanwhile, Camilla has also learned these things from Thoth himself, who has been spending his time in the unnamed dimension taming weird monsters and is now ready to use them to conquer the Earth. Camilla is of course having none of this but her attempts to prevent it using violence are thwarted as Thoth and all others in his presence are immune to mundane weaponry. On an unrelated note, did I mention that Warlock the wizard gave Sir Champion a magic sword and shield?

This is a pretty Sir Champion heavy episode overall - he encounters a cute girl who turns out to be a less attractive green assassin and so is okay to slay and then is taken to the home of a cool nude giant dude who I wish we knew more about this fellow! As it stands, Sir Champion gets directions and a guide from him and we never see him again.

Sometimes I get a bit lazy and just do a bullet point summary as my first draft of these entries and what I had here was simply "MAGIC SWORD, ASSHOLE" an I think that stands. Thoth (asshole) gets a magic sword to the heart and ceases to become a threat to the world as a whole and the Lost Empire in particular.

Camilla and Sir Champion make their way home, accompanied by the giant naked laughing guy's little beaƒt friend, which would be significant to later plots and stories in a different time, but this is the Golden Age and an extradimensional creature of unknown nature and provenance coming to Earth has no further impact.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 667: ANGEL EYES

(Jungle Comics 010, 1940)

It's a c-c-c-combo breaker! Ordinarily Fantomah swans around observing the villains of her comic adventures and periodically telling them that they should stop what they're doing before it's too lat, ie, before she delivers unto them an ironic punishment. This issue features one of the few foes to catch her completely flat-footed and she is as surprised as anyone when giant flaming hands start tearing through the jungle, indiscriminately murdering both people and animals. Who or what could be behind this?

The culprit turns out to be a scientific prodigy called Angel Eyes, who has the Batman origin except his parents were killed by a jungle and so he has vowed to destroy all jungles. He has created artificial life forms out of chemicals and known as the Flaming Claws for the simple reason that they are completely invisible except for their huge flaming clawed hands.

I really appreciate Angel Eyes' design! He really captures the look of a person who would be extremely attractive if they didn't constantly wear their foul mood in their facial expression.

Not that Fantomah ever has much of a hard time dealing with guys like this, but Angel Eyes is an especially easy one: she just hangs him from a tree and has his own creations attack him until he has a heart attack and dies. As for the Flaming Claws, why, they get melted back into the constituent chemicals that they were made of.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 666: MARK LORD

(Jungle Comics 009, 1940)

Minor Super-Villain 666 is somewhat in line with how underwhelming our milestone numbers in the past have been. Just two entries away from being the Devil his own two-headed self. I suppose I could have shuffled things around to make it work out in a more satisfying way but that would really taint the pure joy we'll experience when entry 1000 or 1600 or 69420 turn out to be amazingly apropos.

Who we have instead is poor little rich boy Mark Lord, a villain in the classic Fletcher Hanks sense in that he has a real problem with civilization and wants to destroy it. To that end, he has seemingly been flying aimlessly around until he finds something that he can use to advance his plans - in this case a valley full of royal panthers, the largest big cats in the world! Hanks really seems to enjoy writing about and drawing these beefy felines and dedicates large swathes of the narrative to the mechanics of Lord capturing and transporting 50 000 of them.

Lord's plan - bomb New York and release tens of thousands of enormous hungry panthers into the ensuing panic - is certainly an effective terror attack but I can't see it leading to a total dissolution of human civilization. For one thing, you probably wouldn't get even half your panthers back if you wanted to keep up the momentum and move on to another city quickly. Hell, NYC's population was about 7.5 million in 1940 and I don't know that you're going to kill or scare off enough of them with this stunt that you could declare human civilization ended in the city. I suppose we aren't looking to a guy like Mark Lord for cold rational thought but come on.

As is her way, Fantomah, though she has been watching and warning Lord the entire time, only steps in once things his a crisis point. We are treated to one of Hanks' signature images, a bunch of levitating creatures, as Lord and the panthers are transported back to Africa.

And of course Lord is ironically punished for his transgressions by being transformed into an uncivilized caveman and left to deal with a valley full of cheesed-off panthers on his own. Maybe next time he has a beef against civilization he'll reflect on where his last one got him.

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 016

 Bless 'em, they're trying.

The first few adventures of Hydroman, a character I have an inexplicable affection for, are concerned with what at first seems like some real standard Yellow Peril bullplop ("Oriental invaders" and so forth) but then there are gangsters involved and the two factions variously mention a higher-up named "the Great One" and "the Big Boss", respectively. Still later, the whole operation seems to be run by this collection of pseudo-Nazis on a yacht in New York Harbor. It looks like the bald guy in the monocle might be in charge but the whole issue of just who exactly the Great One is is ultimately rendered moot by Hydroman blowing up the yacht and killing them all before their org chart is fully conveyed. 

Good costumes on those henchmen, though. (Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics 001, 1940)

I quite like "the Snarl," the nom de crime that this fellow has chosen for himself, and he gets up to all sorts of classic villainy to boot: bank robbery, deathtraps, sending taunting notes to the police, mass murder, etc, but he gets caught with ease by semi-comedic actor/detective Fuller Spunk in just a couple of pages so there's not quite enough meat for a full entry. (Hyper Mystery Comics 002, 1940)

Jungle comics are crawling with guys like Zan Marzov, a crook who murders and pillages with the aid of a gang of men dressed in leopard skins. Few can match his look, however. Between the leopard scar, haunted eyes, shrunken head necklace and horrible goatee, Marzov may have achieved the pinnacle of the Evil Explorer aesthetic. He ultimately gets blown up by virtuous explorer Buck Barton, by the way. (Jungle Comics 001, 1940)

This guy calls himself Mr X and he has stolen a sacred mask from a temple in the jungle dimension that Fantomah calls home, thus invoking a curse that threatens to flood the entire land with boiling mud. Needless to say, Fantomah does not look kindly on that sort of behaviour and he is rounded up post haste and sent to a weird cavern to "eat mud and fire for the rest of your days." Tough but fair, Fantomah! (Jungle Comics 008, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 665: THE WIND GOD

(Jungle Comics 007, 1940)

Not quite a normal super-hero/ super-villain interaction, this. Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle intervenes to stop the wind elemental Sirocco from wreaking havoc and in so doing incurs the wrath of the unspecified but very Norse-looking Wind God. At this point we have a simple misunderstanding over a poorly-trained pet.

Everyone involved now escalates things simultaneously. The Wind God unleashes lightning, storms and tornadoes on the valley and Tabu counters using both his own power and that of Sirocco, who he has... tamed? Brainwashed? The fact that it has a baby's face really obfuscates just how intelligent it is.

Eventually, Tabu has the common decency to recognize that even though he has the magical might to have a long-form duel with a deity, that doesn't mean that he should do so, especially in a populated area. As such, he is forced to be the bigger man being and return Sirocco to the loving arms of his... owner? father? coworker? and hopefully learns a valuable lesson about wizard/god relations in the process.