(Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941)
Dickie Dean, Boy Inventor has a new invention: the Photo-Lightning Machine, with which he can cause a bolt of lightning to crash down on anyplace he pleases, like the deserted house across the road from him that nobody was planning on using, hopefully. The only catch is that he hasn't yet figured out how to get the lightning to strike a target that is in water.
Dickie and his pal Zip Todd take the plans for the machine to Dickie's lawyer to have it registered at the patent office, only to find a new face ready to take his business. This is C.B. Wolf, a foreign agent who has infiltrated the firm specifically to steal Dickie's inventions for his home country. Wolf wires the plans home to the laboratory of Professor Blankhorne, the second greatest inventor in the world, barring Dickie (and how that must rankle Professor Skinn), who decides that rather than using them to construct his own machine he will save time by travelling to Castleton to acquire the original.
Dickie is of course unwilling to sign over his shiny new weapon of mass destruction to an Axis agent and capable of defeating the Professor's crude attempt to mug him for it, which forces Blankhorne to establish a Stateside volcano lair to operate out of.
Blankhorne's second attempt at obtaining the Photo-Lightning Machine involves sending a storm of remote-controlled and explosive model planes down on Castleton, Pennsylvania and presumably just kind of hoping that they will kill Dickie but leave his invention intact. This attempt is foiled by a patented Dickie Dean lightning storm that brings all of the planes down safely outside of town.
It is at this point that I must question Professor Blankhorne's motives for confronting Dickie Dean. As mentioned above, he claims that stealing the machine will be quicker than building one, yet between the trans-Atlantic journey and the time spent in preparing his drone fleet, this effort has taken Blankhorne at least three and a half months so far. Is this the sunk cost fallacy at play, or is the Professor trying to prove that he is not merely the second-greatest inventor on Earth?
Blankhorn (along with the surprisingly hands-on CB Wolf) are seemingly handed victory on a platter when Dickie's pal Zip Todd sets out to confront them with a baseball bat and is promptly imprisoned and - both inexplicably and importantly - tied up and suspended in a big tub of water.
Thanks to the aforementioned flaw in the Photo-Lightning Machine's targeting, Dickie is able to blast Blankhorne's entire base without hitting Zip Todd, and when the villains attempt to escape in the Sky Bug he blows them out of the air with a complete lack of remorse.
Astonishingly (considering the fact that he was blown up on-panel), Professor Blankhorne manages to return in Silver Streak Comics 015. He infiltrates Dickie Dean's new high-tech laboratory in the guise of an old flower seller (and gruesomely murders Dickie's head of security in a vat of lye) as part of a scheme to loot the place of all of its technological wizardry. A solid plan, though I will note that he does so on the first day that the lab is in operation and so his haul is mostly made up of the stuff that Dean had already created.
Though the law is no match for Dickie Dean's lightning cannon (a distinct invention from the Photo-Lightning Machine), Blankhorne is no match for a couple of teenaged boys in a smoke screen, and he is captured with much greater ease than in his first appearance.
Categorized in: Accessories (Drones), Doctors & Professors, Ideologies (Crypto-Fascists)
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