MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 057

Two MLJ Round-Ups in a row! They're just churning out the heroes! 

Galahad:

Hey, it's Galahad! Or rather a version of Galahad who is standing in for a pretty wide array of different Knights of the Round Table with lesser name brand recognition. It's some clean-cut knightly action. (Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

Shanghai Sheridan:

Jack "Shanghai" Sheridan, aside from having a sounding like a cheeky nickname for a POW camp, is notable mostly for the fact that he is one of many characters who have "the Batman origin but for...", in this case, the Batman origin but for the Japanese invasion of China. His adventures are nothing particularly special, alas. (Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

Firefly:

Oh hey, it's the Firefly, wearing one of the great super-hero costumes of the Golden Age!

The Firefly is really Harley Hudson, a young biochemist who sought to understand the tremendous proportionate strength possessed by insects and found that it was as a result of their "muscular coordination," and further managed to unlock that same power within himself! Now he's on an anti-crime crusade, and I'm not sure if he's able to glow because of his muscular coordination abilities or he just has some phosphorescent paint slapped onto the front of his costume - the brief appearance of the character in the 60s Mighty Crusaders comic suggests the former, but they were also trying to make him some sort of equivalent of the Fireball and Inferno, so I don't know if I'm going to take that as canon. (Top-Notch Comics 008, 1940)

The Firefly also gets around in a "combination airplane and glider" called the Fireflier (or Fireflyer), which is an objectively great name for a subjectively terrible-looking vehicle. (Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940) 

the Black Hood: 

The Black Hood is perhaps the Archie/MLJ super-hero with the greatest number of different versions, both legacy and reboot-style. He also bumps the Wizard out of the top spot in Top-Notch as soon as he appears - someone at MLJ clearly really liked this guy from the start.

This original Black Hood (and a pretty decent percentage of his successors) is named Kip Burland, and he was a New York cop until he attempted to arrest super-villain the Skull while he was doing some crime and ended up framed and then murdered for his troubles. Except the murder didn't take, and Burland was found by an old hermit who nursed him back to health.

In an amazing coincidence, the hermit in question turns out to be a former sheriff who was also framed by the Skull, and who took so long in training for his revenge/redemption that he grew too old for the job. This turns out to be a perfect combination: the Hermit teaches Kip all that he knows, and the Black Hood sallies forth to mete out justice to the Skull. (Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940)