(Captain Aero Comics 001, 1941)
Captain Hood is your classic fascist of indeterminate allegiance, who has been holed up with a crew of pseudo-Nazis and pseudo-Imperial Japanese agents in a cave underneath Easter Island for four long years working on an "undersea tractor" designed to haul a cargo of explosives to the Panama Canal and then blow it up. Just why he requires a mask in order to oversee this operation is an exercise left for the reader - I prefer to imagine that he got into cosplay as a way to while away the long hours.
Captain Hood makes two glaring errors over the course of this issue, the biggest of which is the fact that he is so punchy as the culmination of his plan approaches that he has his men open fire on the tramp steamer Suzy Q for merely approaching the island, with no indication that they are going to land. This of course enrages the ship's captain and only survivor, adventurer Grit Grady.
The fact that Grady takes his revenge on Captain Hood by storming the cave and ultimately blowing the entire place, undersea tractor and all, to high heaven means that Hood never has to face up to his other, much larger error: choosing to set up shop on Easter Island.
I feel like I'm going to be talking about this a lot, because Easter Island is a beloved exotic setting in comic books, but it is so far away from everything else. Once that undersea tractor was completed, the next step was going to be to drive it five thousand kilometres across the bottom of an ocean that was virtually unmapped at the time but speaking as someone with an Internet connection and thus a collection of maps at my disposal: it's not a smooth path. I, personally, would not place a bet on Captain Hood making it there with his twenty thousand tons of explosives in one piece, no matter how good his tractor is.
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