(Wonderworld Comics 014, 1940)
Our story begins in a very economical way, as Yarko the Great hears about a great plague ravaging Tanganyika (part of modern-day Tanzania, if you must know) and determines that it merits his attention enough to teleport directly to the scene.
Yarko uses his mental powers to trace the source of the disease to a very Transylvanian-looking spooky castle that is not explicitly said to either be or to not be in Tanganyika so I guess we must assume that it is there because that is the more interesting version. Venturing inside, he encounters the spirit of Pestilence, a very sassy character who reveals the following amazing facts:
a. the plague has been caused by the efforts of Hans von Lundberg, aka the Mad Archaeologist, who presumably dug up a sample of it in a tomb or something. This is a real win for the mad social sciences!
b. the plague is called the Curse of Hecate, which is bad ass.
c. Pestilence is there because he is von Lundberg's slave, but whether this is literal and the Mad Archaeologist is doing some mystical disease shit or more of a metaphorical thing because he is responsible for so many plague-deaths is not clarified.
Yarko finally meets von Lundberg after he is captured by some very culturally-insensitive goons (who add weight to the idea of the castle being in Africa in the most unfortunate manner) and contrary to Pestilence's assertions that he is more powerful than the magician ends up dealing with him pretty handily. Perhaps when you are the personification of infectious disease your value system is weighted more toward how much plague someone has spread than any other measure of worth.
Though Yarko could presumably just vaporize von Lundberg with his majicks, he chooses to employ the services of his old enemy Death (not looking quite as dapper as he used to, if I may say so) to do the deed, possibly because this symbolically frees Pestilence from service and thus abates the plague via sympathetic magic. Or something like that. As this is the Yarko the Great version of Death who just loves to harvest the souls of the living he has to be reverse psycologied into it a bit, but he eventually takes the bait/ the archaeologist.
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