(Jungle Comics 014, 1941)
Zomax, the "demonized marine scientist," has a very over-the-top, Fletcher Hanks villain goal: to kill every animal in the jungle. And he isn't afraid to say it.
I won't say that Zomax has a good reason for wanting to destroy all jungle life, but he does have some justification, stemming from a big game hunt he went on that involved, in order:
1. being mauled by a fatally wounded lion. Once the lion died, Zomax wandered away, only to...
2. be grabbed by a man-hating elephant and tossed into a stagnant pond where...
3. swarms of poisonous gnats shredded his skin. Zomax crawled out of the muck in torment, only to be...
4. crushed by a boa constrictor, but not killed, because he was...
5. pulled away by the Hannibal Lector of gorillas, who then proceeded to take Zomax home to his nest and inflict months of psychological torture on him.
Though one might see all of this as a kind of ironic punishment for going on a big game hunt in the first place, Zomax does not in fact see it that way, and concludes that the jungle is an evil place fit only for destruction. And since he is a "marine scientist," what better tool of that destruction than the ocean itself?
Specifically, Zomax has built a machine that can create and control a bespoke tidal wave to to wash over the entire continent of Africa (or that portion of it that contains jungle animals) and destroy all of his tormentors. Other than the gnats, I reckon: I bet they do just fine in a landscape covered in brackish ponds.
As violence against any jungle is violence against the universal Jungle that Fantomah protects, she is out to get Zomax as soon as he actually initiates the tidal wave engine (though please note the silhouettes that indicate that Zomax gets revenge against one representative of each animal species that wronged him, gnats excepted).
Having been given an unusual number of chances to repent and stop his machines by Fantomah, Zomax instead decides to flee in a plane, leaving her not choice but to destroy him with his own tidal wave, or, as Fantomah (and the second Paul Karasik collection of Hanks comics) puts it "YYou shall die by your own creation!"
Categorized in: Generica (Ends in -x), Origin (Vengeance Quest), Supercrime (Disaster Causers)
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