Planet Comics how I love you, cobbled-together pile of scraps that you are.
Torro:
In an adventure that I can only assume was concocted in order to use up some extraneous art, Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force travels to the distant planet Zog and ends up taking up the mantle (and magic whip) of the hero Torro in order to help recover the planet's treasures from an evil giant.
As befits a personality that is probably just, again, repurposed art from an unused fantasy comic, Cole adopts the Torro identity completely. Using his magic clothes, boots, belt and whip, he battles and ultimately kills the two-headed giant and his one-headed wife and then goes back to being a spaceman. (Planet Comics 002, 1940)
Amazona the Mighty Woman:
Amazona belongs to a pre-Ice Age civilization that is not advanced so much as stubborn in that as the ice advanced on them they just toughed it out until the only ones left were super strong and immune to cold.
Amazona is understandably bored of the endless expanses of ice and snow afforded her and decides to tag along when reporter Blake Manners passes through following a shipwreck. In their one adventure together back in the US, Amazona gets to beat the tar out of a bunch of gangsters while wearing a party dress and I'm pretty sad that there wasn't more of this. (Planet Comics 003, 1940)
Jim Giant:
Jim Giant, billed as both the Strongest Man in the Universe and the Mightiest Man on Earth (both can be correct, in the right order), is super strong and super tough and in his single recorded adventure he beats the stuffing out of an entire invasion force that sweeps down from the Arctic. (Planet Comics 004, 1940)
Fero, Planet Detective:
I'm going to call it: Fero, Planet Detective started life as an unused Zero, Ghost Detective story that found its way from Quality Comics to Fiction House and was altered just enough to be distinct. Scrub out the Z and add an F, swap "Ghost" for "Planet" and most importantly slap an extra line on the text box about how all the werewolves and vampires are actually from Pluto. It's seamless!
I actually unironically love the first Fero adventure. It's a great example of how restriction and constraint can make for the most weird and creative choices. "Occult Detective" is after all an entertaining and rich subgenre, but "Occult Detective But All of the Monsters Are Also Space Aliens" is the sort of wild and wacky stuff you come up with while trying to pad out the pagecount of your science fiction comic book and all you have is a second-hand story about vampires and goblins. It's great stuff!
Sadly, though Fero continued to appear in Planet Comics for three more issues the occult aspects of his adventures fell by the wayside in favour of more traditional space detective cases - space theft, space kidnappings, etc. It's a real blow for fans of occult sci fi.
Fero's remaining adventures are all right, but nothing to write home about. He does have a fun futuristic high-collared shirt, so that's something, but the most interesting thing about his latter adventures is his selection of transformation pills that he uses to get out of scrapes, including one that turns you into a toddler and the amazing one that he is taking above to turn into a rampaging anthropoid. (Planet Comics 005, 1940)
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