(Silver Streak Comics 005, 1940)
I was just about to type that this was "a simple, straightforward super-hero comic story" and then immediately had to grapple with how to summarize the following: in the previous issue of Silver Streak Comics, adventurer Lance Hale set out to recover a treasure left by his uncle in an old mine in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After helping the immortal Queen of the Underground Empire Aldia and her caveman subjects fight off a lizard man invasion (and incidentally becoming immortal himself, though this is never brought up again), Lance took the treasure with the stated intention of using it to help the needy back in America. Simple!
This issue, we learn that this treasure includes an artifact known as the Gem of Evil and that a femme fatale named Lurida (very on-the-nose name) not only knows about it but somehow knows that Lance Hale has it. She steals the treasure with the help of some more-competent-than-usual henchmen and voila, summons herself the Shadow Monster.
We don't get a real run-down of the Shadow Monster's abilities but on-panel it is at least physically invulnerable and able to grow to giant size, and so I must admit that I find Lurida's use of it to commit bank robberies and insurance fraud to be a bit limited, imagination-wise. Not that I have any sort of Grand Scheme for what I would do with such a beast, mind, I just have a knee jerk sense that if you're using magic or super science or mutant powers or whatever to do something as banal as insurance fraud then you're Doing It Wrong.
As a femme fatale, Lurida is obligated to make a stab at seducing Lance over to her side, just as Lance as a stalwart hero is obliged to insultingly turn her down, and after some monkey business with a fire-based deathtrap Lance manages to destroy both the Gem of Evil and the Shadow Monster, and Lurida completes the set by flinging herself into the same flame she had set for Lance. It's not a great decision considering that no court in the land is equipped to prosecute somebody for shadow demon summoning, but it does tie up the episode in a real neat bow.
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