PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 001

The kinds of character that are a part of comics history so it would be wrong to ignore them but are also pretty racist (usually - I'm sure that eventually I'll find something else distasteful enough to put here) and unpleasant to dedicate a whole lot of time to. We're going with a round-up!

Our first culprit is George Harvard AKA Big Sun, a guy with a way too complicated plan to sell oil to the Axis out of the Florida Everglades under the cover of being a geological surveyor or prospector or something. He comes to the attention of adventurer Clip Carson due to not accounting for his partner maybe poking around looking for samples like their job is supposed to be? It's a bad plan.

I'm mad at myself for finding Big Sun's mask so cool looking, but it's mitigated by how dumb his gimmick is: he has a shiny breastplate on under his robe and he reveals it flasher-style to blind his foes. Hence the name, I guess. (More Fun Comics 069, 1941) 

I didn't even know that Zingaro was an Italian slur for people of Romani descent until I looked up this guy - just why it was used as the name of a fellow trying to take over Mexico I will never know. On the one hand he is stopped by weirdo character the Voice so that's good. On the other, he gets away so there's a chance he could appear again, which is bad. It's okay though: the Voice only ever had two adventures and this is the second one.

Thankfully there aren't too many characters whose names are racial slurs. (Amazing-Man Comics 022, 1941)

I don't know if you could call it lucky, per se, but it is kind of fortunate for the purposes of this round-up that I'm hitting a lot of the major categories of racist super-villains all in one go. We'll see if this questionable luck holds for the fourth entry.

So: Banga the Elephant God is predicated on the old trope that indigenous peoples are so credulous and superstitious that they will believe that anything (eg, a big mean elephant with a guy in a skull mask on it) is a god or other supernatural occurrence - in this case the people of the hidden jungle civilization of Yenya are helped along by the fact that the human part of the Banga gestalt is actually their witch doctor (called a "wizard doctor" in this case, which is kind of a neat linguistic variation if nothing else). Banga is eventually unmasked by jungle hero Morak the Mighty and meets his dual ends.

As with so many racist characters it is very unfortunate that Banga the Elephant God looks sick as hell. (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

The very next issue we have more of the same: a bunch of white guys dress up like the very cool looking Lizard-Lion Men of local legend and fleece ivory out of villagers in... Malaysia? If Rex King aka Black Fury stayed put between issues then it's Malaysia.

There's not too much to these guys: one of them hides inside the statue of the Lizard-Lion in the local temple and says for the locals to bring all of their ivory hence and then costumed goons go beat up anyone who refuses. And then Black Fury beats them up. (Super-Magician v1 002, 1941)

We didn't hit all the greats in one go - there's a lot of untapped racism coming up once we hit the comics of 1942 after all - but it's a good - bad? - sample.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 006

Minor super-heroes need to be rounded up now and then.

Blackstone the Magician: 

There are a fair number of comic versions of real life people: movie cowboys by the dozen, big game tracker Clyde Beatty a couple of times, etc. Not too many of them quite cross over into the super-hero side of things, but here we have magician Harry Blackstone Sr, who absolutely did (Blackstone is also a great example of someone who was at one point wildly famous and has now receded far enough from the public consciousness that you might not have heard of him unless you're really into the Dresden Files).

Blackstone's adventures fall more into the Action-Packed World Travel to Places Where Ethnics Live category of comics, with the gimmick that he uses stage magic to overcome various obstacles. But stage magic in a controlled environment using your own props and ad hoc stage magic using random items out in the world are different things, comic! (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

Black Fury:

Rex King is an adventurer who spares the life of a panther in the jungles of Borneo because it has a white star marking on its throat. Later, that same panther saves Rex from a leopard attack and he takes this as a some grand life lesson about how animals can be full of humanity while men are bestial - long story short, he dresses up like something halfway between Black Condor and Wildcat and teams up with the panther (now named Kato) to beat up evil. (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

the Blue Bolt:

Harvard University student Fred Parrish had the misfortune to be struck by lightning twice in the same storm, the second time while he was attempting to fly his light aircraft for help. Lucky for him, he crashed near the underground lair of Doctor Bertoff, a scientist looking for just such a lightning-charged person to experiment on and empower to fight in his ongoing war of Bertoff's land of Deltos with the Green Sorceress and her kingdom of Voltor (later sumply "Bertoff's Scientific City" vs "the Green Kingdom").

Blue Bolt was a willing conscript in this war, although he tempered Bertoff's bloodthirstiness somewhat by seeking to reform the Green Sorceress rather than kill her outright, destroy her kingdom and salt the earth. This could be traced to a "don't hit girls 1940s sense of fair play and also because he had the hots for her.

Up to Blue Bolt v1 010 the Blue Bolt comic was written by Joe Simon and drawn by Jack Kirby and it was full of all kinds of crazy fun sci-fi malarky. Sadly, the instant they left to create Captain America it all went out the window and Blue Bolt became a regular-syle super-hero fighting Nazis on the boring old surface of the planet.

For a few issues, Blue Bolt follows his kid brother Kip Parrish around as he serves with the RAF but this gets boring after a while and he heads back to the States. Once the US enters the war he ditches the costume entirely and seemingly forgets that he has super-powers and becomes a regular-style soldier with the unusual name Blue Bolt. Ho hum.

This, by the way, is part of a pattern with the good folks at Novelty Press. They had it in their heads that their readers didn't want stories that were "too fantastic" and this was reinforced by their letters page which every month featured missives from little killjoys asking for more boy inventors and fewer giant robots. I assume that these kids grew up to be the people hectoring DC every time Batman cracked a joke in the 60s and 70s and that their children form the vanguard of the "gritty realism" movement.

Sergeant Spook:

Sergeant Spook here started out as a cop already named Sergeant Spook in a clear case of nominative determinism. After blowing himself up with a carelessly placed pipe in perhaps the least dramatic origin of any of the surprisingly large number of dead police officers to return as undead super-heroes, he basically just carries on as normal. He's intangible and invisible, per regular ghost rule, but can interact with the material world just fine. (Blue Bolt v1 001)

Then, in Blue Bolt v1 006 Sergeant Spook meets legally-distinct-from-Sherlock-Holmes ghost detective Dr Sherlock, who informs him that not only is he not unique but that there is a large community of ghosts that he is flouting the rules of by for instance beating the tar out of gangsters who can neither see nor touch him. He relocates to Ghost Town and becomes the de facto troubleshooter of its President, George Washington until rounding up the ghosts of dead troublemakers begins to get stale, at which point Spook heads back to the mortal world to deal with human/ghost conflicts.