(Startling Comics 001, 1940)
"Dr Slade is one of those rare and unfortunate villains who are a part of a super-hero's origin story but who also die as a part of that origin, so that they don't even have the dignity of actually properly being a part of that hero's rogues gallery. That's sad! On the other hand, Slade did develop his resurrection technology in order to build an army of the formerly-dead in aid of a fascist takeover of the United States, so maybe he got everything he deserved."
That right there is what I wrote about Dr Slade in what will be the next Mad and Criminal Scientist Round-Up, and it's all true. That's a wrap on Dr Slade, I thought, and took a big gulp of coffee as I turned to the Mystico story in Startling Comics 002.
What I'm trying to convey here is that I was shocked, nay, ultrashocked to find out that Dr Slade had not in fact died when his lab exploded but was back to properly vex Mystico as a villain and not a hapless facilitator of his resurrection. And he looks great! As a villain, I mean. It's the only profession where having your face blown off has a lot of positives to it.
Slade is presumably still working for the unnamed fascist country that was behind the Green Shirts and their attempt to take over the US with an army of the dead, and on their behalf he has created the hydrophage, a device that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen at a rate of a billion gallons per hour (that's nearly 3.8 billion litres for all my fellow metric heads out there)! An impressive device with a cool name, but Slade's proposal for how to use it in war - to lower the ocean level to such an extent that Allied ships run aground and become easy targets for Slade-aligned forces - is one of the stupidest plans in comics history.
I mean, sure: it's going to be effective. You're absolutely going to catch some ships off guard with this one. But significantly reducing the amount of liquid water on Earth is going to have some wild knock-on effects for everyone, including fascist dictatorships, and that's without mentioning that they're just releasing the oxygen into the atmosphere (they're saving the hydrogen for presumably nefarious purposes)! And what's going on with the salt, I just realized! I was already concerned about the effects on the world's ocean life, but now it's going to have to contend with a supersaturated salt ocean as well? Yikes.
Luckily for the fishes and the rest of us, Mystico is on the case. He dives into the hydrophage-created bubble that houses Slade's sub-sea base (a cool use of water-destroying technology, I must admit) and though he is captured by some costumed henchmen that is not enough to prevent him from blowing the whole place to smithereens using the stored hydrogen.
Despite all of my hopes for a progressively more blown-up Dr Slade to keep coming back as Mystico's major recurring foe, this is the last we'll see of him.
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