(Fantastic Comics 017, 1941)
The Fang is a recurring villain in the mould of his Fox Features contemporaries the Rook and the Beast: you can knock him down and seemingly kill him as much as you want but he's just going to keep on coming back to do more crimes.
When he first appears, the Fang's major goal is to acquire the Burma Emerald from its caretaker Princess Kava, in order to decipher the secret of invisibility that has been carved into its surface. His initial attempt to snatch the emerald leads him to murder Police Sergeant Marley of the Princess' protection detail, which directly inspires Marley's son Chuck to become a costumed crimefighter under the tutelage of the Black Fury.
Perhaps because Black Fury scribe realized that a series of comics about a man trying and failing to achieve invisibility would be less interesting than one about an invisible crook, the Fang breaks prison in his second appearance and gets ahold of the emerald almost immediately. So what does he use his newfound powers of invisibility for?
- bank robbery (Fantastic Comics 018)
- framing a man for murder in order to buy his house that has an ideal smuggling setup in the form of a secret tunnel to the coast (Fantastic Comics 019)
- sabotaging arms shipments to Allied Europe on behalf of the Axis (Fantastic Comics 020)
I judge these... okay criminal uses of invisibility. Nothing spectacular.
Though I set up the comparison between the Fang and the Rook/the Beast myself, I must now point out the way in which he differs from them: he doesn't seemingly die at the end of every appearance. Instead, he alternates seeming to die being caught: he's caught in Fantastic 017, crashes into an oil tank in 018, caught again in 019, and does a header into a well full of slime in Fantastic Comics 020.
If there's one thing that invisibility powers are extremely good at it's in helping to fake one's own death, though how they help to get out of an ooze pit is beyond me.
Sadly and annoyingly, the final page or two of the Fang's last appearance is not currently available. He is in the process of planting a bomb at the end of the portion that we do have, which makes it highly likely that he went on to be blown up, and that death finally claimed him. Alternately, perhaps he was arrested again and just treated with the appropriate amount of care by the authorities. It is my hope that we will someday learn the truth.
Categorized in: Body (Nonhuman Parts - Fangs), Narrative Footballs (Origin Story Guys), Powers (Invisibility)
