Every hero comes with a free sidekick!
the Deacon:
An otherwise unnamed man headquartered in the disused Marshlands Church that is located in a kind of liminal space just outside of several urban areas (including but not limited to: Coast Town, Midland City and Central City), the Deacon was himself once a young criminal mastermind.
Two years after his original gang is rounded up by the police, the future Deacon is still on the wrong side of the law as part of another crook's gang, but he's starting to have some doubts about the path his life is on, particularly the part where his boss Marty is going to murder a night watchman during their next job. He tips off the police and in return they shoot him in the arm as he runs away
Making his way to the aforementioned abandoned Marshlands Church, the wounded ex-criminal puts on a suit of priest's clothes that he finds there, and when Marty and his old gang track him down to extract some revenge for his betrayal he is able to muster up enough righteous vigour to beat them up and deliver them into the hands of the law.
One thing about the Deacon that might not be evident from my retelling is that despite the sort of gentle world-weariness that the character is portrayed with, based on the timeline presented in the story of his origin, he is at most about twenty-eight years old, and that is a pretty funny age to have already seen it all. (Cat-Man Comics 001, 1941)
Mickey Matthews:
In common with his mentor, the Deacon's sidekick Mickey Matthews is a former juvenile crook who decided that a life of crime was not for him and paid the price for it, in his case in the form of being beaten up and tossed out of a speeding car for dead. After the Deacon finds him and patches him up he decides to turn his life around and join his benefactor's war on crime. (Cat-Man Comics 001, 1941)
the Ragman:
Millionaire newspaper columnist Jay Garson Jr has really been stirring up trouble with his column "Crime Does Not Pay," so much so that he is lured into Central Park and murdered one night. Or so the criminal element think! What actually happens is that a nearby homeless man who looks exactly like Garson is accidentally killed instead of him, and so Garson swaps clothes with the corpse in order to fake his own death.
Taking inspiration from his new wardrobe, Garson dubs himself the Ragman (also Rag Man and Rag-Man) and sets out to solve his own murder, and then decides to continue fighting crime rather than resuming his old life.
Though Garson declines to inform his fiance Joan that he is in fact alive, he does continue to send his newspaper column to the Daily Star to get printed, much to the consternation of his editor. (Cat-Man Comics 001, 1941)
Tiny:
Jay "Ragman" Garson might not have thought it necessary to loop in his fiance re: him being alive, but one person who he does make sure to inform is his chauffeur, Tiny, who immediately joins him as a sidekick.
Tiny is an annoying character to write about: he is a very good sidekick, especially by the standards of African American characters in 1940s comics, who tend to get assigned all kinds of stereotypes (laziness, superstition, cowardliness, stupidity) in the name of comic relief. Tiny doesn't have any of those qualities - aside from a bit of understandable nervousness at meeting what he believes to be a dead man - but he certainly talks like a character who does. Various sources assure me that the accent is toned down eventually, but the 1941 version of the character makes it rough for someone (me) trying to find good pictures of him. (Cat-Man Comics 001, 1941)
Categorized under: Minor Super-Heroes, Origin by Choice (Face Turn, Faking Your Own Death), Profession (Religious)
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