MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 706: ROCKO

(Planet Comics 005, 1940)

Rocko is a totally awesome alien (from a species called the Nethermen, a totally awesome name) who looks like a human with one great grandparent who was a toad and dresses in pulp sci-fi armour as he scours the spaceways for a star of sufficient heat to run all of his planet's industry. Bad luck for humanity: the first adequate star that he manages to find while aimlessly noodling around in space (as opposed to picking one ahead of time and heading directly there) turns out to be our own.

This comic is a real five-star example of the very muddy understanding of astronomical terminology at play in the comic book sci-fi writing community: the term "universe" is used consistently and with 100% confidence in place of "solar system" (though the other option, that Rocko did in fact come from another universe entirely and that he is so bad at finding stars that he flew right past entire other galaxies of them before bumping into ours, is a tempting one to entertain).

Earth is of course placed in quite the pickle by the siphoning off of the Sun's heat, and all of the planet's hopes and dreams of future survival are placed in the hands of the heroic Space Admiral Curry, who proves that he his the right man for the job by getting into his spaceship and aimlessly noodling around in space hoping to bump into the solution to his problems, just as Rocko had before him. And it works! Curry tracks down the missing solar energy, beats up seemingly every Netherman on the planet and then... leaves without shutting off the heat siphoning machines. For some reason.

Instead of, again, simply destroying or even turning off the machines that are dooming his planet, Curry comes up with a more complicated plan: he builds his own machines to siphon the energy of the Netherstar and give the Nethermen a taste of their own medicine. This goes pretty well, as all the Nethermen that can flee the planet (leaving the rest to freeze) and the rest are shot down by the Earth spacefleet as they try a last-second invasion. Rocko himself is the only one tomake it all the way to the solar siphons and he falls to a simple deathtrap. Earth is saved! Via genocide!