(Planet Comics 003, 1940)
We open on Spurt Hammond, the Planet-Flyer himself, intercepting an alarming series of images from the planet Mercury. Giants? Explosions? Girls!? What could it all mean?
It turns out that the girl in question is Princess Zilla, erstwhile ruler of Mercury but recently deposed by her Prime Minister Radgio, who schemes to conquer the world using mutated Mercurians such as the previously-seen giant. Which I suppose strongly implies that Zilla was the ruler of only a part of Mercury - I'm so used to assuming that every sci-fi government is global in nature.
Zilla and Hammond make their way to Radgio's fortress and dispose of the unfortunate giant by means of an old reliable method, the portcullis. Move over, Rancor! Make way, two-headed dragon from Willow! there's a new member of the "Killed by a Falling Portcullis" Club!
It's okay though: Radgio is done with boring old giants and has moved on to his ultimate creation, a huge six-armed robot. And unlike many so-called humans-turned-robots in 1940s comics, this isn't merely a case of extreme mind control but, per the little x-ray cutaway, this poor Mercurian is being mutated into some sort of cybernetic organism with what are possibly horrible organic gears and everything.
Spurt Hammond bursts in just before Radgio is able to release his creation from where it is shackled to the wall (either as part of the roboticization process or for display purposes, I cannot tell) and, as he believes in ironic punishments, pops the Mercurian into his own machine.
Radgio is reduced to... somewhere between four inches and a foot in height. But even shrunken so, and nude, he almost manages to turn things back around by assuming voice control of the robot. Unfortunately for him, 1) he failed to make the robot ray gun-proof and it goes down with little effort on Hammond's part and 2) a nearby rat also has a sense of ironic justice and chows down on his tender Prime Ministerial flesh. Mercury is saved!
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