Even the most minor of super-heroes gets the chance to shine brightly in the Round-Up.
Super-American:
I can't decide if I'm surprised or not that the development of the archetype of the patriotic hero was so rapid as to produce a character called "Super-American" less than a year after the debut of Captain America. He's simultaneously straight out to the sketchbook of a 60s underground comix guy (or indeed a more modern edgy comics guy) and a perfectly ordinary 1940s comic book character. Regardless: Super-American!
Super-American is an unnamed resident of the year 2350, who journeys back in time after Dr Allen Bruce uses his Chronopticon device to ask the President of 24th Century America for a little help with all the fascist spies and so forth who are causing trouble in 1940s America.
This is way too early for a pop time travel story to get too worried about issues of causality and so forth, so I guess we must assume that Super-American uses the kind of time travel where your time travel escapades already happened so you can't actually change your own present. Or maybe the kind where the time you leave from is inevitable, so your actions in the past merely cause it to happen in a different way. Or even the kind where messing around in the past causes a divergent timeline, but the new futures he creates are similar enough to still produce a Super-American.
Thanks to good old-fashioned futuristic technology, Super-American is endowed with powers such as super strength and speed, invulnerability and flight. Plus, he's super-duper patriotic! Like, annoyingly so! As one might expect of someone who willingly wears that helmet. (Fight Comics 015, 1941)
Categorized in: Language (Superlatives (Super)), Locations (Specific Locales), Origins (Displaced in Time)
Captain Fight:
Patriotic hero Captain Fight is actually Jeff Crockett, gym teacher at Freeville High in Freeville, Maryland. Despite being held in contempt by his male students for turning down a career in prizefighting due to a conviction that violence should not be used frivolously, Crockett does not hesitate to don a sporty outfit and deal out fistic justice to the enemies of America when they show their faces in his specific small town. (Fight Comics 016, 1941)
Categorized in: Activities (Fighting), Day Jobs (High School Teachers), Generica (Captains)
Yank Adams:
Unusually for a boy sidekick, Yank Wilson is not an easily-adoptable orphan, instead, he is one of Jeff "Captain Fight" Crockett's students and also the son of local inventor and espionage target Professor Adams. Yank recognizes Crockett through his weird mask pretty much instantly and a crime-fighting team is formed. (Fight Comics 016, 1941)
Categorized in: Day Job (High School Student), Origins (Sidekicks)
Zanzibar the Magician:
Zanzibar is a standard unit of magical super-hero who adventured in a variety of Fox Features books from 1939 to early 1942. Though his adventures are decently entertaining fare I'm afraid that the most interesting fact I can give you about Zanzibar himself is that at one point he switches from a red fez to a blue one. (Mystery Men Comics 001, 1939)
Categorized in: Locations (Place Names as Proper Names), Magic Users (Magicians), Powers (Various Magic)
No comments:
Post a Comment