(Zip Comics 004, 1940)
The villain for today is called Magi, and is the chief magic-user to a race of Mermen and Mermaids. Magi and his pal Torno have come to the surface world on a mission to retrieve the last descendant of the Mer-folk on land. Some notes:
-Magi gets no small amount of points for recognizing Zambini as his greatest threat among the surface world people and moving to neutralize him in advance of the mission.
-These points are lessened by the fact that Zambini manages to wake up mid-Eternal Sleep spell and turn it into a Long Nap spell instead.
-Mary Reed, the last Mer-descendant on Earth, is somehow the key to making the Merfolk able to walk the land again, but just how this is to be achieved is never articulated. Does it have something to do with her being the only part-Mer human or have the Merfolk simply been procrastinating for generations?
-The reason that the Merfolk can't just walk up onto land may shock you: it's not due to amphibiousness-related problems as you might expect but rather because they can't see in daylight. Wild!
Magi and Torno successfully nab Mary Reed, but her savvy friends recruit Zambini (extremely refreshed from his long magic nap) to help rescue her. In addition to Mary's friend Jean Sampson (cruelly institutionalized for reporting Mary's abduction but sprung by Zambini) and Jean's fiance Stanley Hamilton, they are accompanied by Hamilton's friend and minor antagonist Paul Lloyd, whose lust for Merman gold is such that he attempts to murder Zambini for it while walking around on the bottom of the ocean in a Zambini-made air bubble that he has no hint will survive the magician's death. If ever a man deserved magical punishment (specifically: having his arm turned into a fish fin) it is he.
The rest of the adventure is a foregone conclusion, considering that Magi was not quite powerful enough to overcome Zambini while the latter was in deep REM sleep. After some magical spankings and a round of apologies, the humans are off to the surface while the Merfolk city is spared further wizardly wrath. Even Paul Lloyd gets his regular arm back though he doesn't deserve it, the jerk.
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