GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 007

The hits keep on coming:

This Fellow's name is Becker and he and his wife run a gang while pretending to be among its victims. An okay scheme, but not really up to foiling Bulletman and Bulletgirl. (Master Comics 014, 1941)

This guy here is why I have such a hard time relegating masked Western bandits to the dregs of the generic costumed villains: he's as by-the-numbers a bandit as they come, he robs one stagecoach total, he ends up dying because he falls off his horse... but he is frequently and consistently referred to a "Alkali, the Scourge of the Plains" which is as endearing as it is possible to be. (Master Comics 019, 1941)

I'm overlooking the fact that this bundist-style not-exactly-German spy encountered by Miss America doesn't actually wear a costume because a) he's called the Leader, b) he lives in a wax museum and c) he has a pet gorilla named Gargo. (Military Comics 002, 1941)

Captain Rajah, AKA the Master, was a jewel thief who ran up against Captain Desmo, in a story even more weirdly pro-colonial than Captain Desmo stories usually are - Captain Rajah is immediately suspicious for being an Indian officer in the Bengal Lancers, continued to be suspected throughout and then turned out to be the Master. The story is from before the invention of "defying expectations". (More Fun Comics 065, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 353: THE PURPLE HOODS

(Master Comics 013-014, 1941) 

I'm not going to lie: when I started reading this story I got excited for one of the more niche reasons I ever have. See, the prior Buck Jones story - the one with the Ghost Killer gang - was still wrapping up and I had a moment where I thought there would be some very exciting gang continuity if any of the former Ghost Killers, already relict of the White Arrow gang, had joined up with the Purple Hoods. That's an unprecedented three gangs! Alas, Snake and Cope were sent to jail and the counter reset.

Ephemeral hopes and dreams aside, the Purple Hoods are crass capitalist crooks: their big scheme involves kidnapping Mexican farm labourers and pressing them into slavery in a secret oil refinery. Ah, the romance of the Old West!

And speaking of the Old West, this story is a perfect illustration of the weird liminal space that the West occupied in the 40s imagination: is Buck Jones an Old West marshal or a contemporary one? Does this issue offer any clues? The ascent of oil as a valuable resource does overlap with the Old West, and steel oil barrels of the kind pictured above are a 20th Century invention, but one of the major conflicts of the story is a business rivalry between two competing stagecoach lines and while I can find evidence of stagecoaches being used into the early 20th Century I doubt that they were such a going concern as that.

What I'm getting at here is that I don't know which way the anachronisms are going: is Buck Jones an Old West marshal with forward-thinking villains or a modern marshal in an overly romanticized setting? Who knows!

(I must note that I do appreciate the Purple Hood leader getting his own special version of the gang costume)

ADDENDUM:

Two issues later (Master Comics 016, 1941), the story is clearly set in the Old West! Answers have been forthcoming at last!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 349: THE GHOST KILLERS

(Master Comics 012, 1941)

Maybe someday I'll wish that I had started out putting all of the various gangs of masked Western outlaws in group posts like the generic villains or mad scientists. But maybe not, because the major difference between those three groups is that the other two are par for the course in a super-hero comic while masked outlaws are frequently the only interesting thing about a Western comic.

Anyway: the Ghost Killers (unofficial name - they are hard to find and they kill witnesses) are fun because they are made up of the remnants of the White Arrow's gang and achieve their ghostly status by operating out of the town jail, coming and going via some loose bars until Marshal Buck Jones gets wise and slaps leather, rendering one of them and actual ghost and sending the other two to big boy jail.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 345: THE WHITE ARROW

(Master Comics 008-011, 1940-1941)

A regular-style Old West outlaw chief with the somewhat lyrical name of Santos Figaro, the White Arrow's main distinction is that he was a multi-issue rather than one-off foe of Marshal Buck Jones.  

Jones himself is far more interesting than poor Santos Figaro, being a real-life cowboy actor cast as an Old West lawman (probably - I think I've mentioned before that the media of the 1930s-40s doesn't draw a lot of distinction between the Old West and the contemporary West and that sometimes the only way you find out that a series is one or the other is 50 instalments in when the protagonist hops a plane to Chicago). Jones replaced former marshal Bill Crane in Master Comics 006 in a sadly lost-to-history adventure that might contain clues as to whether he was the Buck Jones or just a Buck Jones. 

Regardless, the "Buck Jones, Frontier Marshal" feature closed its doors after the real Buck Jones died in 1942. Given that, it is somewhat ironic that Master Comics was one of the books to eventually carry the adventures of Old West cowboy Tom Mix based on the Western actor who had died in 1940.

UPDATE: I finally got to read Master Comics 006, in which Buck Jones takes over for Bill Crane, and it's almost but not quite as unclear about the time period as the issues I already had access to. Buck Jones is a famous actor moving to what is effectively the past for a bit of a break from modern life and when Crane is wounded he is sworn in as the new marshal. Jones is simultaneously a recognizable celebrity and living in a place with no technology more modern than the steam engine. Baffling!