(Wow Comics 004, 1941)
Mr Hyde is introduced to the reader as a homicidal maniac who murders future Mr Scarlet sidekick Pinky's mother one night for unclear reasons. He just bursts in and kills her and there is not even attempt to justify it. In fact... I'm not 100% certain that Pinky actually knows that Mr Hyde is the killer.
Pinky is relocated to Oaklawn Orphanage, under the care of director Dr Jelke, who we as savvy readers immediately recognize is going to turn out to be Mr Hyde. I must admit that upon first reading this story I thought that Jelke/Hyde might have been out murdering parents in order to keep his orphanage well-stocked with kids but alas, it seems that Pinky ends up crossing his path purely by chance.
Mr Hyde's next crime is to make the city safer for crime and criminals by murdering the mayor, and since Mr Scarlet has been pretty firmly established as operating out of NYC we must add the Honorable James T. Flynn to the list of alternate, non-Fiorello La Guardia mayors of New York in comic books. Perhaps La Guardia claims the mayoral role after Flynn's death - we'll have to watch the pages of Wow Comics to find out.
Mr Scarlet intercepts Mr Hyde (a rare battle between a super-hero and -villain with the same prefix!) but loses him just inside the orphanage walls. This of course again points straight at Dr Jelke as the fiend's alter ego but more importantly leads us to our main line of inquiry about this villain: Just What Kind of Jekyll/Hyde Situation is This?
We all know the basics of the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in which Dr Henry Jekyll attempts to purge all evil from his body using a chemical concoction and instead creates a secondary, wholly evil identity that controls his body with ever-increasing frequency and power. The question is, which elements, and in what form, are being used in this particular story?
1. Does Dr Jelke know what Mr Hyde is up to? It appears that he does! Hyde turns back into Jelke to avoid Mr Scarlet and though Jelke's brush-off of Scarlet could be chalked up to his being a stuffed shirt, the fact that he then tries to locate Hyde's lost monocle indicates that he is wise to the situation.
2. How is the change effected? Though Mr Hyde has a small laboratory and loves to hurl flasks of acid around, the Jekyll/Hyde transformation in this story is not chemical but seemingly purely mental and brought on by Jelke reading the original novel. But there is something else going on! Namely...
3. Just how much of a transformation are we talking about? Jelke's switch to Hyde involves more than a robe, a monocle and a mussing of the hair - Hyde has claws and fangs and lacks a stupid little mustache! Clearly Jelke is onto something and is not just a homicidal maniac with a literary fixation.
All of these questions lead up to the big one:
4. Are these two personalities sharing one body or not? I gotta say no to this one. While the Mr Hyde persona appears to be more violent and less inhibited, all indications are that this is something that Jelke did on purpose, though his aims are never elaborated on beyond "personal gain." In a classic Jekyll/Hyde situation such as the Wolf's the good personality is oblivious to the actions of the evil one, and Jelke shows no signs of that.
Jelke does eventually follow in Jekyll's footsteps in one final way: once his experiments in identity are proven to be a bust he kills himself.
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