(Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941)
We meet Fang Ryan after he grabs a payroll from the recently-deceased messenger who was in the process of delivering it. He then escapes despite the fact that Police Detective Danny "the Raven" Dartin is on the scene to engage him in thrilling gunplay, but drops his signature weapon, a stick with a couple of snake fangs on one end. It's a neat gimmick: the stick has a reservoir full of poison inside of it, so when Fang whacks someone with it they die of what looks like a snakebite. It is therefore a shame that he does not actually use this item in the story (aside from in killing the courier, implicitly).
Since Ryan has lost his weapon, the Raven knows that he will need a new supply of snake venom to make another, and waits in ambush for him at the zoo from which he had previously sourced the stuff. Sure enough, Ryan shows up in time for a fist fight, which ends in... perhaps not the only time that a super-hero is knocked out by a zebra but surely one of a very limited number of times that it happens.
When a supercrook has rendered a super-hero unconscious and captured them, there are a few ways that they can proceed. The standard approach is of course to place the hero in a deathtrap in full costume and then leave the room, followed closely by "go to unmask them but take so long that they wake up and start fighting you again." Fang Ryan instead opts for one of the rarer options and just immediately unmasks the Raven, and thanks to the gunfight from earlier he even recognizes him!
Ryan's next thoughts are both good: frame the Raven for his next job and expose the Raven's identity, thus taking all the focus off of him and his piddly little crime spree. Where it all falls apart that he tries to do both at the same time instead of sequentially, as he calls up Dartin's boss and rats him out before heading out to do the next robbery.
The one-two punch of this means that when an insomniac sees the Raven and reports him to the cops, the entire police force shows up to get him rather than a car or two worth of guys.
Meanwhile Dartin has escaped from where Ryan left him hogtied in the woods and shows up to avenge his honour. He ends up killing Ryan in a shootout, which somehow completely overwrites the part of Police Chief Lash's brain that heard the information about Dartin being the Raven. It's just the luck of the costumed vigilante, I guess.
Categorized in: Animals (Snakes), Body (Nonhuman Parts), Fraud (Identity Theft (Hero Impostors))
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