REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 013

Yet again we have a selection of comic book appearances of real-style people for you to enjoy.

Adolf Hitler:

Warak, dictator of Barbaria is a bit generic as far as pseudo-Hitlers go, but a pseudo-Hitler he is. (Smash Comics 017, 1940)

Scraggs, leader of the Green Shirts, is very much a "make the leader look like Hitler as shorthand for These Guys Are Fascists" character, a subspecies that will nearly die out some time in 1941 but survives in small numbers to this day. (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

Devil's Island: 

Black X has himself sent to, and then escapes from, Devil's Island in order to secure a fellow prisoner with valuable US defense secrets in his head. (Smash Comics 013, 1940)

FDR:

An off-model Roosevelt visits Carterville and is kidnapped by Devil's Dagger nemesis Jeff Marlowe (and thus retroactively by Marlowe's boss Mr H). This is a wild move for a regional crime boss to pull! (Master Comics 006, 1940)

Gill Fox:

Probably a different guy to the last "Gil Fox" to appear in a Clip Chance comic - this one is just a small town baseball player. (Smash Comics 015, 1940)

Groucho Marx:

Goucho's look lifted wholesale for this unnamed comedy character. (Star Comics 010, 1938)

Hollywood:

Autograph hound adds Shock Gibson to her collection along with "Cary Trooper" and "Glark Cable," aka Gary Cooper and Clark Gable. (Speed Comics 009, 1940)

Joe Devlin: 

Given the prior instance of Joe Devlin being referenced in a Clip Chance story I must assume that the "John Devlin" mentioned here is another. (Smash Comics 014, 1940)

Joseph Stalin:

The Three Aces (but not the DC Comics Three Aces, the Harvey Comics ones) transport three anthropology-minded sisters to Paraguay to study the Guató people and stumble upon a plot by the sinister witch doctor Ni Lats to bring all under his sway via hypnotic mind control, for which crime he is drowned in a swamp.

(slight aside: the Guató are a real people being used as set dressing for an exotic locale, and weirdly, in checking to see if that was the case I'm pretty sure I stumbled across the exact reference that Klaus Nordling drew from - every detail in the brief entry on the Guató in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica is reflected in the story. The mind control thing is added plot) (Speed Comics 010, 1940)

Samuel Goldwyn:

Is this movie producer named Sam meant to be Samuel Goldwyn or merely a lookalike reference to him? Regardless, this is clearly Samuel Goldwyn. (Speed Comics 010, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 749: THE SABOTEURS

(Smash Comics 015, 1940)

Sometimes all you need is a group of mercenary saboteurs dressed in matching cloaks and gas masks to zazz up a story - Black X and his comic book contemporaries have faced and defeated hundred of sabotage plots in front of my now-jaded eyes over the course of my comics-reading career, and so it takes a bit more than your basic pseudo-Nazi in a suit and tie to get my attention. That there is a suit-and-tie pseudo-Nazi behind the scheme to blow up a city that is technically never called New York is irrelevant, as it's the cloak-and-gas mask guys who matter.

Black X and Batu do not of course let this campaign of destruction stand, and despite some unusually acrobatic fighting moves on behalf of the Saboteurs the whole bunch of them are brought to justice after only a moderate amount of infrastructure is exploded.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 548 UPDATE: MADAME DOOM (1940)

When we last saw Madame Doom, she had been bested at the game of espionage by the Black X and was fleeing the US for friendlier shores at the end of Smash Comics 004.

Madame Doom returns with a fresh new attitude for 1940 in Smash Comics 008, as now she is not just working for an analog of the Axis powers but explicitly for the Nazis. It's a lateral move at best but an important one nonetheless. She only actually appears for a page or so and acts as an obstacle to Black X's escape from Germany rather than a full-fledged villain, and is then left in his dust as he takes off into France.

In Smash Comics 012, Black X accompanies US Ambassador Blank to Paris as part of an attempt to initiate peace talks in Europe. Madame Doom is there too, attempting to disrupt the process by manipulating the Hunchback of Notre Dame into assassinating Blank. It's not explicit that she is still working for the Nazis on this, but c'mon. 

This issue also marks the zenith of Madame Doom's investment in the will they/won't they relationship with Black X, but her plea to him to run away with her is an interrupted first by the Hunchback and then by the French authorities and so it is not to be.

Madame Doom returns in Smash Comics 014 with some snappy new henchmen, the Legion of Living Bombs, who have: a. very cool costumes (that they don't actually wear while they're outside of the house), b. a very cool name (as long as you don't think too hard about it in any context other than aesthetic).

More importantly, this story features the zenith of Black X's investment in the relationship between himself and Madame Doom, to the extent that he resigns from the Espionage for her.

This proves to be what's known as a Bad Decision, as Black X soon learns that while Madame Doom is not working for the Nazis this time around (that's good), that is because she has teamed up with a fellow named Count Mirov in a bid to conquer South America (that's bad), and that to that end she is dosing her fanatical minions with a fluid that eventually causes them to explode and sending them out to disrupt the Pan-American diplomatic talks (that's even worse). If there's a positive to this dastardly plot, it's that it seems to kill the romantic tension between the two once and for all.

(Madame Doom's height, hair colour and general appearance are fairly mutable during these appearances, as is not unusual for reoccurring female villains. I mention that here because in order to say that her height had fluctuated I felt compelled to comb through this issue like a foot pervert to see if she was wearing anachronistic 90s stiletto heels, but as you can see above she is not)

After some hijinks involving Black X's aide Batu stealing back his letter of resignation so that his boss can get back on the case, Black X returns to Madame Doom's underground HQ and proceeds to beat ass, and the ease with which he does so to an entire roomful of guys might just be another indictment of selecting your minions for their willingness to die over any other useful quality.

Defeated, Madame Doom decides to take what I would call "the cool way out" and guzzles some of her own explosive brew rather than be captured. It's a heck of a way to leave a final impression.

SPOILER: Madame Doom will return!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 748: THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

(Smash Comics 012, 1940)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is just that, a modern version of the fictional character, and seemingly just as damaged by society as his predecessor. He is manipulated into working as an assassin for Madame Doom, who is in Paris (presumably on behalf of the Nazis) to disrupt peace talks helmed by US Ambassador Blank but is being effectively countered by the Black X and so must operate through a deniable dupe asset.

Just what the deal is with the Hunchback is down to three distinct possibilities, all fairly equally outlandish, but all are predicated on the fact that Notre Dame has a hunchbacked bellringer in 1940, like it's a prerequisite for the job. The possibilities:

1. That the people of Paris are correct in their belief that this Hunchback of Notre Dame is a direct descendant of Quasimodo, the original, which would imply not only that Quasimodo had a child at some point but that his physical condition was one which was passed down through a line of bellringers for almost 500 years.

2. Similar to Possibility 1. Quasimodo has a child, but in this case, the Hunchback of Notre Dame Gene is recessive and his descendants are not generationally indentured cathedral slaves. This latest member of the family would thus be reviving an old tradition by being a delusional misfit urban legend.

3. The citizens of Paris are credulous fools and all hunchbacked bellringers are not, in fact, related. In this scenario we must assume that it's the job that is so terrible that it drives these poor men mad.

Regardless of his actual origin, the Hunchback meets his end after attacking Black X in a jealous rage over Madame Doom's affections. Riddled with bullets, he falls to his death. Black X is still horny for Madame Doom at this point, so she is allowed to leave.

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 012

Lotta Hitlers in this one.

Adolf Hitler: 

Thalga, supreme dictator of Govania, is a clear Hitler analog. (Smash Comics 006, 1940)

This unnamed Hitler-with-a-goatee comes with a bonus, very tired-looking, FDR! (Smash Comics 006, 1940)

Hitler look-alike Rudolph Hitz acts as political representative and spy chief for Hitler act-alike dictator Holtz in a plot to rob the US gold reserve at Fort Knox-alike Fort Adam, only to meet defeat at the cold metal hands of Bozo the Iron Man. (Smash Comics 007, 1940)

Hitlin is a Hitler stand-in who we never actually see and who acts as a motivation for the villains of the piece in their struggle to defeat Hugh Hazzard and his Iron Man, Bozo. Almost charmingly, Hitlin's followers are called the Batzis or the Batzi Tribe. (Smash Comics 008, 1940) 

There's a lot of competition for the title of "most unflattering on-the-nose Hitler analog," but Motler here might just take it. He's top five, if nothing else - just an absolute bad'un. Like Hitlin and Holtz before him, Motler is thwarted by Bozo the Iron Man. Unlike them, he then falls off of a cliff and dies. (Smash Comics 009, 1940)

Franklin D Roosevelt: 

Briefed on the approach of the Metallic Army by intelligence agent Wings Wendall (Smash Comics 012, 1940)

Gill Fox:

Golden Age comics man Gill Fox might not be the coworker most often inserted in stories as a gag but he sure is the one I notice the most. Here he is as a college track star. (Smash Comics 012, 1940)

Hollywood Crowd:

Quality Comics comedy character King Archie O'Toole ends up in Hollywood and attends the usual star-studded party, featuring lightly parodic versions of Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, WC Fields, Clark Gable, the Marx Brothers, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and possibly Joe E. Brown,  Laurel and Hardy and Edward G Robinson, plus a guy who looks very specific and who I could probably figure out if I knew the right things to look for.  (Smash Comics 011, 1940)

Joseph Stalin:

Stalin is in the upper right panel here ordering the invasion of Finland, but I include the rest of the page for a history repeats itself kind of view vis-a-vis the invasion of Ukraine. (Smash Comics 010, 1940)

Unknown:

This right here is the kind of thing that preys on my mind: a character with a roughly equal chance of being completely made up or being a reference to a real person who I might know immediately if I were reading the news regularly in 1940, but who would take no small amount of research to identify now without stumbling upon a Wikipedia page titled List of Deposed German Intelligence Officials. (Smash Comics 008, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 744: PROXOFF

(Smash Comics 009, 1940)

Proxoff is an example of a Kind of Guy that you see in Golden Age Comics: he came through the chaos of the Great War and said to himself "if this ever happens again then I'm going to come out on top." Together with his aides van Damm and Count Trini, Proxoff has established secret airfields and fortresses in Siberia and presumably elsewhere and is waiting for his moment to swoop in and conquer the weakened nations of the world once they've fought one another for a while.

Proxoff's scheme hinges on his army of men who do not fear death, as exemplified by this would-be assassin who, having failed to kill Black X, bumps himself off using a cool skeletonizing drug (in-universe, the skeleton thing is not really for any reason, but on a meta level it points the Black X to its point of origin in Siberia).

The "no fear of death" thing eventually proves to be Proxoff's downfall. Firstly, they've been so heavily conditioned that Black X's aide Batu is able to mesmerize an entire submarine without even trying, and secondly, the impulse to die rather than submit to capture overtakes them when Batu drops his concentration during some depth charge action and they all kill themselves rather than, say attempting to take back the ship.

Things get even worse once Proxoff's men see actual combat, as they don't even see the point of returning enemy fire and prolonging their own existences. Truly this is an indictment of the trope of the henchman loyal unto death.

Proxoff himself meets an ironic end: as Black X closes in on him he must resort to his own skeleton drug rather than being captured, and the caption makes sure to emphasize that he, unlike his men, does not particularly want to die.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 740: THE DEATH BATTALION

(Smash Comics 007, 1940)

You're going to have to trust me because I have gathered no evidence, but I can state with some confidence that the American people of late 1939/early 1940 had a great deal of (perhaps wishful) hope in the effectiveness of the French Maginot Line, right up to the point at which the Nazis did an end run around it and into France. A fair number of war comics of the time (like the adventures of Corporal Collins, for example) feature defenses of the Line (or fictional versions of the Line) from the advancing Axis. Perhaps the most interesting version of this Maginot Line fandom is the concept of the US defending itself via "the Caldwell Line," a series of floating fortresses running from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, if the caption box is to be believed (the floating fortress is another frequently referenced Golden Age idea that I have no other examples of beyond "dude, trust me").

The Axis powers (still creeping up to the line of just saying Nazis) respond to this defensive superiority by deploying their finest spies, under the leadership of Madame la Coquin here. And since the greatest enemy of the spy in America is Black X (in a Black X comic, at least), la Coquin and her cadre start their campaign by hatching a plot to kill him.

As is usually the case in plots to preemptively murder the protagonist of a comic, this proves to be a very bad idea. The Black X manages to fake his own death with the help of a handy psychic illusion (courtesy of his aide Batu) and uncovers the whole operation, namely a secret underground base from which Madame la Coquin and her Death Battalion comrades plan to attack the Caldwell Line using manned torpedoes. An insane plan!

Black X manages to foil the suicide runs of the first two Death Battalion members by radioing their positions to the US Coast Guard, but finds himself unable to do so when la Coquin takes out the final torpedo herself, because they are very horny for one another. And he almost saves her! Oh Black X, are you ever going to find love in the arms of someone who isn't an enemy agent?

(in one of my patented unproveable theories about comics published before my father was born, I reckon that la Coquin was originally going to be our old friend Madame Doom but they didn't want to blow her up)