SUPER-HERO FILE 006: THE ANGEL

(Marvel Comics 001, 1939)

A two-fisted vigilante in the Batman mode, the Angel was a big enough name in Marvel's Golden Age comics that it would be kind of surprising that he has never really been revived post-Silver Age if not for the fact that his name was, and that the subsequent and ongoing popularity of the X-Men means that there was always a full "Angel" slot on the Marvel roster. On top of this (and probably because of this) the Angel was eventually revealed to be the mastermind behind the Scourge of the Underworld program, lending a villainous tarnish to his name that certainly contributed to his lack of a modern legacy.

The Angel never really gets an origin in the Golden Age, and thanks to the fact that he was never brought back in any meaningful way, this persists until the Marvel 70th Anniversary books in 2009, when he is revealed to have grown up in a prison or something. It's not better than just mysteriously having no origin at all, so I never internalized it.

One thing that the Angel does have, however, is a calling card. Two of them, in fact, as he both signs his notes to police and criminals with a little drawing of an angel and also projects long-lasting shadow images of an angel onto nearby surfaces, this latter also being his only real super-power.

DIVINE ROUND-UP 035

Time to revise the Comparative Religion curriculum again because we found some new gods.

Adobi:

Just to what extent these Molemen worship the god Adobi is impossible to say. This particular Moleman hold him in high enough esteem to implore him to sanctify a forced political marriage, if that counts for anything much. I really wish we had a better angle on Adobi's front side so I could see the big gems in his chest and forehead better.

God Style: Idol (Lightning Comics v2 002, 1941)

Vango:

After escaping the lands of the Adobi-worshipping Molemen, Congo Jack encounters the worshippers of the multi-armed Vango. We don't learn too much about Vango himself, alas, as the bulk of the narrative is taken up with a religious schism between pro- and anti-human sacrifice Vango worshippers. He looks good!

God Style: Idol (Lightning Comics v2 004, 1941)

Fire:

The Fire-Men (aka the Fire-Cult) are a weird bunch to categorize. They are initially antagonists to the Human Torch, and give him a run for their money with their flame control powers while they hunt down and kill a former member. Then, however, they reveal that he was not merely an apostate but someone who was planning on using the cult's teachings to profit while causing great destruction, and that he had a partner who is still at large. The Torch is left with to choice but to team up with his former adversaries.

Though the Fire-Men presumably worship or at least pay fealty to the flame that they control, the real focus of the group is less religious than practical, as they work to contain the rampaging Flame Monsters of Tibet, giant green humanoids who emit flame from their pores. 

(the second traitor to the cult turns out to be a man named Culflam, who later passes on the Fire-Men's teachings to the Torch's enemy the Parrot)

God Style: Animist (Real?) (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 014, 1940)

Flamosa the Fire God:

God of the people of the volcanic Inferno Isle in the Pacific, who appear to have been manipulated into practicing human sacrifice by a group of Nazis in order to dispose of Allied scientists in the area. The Angel semi-accidentally blows up half the island and sets off the volcano, and the worship of Flamosa is abandoned.

God Style: Idol (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941)

CATALOGUE OF WOUNDS 001

Among the many things that I have found interesting enough to keep track of over the years is just how many times super-heroes get wounded while going about their business. What does a shoulder look like after it's been shot a dozen times, for example? If I had been really on the ball I would have also been noting every time someone was knocked out with a blow to the head as well, but we can't all be perfect.

Full catalogue here, such as it is. 

the Angel:

The Angel chars his own hands at least a bit while escaping from some ropes. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 008, 1940) 

The Angel is wounded and probably shot while escaping from an ambush by the Cat's Paw's men (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 019, 1941)

Batman:

Batman is shot in the left shoulder during an altercation with the Wolf's men. (Batman Comics v1 002, 1940)

Shot in the right shoulder by a fleeing crook. (Batman Comics v1 004, 1940)

While attacking a criminal hideout in a berserker rage, Batman is shot twice in the right shoulder and has a bullet glance off his ribs. (Batman Comics v1 005, 1941)

Pirate Hook Morgan slashes Batman across the chest and hooks him in the left shoulder. (Detective Comics v1 054, 1941)

Black Condor: 

Black Condor is shot in the back by the Sapphire King's men. (Crack Comics 005, 1940)

Blackhawk:

Blackhawk's arm is non-specifically injured after an attack on Blackhawk Island. (Military Comics 001, 1941)

the Deacon:

The Deacon is shot in the right arm by the cops. (Cat-Man Comics 001, 1941) 

Robin:

Robin is beaten nearly to death by some gangsters (triggering Batman's berserker attack above). (Batman Comics v1 005, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 328: THE NAZOMBIES

(Human Torch v1 005a, 1941)

This is kind of a weird one in a few ways, the first being that the foundation of the plot is that a) Namor the Sub-Mariner and the Angel both own Caribbean islands and b) that they are good enough friends for Namor to pay the Angel a visit. During this visit one of Namor's servants bursts in and promptly drops dead in an effort to deliver a note cryptically warning of a zombie takeover.

Namor takes off on his own and indeed! Zombies have taken over his island! Kind of!

I mean, even by 1940s standards of zombie these are clearly either costumed goons or some sort of monstrous humanoid group. They're not explicitly identified as fancy dress Nazis until the third-to-last panel, but come on. Buncha goose-steppers establishing military bases and concentration camps across the Caribbean? That's Nazis.

The Nazombies mostly employ conventional weaponry but seem to have hit up the "underwater" section of the Comic Book Nazi Superweapon department, as not only are they fielding undersea tabks but these extremely cool personal shark submersibles

This is, by the way, your go-to comic if you have ever wanted to see the Golden Age Angel get crucified by a bunch of Nazi zombies. Not to worry though: Namor rescues him and from then on it's strictly Nazi-punching time.

I don't reckon that the Nazombies have enough potential to be BRUNG BACK but it really seems like the shark-sub tech is ripe for revival in the hands of coastal raiders or something. Once such a revolutionary technology is unleashed it can't be put back in the bottle.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 292: ARMLESS TIGER MAN

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 026, 1941)

Armless Tiger Man! A minor classic in the Characters With Goofy Names category and almost certainly a Wizard Magazine Mort of the Month some time in the late 90s. Also: he wears stirrup pants.

Unfortunately there's not a lot going on in the story: Armless Tiger Man is a Nazi saboteur who murders a man in order to save a few bucks on bribes, which leads the Angel to get involved. He ends up getting tracked down due to his taste for hard-to-find Chateau Quim wine (I checked and yes, it absolutely meant the same thing in the 40s as it does now, so this is very cheeky). As seen above he manages to escape only to be apprehended mid-sabotage.

His origin is a bitt more interesting: after losing his arms in an industrial accident he obsessively trains to use his arms and legs as replacements and develops an unsettling appearance due to his massive jaw muscles. He also develops a hatred of industrial machinery which is the reason that the Gestapo mobilizes him to the US.

You can't keep a weird fella like this down forever - Armless Tiger Man is our first properly brung back Marvel Villain, appearing in a Captain America WWII-era comic in 2010, in which he died, then gets to show up in hell! I mean, it's not illustrious but it's better than the Vampire Killer got.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 287: DR HYDE

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024)

A simple if gruesome one: Dr Hyde steals the eyes of wealthy men and then ransoms them back. One expects there to be some sort of ultra-technical removal process but no, he just yanks them out - the secret must be in the replacement.

He is of course undone by the fact that the Angel is a rich guy and has rich guy friends. Once their paths cross in the person of artist Keene, Dr Hyde is not long for life as a free man.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 281: THE WEIRD GHOST OF AMBER SWAMPS

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 021, 1941)

I got lazy here and clipped the setup, sorry. In brief, the story takes place at Chellcroft, the swampland mansion of wealthy Georgian C.J. Miller (just one letter off from being quite funny), formerly a centre of art and society but now fallen into disrepair.

To make things worse, the Weird Ghost of Amber Swamps has started haunting the property and killing people, including Norton, the poor butler pictured fleeing the house in the above image.

You can't have a murderous ghost, even a weird one, in a super-hero universe without someone showing up to check it out, and in this case it's the Angel who turns up to pretty quickly discover that the Weird Ghost of Amber Swamps is in fact a Weird Living Man of Amber Swamps, albeit a huge one.

More specifically, it's the owner of the house, C.J. Miller, armed with a rubberoid mask and a wild razor blade/ fishing rod weapon that allowed him to kill at a distance. The fact that C.J. Miller was a celebrated angler (and built like a brick shithouse, let's not forget) makes for a quicker unmasking than usual - a bit of a flaw in the old ghost routine.

Turns out that Miller is broke and that committing a series of gruesome murders and then killing himself and pinning it all on the ghost is preferable to anybody finding out that he's broke. Real rich guy shit that us poors wouldn't understand. Sadly, he does not get his wish, as not only does he trip and kill himself with his own gimmicked fishing rod like a clown but he does so in front of a reporter. Haw haw haw, says I.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 279: THE CAT'S PAW

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 018-020, 1941)

The Cat's Paw gets a pretty classic intro: Dr Lin, the Angel's old mentor and friend who was introduced in the previous issue, is ruthlessly murdered via high-speed application of poisoned dart. The Angel give chase, but fails to make the bust.

The next day we see some of the Cat's Paw's scheme begin to emerge. She's killing industrialists for some reason. But why?

Here's our first look at the villain in question, because I chose some odd images to clip. A couple of things about her stand out:

-she's our first example (if not necessarily Marvel's first example - they've got a half-dozen other titles at this point) of a few things in a Marvel comic: a female super-villain, a proper costumed crook, themed weaponry in the form of a cat-claw launcher, and, kind of, a recurring villain.

-on that last point: not really. Though the Cat's Paw does appear in three issues worth of  Angel comics, it's all one story, just decompressed a bit.

-it is of course notable that she looks a bit like 90s Catwoman

-most importantly: in the above image both the Cat's Paw and the Angel are attending a costume party as themselves! A twofer! 

Eventually, the Angel tracks the Cat's Paw down to her HQ in one of the dozens of deserted castles that litter the mountains a short drive from NYC in any given comic book universe.

Now for the disappointing news: the reason that the Cat's Paw was killing all of those industrialists is that she was acting as a... catspaw for the Nazis in their bid to weaken US support for Britain (and here once more I must note that Marvel was really leading the pack on making Nazi villains for-real Nazis well before Pearl Harbor). She does rediscover her patriotism once her Nazi handler tries to bump her off, which is better than nothing, I suppose. 

Here's where I'd normally be decrying the comic for killing her off at the end, pointing out how ambiguous the "guess we'll never find the corpse, oh well" nature of her death is, and call for her to be brung back as a legacy villain, but the Nazi collaboration is really sticking in my craw. Honestly if she hadn't walked it back at the end I'd be all for the Cat's Paw showing up as an Axis agent in period pieces going forward but as-is I reckon she can lie fallow.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 272: KARL SCHWAB

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 016, 1941)

Karl Schwab is part of a long tradition of villains who spend years and years meticulously preparing for their big moment, only for it to come crashing down the second that a super-hero, adventurer or plucky kid with a pet monkey gets involved. Usually this involves lurking in an old castle or cemetery lair while tinkering or planning or brewing or growing homunculi but Karl actually managed to get caught already, somewhere around 1931, and while he's been stewing in a federal prison all of his little minions have been carrying on for him.

Karl's actual plan is to take over the US - we don't see a lot of it in action due to interference from the Angel, but Phase I involves electrifying NYC. We can only speculate what the next step would be - establish a foothold from which to invade the rest of the US? Install similar systems in other cities , or activate ones that are already there? There's even a bit of good old crypto-fascism, as Karl does a fair bit of exclaiming in German and talking about his home country being cooler than the US. Whether he's working for the Nazis or not will never be known, as it's still mid-1941 (Marvel is a bit more likely to have explicit Nazi villains than other major publishers of the time, but not on US soil, by and large).

All of this speculation is rendered moot by the big fight that occurs between Karl and the Angel, during which Karl's generator is activated at full power, overloads and explodes. Karl takes a piece of shrapnel to the back, while his minions conveniently all die from the sound of the blast, broadcast over their helmet radios.

(this is one of those things that would galvanize me to another long-term open-ended project if I was just a little bit different of a kind of nerdlinger. If I had any knowledge of cartography etc I'd be figuring out where all the lairs and abandoned castles and sewer bases full of desiccated corpses in rubber suits were. Instead I compile spreadsheets estimating how many desiccated corpses there are. To each their own I guess)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 269: THE BRAIN OF PROFESSOR DONAIRE

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941) 

I must admit that I was predisposed to give Professor Donaire the benefit of the doubt, given that where I'm from a donair is a delicious late night drunken street food. But he didn't need it! Even with a non-snack-based name, Prof. Donaire would be a terrific villain.

Having said that: Prof. Donaire is a real dummy. He suffers from exactly the same failure of imagination as our old pal Python: that nobody would bother to investigate the nearby vicinity when large numbers of corpses are found in quick succession.

But the similarities to Python don't end there! Like Python, Donaire lives in an old stone structure (a temple rather than a castle, buts still) retrofitted with a modern lab, has a big bald goon with a K name (Karlo to Python's Kreeper) and the corpses he's dumping are sans brain.

Unlike Python, Prof Donaire has no interest in the brains of his victims. No, he's a body thief. He's scooped out his own brain and put it in a jar and now can control five seperate bodies on the 40s equivalent of a Local Area Network. And as always with any kind of body part thief, Donaire is just salivating at the thought of adding a toned super-hero bod to his collection.

Luckily for the Angel, merely having the bodies of a bunch of athletes does not grant Donaire the reflexes or fighting abilities of their original owners. Likewise, being able to mobilize four bodies for a melee doesn't convey the ability to coordinate their attacks. The Angel is perfectly fine.

All good things come to an end, however, and Professor Donaire learns a bit too late the primary rule of having an disembodied brain: don't just, like, put it on a shelf or other easily accessed location in a glass jar. In this particular case, Donaire ends up setting his own lab (and therefore brain) on fire but the Angel would have been completely justified in nailing it with a jump-kick.

In conclusion: the Brain of Professor Donaire should absolutely be BRUNG BACK.