MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 087

If the last group of minor Marvel super-heroes had a tiny chance of appearing in a modern comic book I would say that this group's chances are tiny-plus. Like a further 5% chance. Except for Dynaman.

Dynaman:

Dynaman, aka Lagaro, which means "Dynaman", was born in the ancient super-advanced Kingdom of Korug, located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Endowed with super strength, a photographic memory and enhanced intelligence, the ability to fly and a general superiority to even his peers in the ancient Korugan super society, Dynaman had it all.

Korug eventually suffers the fate of all ancient island super-societies and sinks into the sea, leaving Lagaro as the only survivor. He makes his way to Ancient Egypt (and the presence of the Sphinx when he does so gives us a more accurate guess than usual as to when in the past this adventure takes place, if only by telling us that it was some time after 2500 BCE) where he helps the heretofore unknown Pharaoh Khufor with a couple of problems (i.e., a giant caveman invasion). His further adventures go unrecorded.

Dynaman, like Breeze Barton before him, is a simple concept (super guy) wrapped up in a lot of extra layers (last survivor of a super-race, in the past, somehow still looks like a 20th Century super-hero). This is one of two things that they have in common, with the other being that they were both brought back in the same Marvel Zombies sequel, only to be gruesomely killed off. (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940) 

the Fin:

The Fin is in reality Lieutenant Peter Noble, engineer in the US Naval Reserve, whose submarine is wrecked while on manoeuvres in the Atlantic. Noble, the only survivor, finds that for never-explained reasons he is able to breathe underwater and makes his way to the underground kingdom of Neptunia (a big cave). He then becomes the new Sub-Ruler of Neptunia via the traditional methods of attaining nobility: being a colossal jerk, picking a fight with the reigning Prince Ikor and shooting him in the head, then shooting anyone who disagrees with his rule.

This would be the origin of a villain, if the Neptunii didn't immediately declare him to be the reincarnation of their ancient hero the Fin, making him a bit less likely to blow them away. Over time he grows into the role and becomes the true champion of Neptunia, and hey, perhaps he is the real Fin after all, which might explain his water-breathing ability an innate ability to speak Neptunian.

As with so many great super-hero costumes, the Fin's is just thrown together out of some old crap that Peter Noble had lying around. (Daring Mystery Comics 007, 1941) 

Blue Diamond:

GOOD NEWS: Professor Elton Morrow's Antarctic expedition was a success! He found a huge blue diamond!

BAD NEWS: Morrow's ship was sunk by Nazis on the way home.

GOOD NEWS: He escaped the sinking ship and managed to bring the diamond with him!

BAD NEWS: The Nazis shelled the bit of wreckage he was clinging to, causing the diamond to explode and riddle his body with shards. 

The final bit of good news is that despite the loss of the diamond, the shards in Morrow's body have somehow made him"super hard," which is an inelegant way of saying resistant to pain, invulnerable to harm and extra dense or simply unable to be moved by something like a truck hitting him, and though he's not precisely super strong, these features add up to produce something like super strength.

After foiling a pretty low-stakes museum robbery, Morrow decides to adopt a costumed persona to continue fighting crime. Every time I see his costume I am surprised by a) just how much yellow is on it and b) just how big that diamond on the chest it. It's also a wild move to have a completely exposed face and call yourself the Blue Diamond when you are the one guy who is prominently associated with a blue diamond. (Daring Mystery Comics 007, 1941) 

the Silver Scorpion:

Betty Barstow, secretary for private detective and huge asshole Dan Hurley, is secretly vigilante the Silver Scorpion. I want to say that Golden Age Marvel has very few female super-heroes compared to its contemporaries, but my reckoning is probably being biased by the fact that DC's stable includes all of Quality and Fawcett's female characters. I reckon that the percentage is pretty much the same on a per-publication basis.

Betty's origin as the Silver Scorpion is in fact identical to that of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, in that she is on her way to a costume party when she stumbles upon the scene of a crime (in this case a bunch of counterfeiters operating out of a cemetery rather than whatever the Killer Moth was doing) and intervenes, armed with a pre-concealed identity and some martial arts knowledge. She only has three Golden Age appearances but they're all pretty fun.

Finally the obvious question when discussing the Silver Scorpion: what's with the name? Why silver when her costume is mostly yellow and red? The answer: the silver scorpion in question is this little fellow on the back of her cape, though just what the significance of it is is left unsaid. It is a masquerade costume, after all - since when do they have to make total sense? (Daring Mystery Comics 007, 1941)

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 036

Once again we bring you some aliens.

the Tribe of Gurban:

The Tribe of Gurban come down out of "the upper valley of the Nile" and clash with the ancient superhuman Dynaman in his one Golden Age adventure, and there's a part of me questions whether it's even worth noting groups like this who are just humans but bigger (about eight to ten feet tall if I'm any judge). But no: giants in caveman singlets who attempt to conquer Egypt c. 2500 BCE and who use sauropods as beasts of burden always deserve recognition, particularly when they're very technically canon to the Marvel Comics Universe.

Dynaman doesn't have too much trouble sending Chief Ribur and his compatriots packing, but not before they unleash their ultimate weapon: the Wild War Beasts. (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

Inhabitants of Phobos:

I didn't really cover them in the entry on Spacehawk's Martian enemy Glork, but his plan to smash Phobos into Mars in revenge for him losing an election wasn't just bad news for the Martians but also for these adorable little dudes. They're just trying to live on a very small moon, Glork! Why are you hassling them? (Target Comics v1 009, 1940)

Insect-Men:

Not two issues after his adventures with the Serviles and their enemies the Heidites, Flip Falcon is hopping back into his all-purpose machine and heading back to Mercury for a little aimless exploring. There, he is confronted by a completely different group of aliens than the two he had already met, and while the out-of-universe explanation for this is simply that the "Flip Falcon" comic was nobody's baby and had a very loose relationship with internal continuity, it is fun to imagine that the sun-blasted surface of Mercury is just teeming with weird life forms. 

Though the Insect-Men are huge cool-looking bug-men who communicate using long warbling cries (and are able to break the strand of energy that tethers Flip to his machine, a strand that can restrain Lucifer himself), by fat the most interesting thing about them is their unnamed queen, who shows up soon after her followers capture Flip and reveals that she is the child of a similarly-unnamed human man and an Insect. This raises an enormous number of questions: just who is this human? How did he get to Mercury? When did he decide to make love to an enormous humanoid bug? How is it possible to produce hybrid Earth mammal/ Mercurian insect offspring? Is it just her feet that are weird looking or does she have insectoid legs? None of these questions are in fact answered in the text.

The Queen of the Insect-Men is, it seems, a more picky lover than her father, and so falls for Flip Falcon the instant she lays eyes on him. After watching a little light gladiatorial combat she is ready for the marriage to commence, and the only thing that saves Flip from a lifetime of caring for weird little grubs with baby faces is that his faithful assistant Adele reinstates the connection between Flip and his machine in time, which fries the wedding party and allows him to fly on home. (Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

Insects:

Like Flip Falcon, Stuart Taylor has a time-space machine and a penchant for blasting himself into the void to see what is there. In this instance, Stuart has flung himself randomly forward in time and fetched up on the shores of the year 9250 CE to find that while humanity yet endures they are at the mercy of a species of giant intelligent insects. After helping to repel an Insect attack on one of the remaining human settlements, Stuart offers to infiltrate their capitol, where he is quickly captured and taken to the Insects' long-winded ruler.

Stuart jumps the ruler while it is busy manning the city's defenses against an attack by the humans, and I must say that I really like the image of it in its little console chair. It really looks like the artist (Lou Fine) really sat down for a minute and thought about how that would work. Though the Insect ruler outclasses Taylor physically, it is undone by its own prowess, as it throws him into a control console and causes an electrical overload that leads to its own death (Taylor is fine). (Jumbo Comics 013, 1940)

COMEDY CHARACTER ROUND-UP 001

Comedy and parody super-hero strips are just as old as the more sincere kind, but they don't get very plentiful or very good until the MAD Magazine era (and even if I'm setting myself up for a fall by saying that, I would love to be proven wrong). Until we get to that far-off time this will be a round-up in name only - I have enough partially-completed entries clogging up my drafts as it is.

Stuporman:

As befits his status as one of the earliest comedy super-heroes, Stuporman, aka Marmaduke Snood Jr, is both a parody of Superman, the big guy, and also a clearing-house for every dumb joke that the writer (credited as Harry Douglas, who is also listed as the creator of the Blue Blaze) could come up with on the fly.

Stuporman has all of what is already the standard array of super powers: he is super fast and strong is invulnerable and can fly. Comedy super-heroes are generally either hyper-competent or ludicrously incompetent, and while Stuporman is the former this is balanced out by the fact that he is extremely lazy. A pretty basic super-hero parody over all, but I suppose that's to be expected when you're looking at what is quite possibly the first example of such. (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

DIVINE ROUND-UP 028

Religions of the world: you are not being well-represented in fiction.

the Dream Warner: 

While they never actually say the words "Tibetan Buddhism" in either of Thun-Dohr's two appearances, he was brought up in a lamasery in Tibet and is personally mentored by the Dalai Lama (though not the one you're thinking of), so I think that we can extrapolate and assign the Dream Warner to that religious tradition. Though it does not actually appear on-panel, the Dream Warner does give the Dalai Lama an accurate heads-up on the machinations of the villainous Sin Khaii, so me must conclude that it actually exists. It also has a very fun if on-the-nose name.

God Style: Real (Silver Streak Comics 014, 1941)

Ratzinatzi: 

In Cloud Curtis' final adventure he sets out alone to solve the mystery of some mysterious disappearances and air raids across South America, and ends up crashing his plane in the middle of the jungle. There he stumbles upon an idol to "Ratzinatzi, the Demon-God of the Ancient Incas" and is seemingly about to enter a chamber that opens up underneath it when the story ends. Sadly for all the completionists out there the story never concludes and so we never learn what kind of pseudo-Nazi air base or whatever lies below, though I think that we can safely assume that it continues to be pretty disrespectful to the Incas.

God Style: Idol (Silver Streak Comics 017, 1941)

the Devil-Flower:

Trojak the Tiger Man's friend Edith's brother is sick, and according to the nearest wise man the only thing that will aid him is the juice of the sacred Devil-Flower, as worshipped by the Gemba tribe.

Trojak and Edith brave fanatical cultists and flower-charmed animals until they are able to harvest the sacred juice and seemingly kill the plant. One can only hope that the Devil-Flower, which not only has magical powers but also seemingly some degree of self-awareness, had the foresight to do a little precautionary propagation.

God style: Animist (Real?) (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

Mars:

Seen overlooking the Axis war machine in an image I would say is meant to be purely allegorical if it wasn't from the origin of Marvel Boy, a reincarnation of Hercules in whose story Jupiter figures prominently. Were the Marvel Boy stories to have continued I'm sure that this version of Mars would have gotten a sock on the jaw in due time.

God style: Real (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 035

Aliens! Aliens? Aliens.

the Black-Light Men:

Like the Emerald Men of Asperus, the Black-Light Men travel on a mobile planet (the Black-Light Planet, natch, so named because it is not visible using conventional light) and like so many Fletcher Hanks villains they are looking to take over the Earth, in this case by pulling the whole planet out of orbit and freezing it solid before selling it on to the Martians. Due to the Black-Light Planet's perpetual cold, the Black-Light Men are all blubbery. Just what the little rhino horn situation they have going on is for is beyond me. 

Luckily for the Earth, space hero Whirlwind Carter is on the case and the planet-jacking is halted before more than a measly few million people are killed. Carter leads the Earth military in a retaliatory strike on the Black-Light Planet but it quickly turns into a hand-to hand battle that leaves the human forces ata severe disadvantage.

Thanks to Whirlwind Carter's companion Brenda, the Black-Light Men are discovered to have a crippling fear of fire and armed with that knowledge the Earthian forces are able to drive them to self-destruction. (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

Serviles: 

Flip Falcon's portal to the Fourth Dimension allows him to do a whole lot of different things, for instance: look at images of the planet Mercury and notice that there is a cool-looking city there, then visit that city with his partner Adele. We soon learn that the city is called Servil, and it is inhabited by some truly delightful aliens with the bodies of plucked chickens and the heads of bargain-basement mannequins and who are revealed to be called Serviles in a text box several issues after this appearance.

The Serviles communicate using extremely cute golden helmets. Up until this point they might just be the perfect alien species, but they have to go and ruin it all by being weird 1940s misogynists and denying women the ability to speak (!) because they "talk too much."

Anyway, Servile civilization is plagued by these cool-looking dragonoid beasts called Heidites that crawl over from the hot side of Mercury to eat them, but who could care? (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

Hoof-Men: 

The Hoof-Men are 1. extremely burly 2. hoofed and 3. of a class of science fiction alien that can best be described as "space bullies," who exist to give humans a hard time. In this case they have captured the (also very burly) space explorer Professor Darrel and are threatening to turn him into a bug if he doesn't say that Hoof-Men are better than humans, and it all gets a little too real until space hero Cosmic Carson has to step in and break things up. (Science Comics 003, 1940)

Hoppers:

The Hoppers are yet another group of Fletcher Hanks aliens who live on a wandering planetoid, in this case on that looks just like a cartoon tropical island and seems to just aimlessly float through space. As might be expected given their name the Hoppers a big on jumping and can seemingly do so to get from planet to planet. They have the beefiest legs in comics and show them off in what I can only describe as bicycle shorts, in an astounding bit of predictive design-work.

Unlike most Fletcher Hanks aliens, the Hoppers don't have some sort of over-the-top plan to destroy humanity - they aren't even hostile, as far as I can tell. They do hop on over to Space Smith's ship as soon as it comes into range, which he interprets as a hostile act, but I'm inclined to disagree. The only aggression the Hoppers display is after they are trapped under a big metal net, and even then it is nonlethal.

Perhaps Smith agrees with me after all, because instead of gruesomely killing the Hoppers he instead essentially pranks them by bringing them to New York City to be spooked by the hustle and bustle of big city life, with its bodegas and whatnot. Unable to hack the Big Apple, they hop back to their small-town planetoid. (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)