A fine batch of aliens for ye this day, sor!
Inferians:
The wandering planet Inferno threatens to destroy the Earth with its heat, and the magician Zambini (plus some lady and the mad astronomer Professor Stargaze) travel to its surface in an attempt to cool it down. There they find the Inferians, charmingly can-shaped aliens made out of heat-resistant glass.
We learn more information than usual about this alien culture from a handy text box: the nearby Inferian city is called Cinderburg, and the tap-based language is called Clink. From an Inferian tranformed into a human we learn that the king of Inferno is known as the Great Glassblower, plus the fact that Inferians can be horny.
The Great Glassblower is implied to have made the Inferians somehow, so I had expected him to be some other manner of being but instead he is just a slightly better-dressed Inferian with a hostile attitude and a bowl full of molten glass that he's not afraid to throw at intruders. Zambini nonetheless manages to seal up the huge volcano that is the source of Inferno's great heat (and hopefully not important for maintaining the lives of the Inferians somehow) and thus Earth is saved! (Zip Comics 002, 1940)
Etherians and Rodongees:
After helping the Barrangees move back to the surface of their world and defeat the giant insect species that had driven them underground in the first place, Captain Tornado and his fellow Earthicans were probably ready for a bit of a break from inter-species combat. Well, tough luck, because upon closer inspection, some of the giant insects flying around the surface of Barrang were not insects at all but insect-shaped vehicles piloted by four-armed, blue-haired guys with fragile constitutions and a bad attitude, and Tornado, his friends and a whole bunch of Barrangees are rounded up and taken prisoner by them.
Their jailers turn out to be called Etherians, and the Etherians turn out to be jerks who have already enslaved a race called the Rodongees and now propose to do the same to the Barrangees. Tornado and his party fall in with a group of freedom-fighting Rodongees and pledge to help them overthrow the Etherians once and for all... and that is the end of the "Captain Tornado" feature. I sure hope they managed to complete their mission without having any more alien trouble on Barrang! (Popular Comics 056, 1940)
the Evil Gods:
Ted Hunt and Jane Martin, the Star Rovers, are making an exploratory stop on Venus when they are captured by a tribe of post-apocalyptic Venusians, but just what exactly was the apocalypse that made them so? They soon find out when they witness a Venusian hunter being chased down and seemingly eaten by a robot referred to as one of the "Evil Gods."
And just what are the Evil Gods? Once Ted beats up the Venusian king he gets the story of how his people found six of them deep underground in some sort of suspended animation and how once they were accidentally revived they enslaved the former Venusian civilization and reduced the few free members of the species to starving in isolated swamps. Ted, now king of the Venusians, vows to free the people from the tyranny of the Evil Gods.
Ted and Jane set out to find food and are immediately captured and transported back to the Evil Gods' seat of power, where they learn that the tyrant beings are not in fact robots but blobby green aliens that use the impervious robotic exoskeletons to protect their frail flesh.
Ted escapes to retrieve his spaceship and takes advantage of the Gods' habit of sleeping outside of their shells to kill five of them. The sixth, on watch over the Venusian slaves, is lassoed and dragged into a cave where it is then sealed, hopefully for all time. The Venusians (and Jane) are free! (Exciting Comics 003, 1940)
Fang Men:
The Fang Men of Jupiter (or Jupitor, as it appears here) might have a rich and beautiful society that values poetry and art and presumably good dentistry but alas that is not how we encounter them while reading the adventures of Cosmic Carson.
Instead, all of the Fang Men we meet are space pirates, and particularly jerky ones at that. We can only hope that this is not an accurate picture of Fang-Man society as a whole. (Science Comics 001, 1940)
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