(Whiz Comics 024, 1941)
Herr Gloobels is a mysterious and somewhat gruesome figure who murders a motorcycle messenger in order to get ahold of some troop transport schedules and then murders a second one to get them again after Spy Smasher recovers them from the first theft. He does all of this using his Tornado Gun, a device that seems to be a ray gun but which actually fires beams of compressed air that can sink a ship as easily as perforate a hapless guard.
Herr Gloobels' generally chaotic nature leaves us with a number of questions, the most narratively pressing of which is: is this guy a spy or what? There's no real talk of the War Lord or any other Axis stand-in and Gloobels seems to be driven by scientific megalomania as much as any desire to advance the cause of world fascism. Maybe he's just wacky.
The second question is of course: what's the deal with Gloobels' assistant Hugo? Is he a trained gorilla? An ape-man? Something more racist? It's never specified.
Thirdly: just why does he look so much like a Basil Wolverton character in that last panel? Don't get me wrong: it's a good look! It's just not quite what he looks like the rest of the time.
After a spirited melee in Gloobels' lighthouse HQ, Hugo ends up taking a Tornado Gun blast meant for Spy Smasher and is sent to his final reward. This seems to take the wind out of Gloobels' sails and he surrenders without further incident - a surprising demonstration of affection for a henchman, particularly for a homicidal scientist type like Gloobels. The Tornado Gun is supposedly turned over to the US military for study, but as with all of these captured super-villain weapons they seemingly put their worst men on the job because the Allied forces continued to rely on plain old bullets.
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