(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.
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