DIVINE ROUND-UP 031

It's a wide-ranging and complicated theological world out there. 

the Death Orchid:

Once again we have a giant flower - in this case a carnivorous one - that is being worshipped as a god. Interestingly, the people doing so are Lamas, which I think might be being incorrectly used as a general term for Tibetans of a religious inclination, unless there are some major aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that I haven't heard about.

Adventure aviator Captain Kidd flies a fellow named Professor Teller to Tibet to find this fabled plant only to nearly be sacrificed to it with him and ultimately to destroy it. The price of scientific inquiry, I suppose.

Lamas! 

God Style: Animist (Fantastic Comics 019, 1941)

Isis: 

This version of the goddess Isis is okay with her followers being evil and scheming, as evidenced by the fact that her high priest is Nagana, aka the Queen of Evil, but not so hot on blasphemy, as seen here when she drops her own temple on Nagana as well as the faithful Kalkor and hundreds of others. 

Then when Nagana manages to come back to life in the present day she immediately starts badmouthing Isis again, prompting the goddess to show up (topless, in a repeat of the last time we saw her) and introduce an immortal foe for her in the form of Kalkor.

GOD STYLE: Real (Fantastic Comics 022, 1941)

the Black Sword:

The theology of the Black Sword Cult is not entirely clear, so the fact that they worship this swordfish is at least partially speculation on my part. They do use it to conduct human sacrifices, and the high priest does kill herself after Oran of the Jungle slays it, so I'm gonna go ahead and call this as a swordfish cult.

God Style: Animist, probably (Fight Comics 012, 1941)

Zeus: 

Zeus has a reputation for being weird and horny all the time, but this version of him might take the cake. He has stolen the Venus de Milo from the present and taken it back to Ancient Greece to bring it to life and marry it. Wild stuff. Featuring Hercules for a split second before Zanzibar the Magician turns him into a bird! 

God Style: Real (Mystery Men Comics 002, 1939)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 968: THE BLACK RIDER

(Fantastic Comics 018, 1941)

The Black Rider is a ruthless bandit chief who has not only terrorized the countryside but has had the audacity to kidnap Bill Carrol, Captain Kidd's best friend, an unforgivable sin.

While the Black Rider & Co. might look like they are straight out of a comic set in the American West, Captain Kidd's 1941 adventures have taken place exclusively in Africa, and given the mention of a city called Tanga above, I think that we can pretty confidently place this comic somewhere in present-day Tanzania, in the part that was then Tanganyika (yes, okay, there's also a couple of Tangas in Burkina Faso. I just don't think that they're the right ones, okay?).

Though the Black Rider manages to overpower Captain Kidd and stick him in a booby-trapped airplane during their first encounter this is absolutely not enough to dissuade even novice two-fisted adventurer, let alone a grizzled veteran like Kidd. Kidd's return gambit is to storm the Black Rider's HQ and machine gun the entire gang.

The entire gang bar the Black Rider, that is, because it's time for the dramatic revelation that the Black Rider is... A LADY???!!! Specifically, she is the daughter of the original Black Rider, out for revenge since he was killed by vigilantes but now on her way to a British colonial jail and/or execution. Please note that the Black Rider pulls the old "roughly the same size as an adventure hero until unmasked" trick, going from a burly six foot to a slender 5'6" in about one panel.

Categorized in: Colours (Black), Generica (Riders), Origin (Cross-Dressing Characters, Legacy Characters)

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 024

Let's spare a thought for all the mad lab assistants who do so much for so little credit. 

Rokula:

Rokula's plan is simple: kidnap inventors and then use his mind control machine to force them to work for him. Hey, it's a classic for a reason, but it's also a plan with a high chance of attracting super-heroic attention such as that of Zongar the Miracle Man.  

Rokula might be a fan of the classics but like so many of his peers he is no as into workplace safety, and he meets his end when Zongar sends him careening into his own equipment with a forceful punch. (Silver Streak Comics 007, 1941)

Quislor:

Quislor is a fellow who has developed technology that turns aircraft into remote-controlled drones, and is using it to send bombers out to destroy airfields across the US, thus reducing its ability to field an air force. Though he never quite gets around to saying just why he's doing this it is presumably in service to some sort of fascist plot.

Like all air-based crooks within Cloud Curtis' flight range, Quislor soon learns that the only reward for messing with the sanctity of the wild blue yonder is a sock to the jaw and a trip to the hoosegow. (Silver Streak Comics 014, 1941)

Professor Giess:

Professor Giess, a crypto-fascist scientist with some very interesting eyebrows, has developed a fuel additive called Thanotane (great name) that causes vehicles using it to give off deadly fumes in their exhaust. His plan to distribute this fuel throughout the US to spread terror is stymied somewhat when the test shipment is hijacked by gangsters, but the plan is still on track until John Thesson, aka the Son of the Gods, gets involved and beats everyone up. This must be especially galling for Giess, who noted that Thesson was going to pose a challenge but put off dealing with him for too long. Live and learn, I guess, until you're shot as an enemy agent. (Exciting Comics 007, 1941)

Doctor Mord:

Dr Mord is, like, the Platonic ideal of the comic book mad scientist. He lives in a castle that he explicitly just kind of found in the South African jungle and is attempting to scientifically extract the human soul and place it into a big jar of acid by electrocuting people's brains. He claims that this will make him a god among men, but fails to lay out how, exactly.

The old storytelling rule of Chekhov's Unsealed Vat of Acid comes into play here and Doctor Mord ends up doused in the stuff before being chucked out a window by Captain Kidd. (Fantastic Comics 014, 1941)

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 002

Once again I present the worst that comics has to offer.

The Great Green Turtle:

The Great Green Turtle is just your standard Yellow Peril Chinatown ganglord, albeit one with a fantastic name. He does try to throw Sub-Zero, a man with ice powers, into a shark tank so we can safely say that he is not a villain with fantastic intelligence. His gem-smuggling ring gets thoroughly kiboshed. (Blue Bolt v1 004, 1940)

The Lama:

The Lama is a bandit chief, essentially, albeit one with a name from one religious tradition and henchmen - Thuggees, natch - from another. He hijacks a plantation and then gets beat up by aviator Captain Kidd. (Fantastic Comics 010, 1940)

The Fire God:

If there's one thing that Captain Kidd likes, it's finding lost explorers, so when a fellow named Benson goes missing he's off like a shot. He finds Benson about to be sacrificed to the Fire God, a masked figure who a well-placed kick reveals to be a Hitler lookalike in a mask (the Hitler thing is either a coincidence or just kind of meant to indicate generic megalomania in the Fire God's character). This one not only has a white guy easily convincing a group of credulous natives that he is a god but an instance of White People Vs Everyone else as Captain Kidd fruitlessly tries to get out of a sticky situation by playing the race card.

The Fire God ultimately meets his end in the classic writer's cop-out when they don't want to make their guy do a murder: he falls and hits his head on a rock after a sock to the jaw. (Fantastic Comics 011, 1940)

Mad Ming:

Part of me wants to give Mad Ming some credit for not being as racist a Yellow Peril villain as someone like the Great Green Turtle, but he basically is and I am being tricked. Ming talks and dresses like a normal person and so all of his outrageous villainy is recontextualized, and maybe he would be worthy of reconsideration if all of his schemes and his henchmen and his nom de crime weren't still mired in the muck of the Oriental pulp villain, but as it stands he's just mildly better than his peers, racist stereotype-wise. (Funny Pages v4 001, 1940)

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 012

Science class was never like this.

Count la Roach is a scientist-spy looking to synthesize enough "noxio gas" to flood the NYC of the I-think-it's-still-the-near-future world of Yank Wilson, but all he gets is a sock in the jaw for his trouble. (Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

This unnamed fellow is our first proper mad scientist in a while! I really like his style, particularly the fact that he's introduced while sitting in a tennis judge's chair for no stated reason. He lives in an inactive volcano, probably in Africa, and is developing a horrible poison dust that he has used to destroy the neighbouring village - it's probably a good thing that Captain Kidd melts him. (Fantastic Comics 008, 1940)

Dr Loy here has created an army of chemical androids that he controls and aims to take over the world with. Two problems: the Fantom of the Fair is on the case and Dr Loy's androids dissolve in water. Loy is quickly arrested. (Amazing Mystery Funnies v3 002, 1940)

Chung Hang has a simple dream: wait until the world is exhausted by WWII and then take over using his mind control ray. And he might just get there some day, because Chip Collins of the Skull Squadron just punches him out and leaves once he and his pals have escaped Chung Hang's science dungeons. (Fight Comics 002, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 639: LU CHENG THE FORBIDDEN

(Fantastic Comics 013, 1940) 

A vampire holed up in a cave in the Gobi Desert with a bunch of lady vampires, Lu Cheng the Forbidden talks a big game but I reckon that he's super screwed. He's somehow found himself in one of the largest deserts in the world, presumably farther from human habitation than is comfortable for a vampire - when Captain Kidd wanders into his cave all Lu Cheng is concerned with is using his plane to get the heck out of the Gobi.

Lucky for Captain Kidd, Lu Cheng is not the kind of vampire that is immune to everything that isn't a specific vampire weakness, or maybe is a kind of vampire that is vulnerable to grenades. Either way, he ends up dead for real. And as a bonus, the lady vampires are the kind of vampire thrall that returns to normal once the head vampire is killed! Hooray!

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 014

Once again the also-rans.

A bunch of small-time crooks get paid to fake the death of Titano (the largest gorilla in captivity!) for an insurance scam and of course use him to rob a series small-town banks. If only they had thought a bit more ambitiously they might have made the big time. (Exciting Comics 005, 1940)

This Yank Wilson adventure features a fairly by-the-book super-spy ring headed by Count Lustig von Blackgard. They plot, they scheme, they are ultimately foiled. This mysterious radio message is the only mention of a higher-up, but their moniker - the extremely evocative Neuromania - was too good to pass over without comment. (there is of course the possibility that Neuromania is the spies' home country. Either way, it's great). (Fantastic Comics 002, 1940)

This happy fellow has no name but makes up for it with a laundry list of distinctive features: missing left eye, hunch, catlike upper lip, pointy ears, bizarrely long hair on his forearms, etc. He lives under a fake man-eating tree in... probably the African jungle and spends his days torturing and poisoning people for no stated reason until he is killed by Captain Kid using his own poisoned melon. (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

This is Nipon, ruler of an unnamed Asian country (wink, wink) from that period in late 1940 through 1941 when the Axis powers were very clearly the villains on everyone's minds but the US was remaining neutral so you couldn't in good conscience make the leader of a foreign nation the villain of your story. These guys are usually either extremely obvious stand-ins named, like Arnolf Hilter or Menito Bussolini (in which case they get added to a Real Folk entry) or so generic that I forget them entirely. Nipon is kind of neither - like, he's obviously a stand-in for the Emperor of Japan but extremely generically, but also he has a very fun look! (Fantastic Comics 013, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 623: THE CYCLOP

(Fantastic Comics 009, 1940)

Captain Kidd is once again back in Africa, this time in search of a lost explorer named Perez, and has once again bribed a local into taking him somewhere dangerous only to get that local killed (this happens about a third of the time with Kidd - not quite often enough to make a very depressing supercut).

Kidd and his unfortunate hireling Wango track Perez to the Lost Valley, where they discover and are captured by a tribe of one-eyed Beastmen, respectively.

Surprisingly little is made of the fact that the Beastmen worship a hypnotically paralyzed woman. Ordinarily a reveal like this would be lead to the woman's rescue being the focus of the rest of the adventure but this panel is her only appearance - is it possible that Captain Kidd thinks that she is merely a statue? A grim fate indeed. 

Also: RIP Wango.

The Beastman leader (referred to as "the Cyclop" throughout) of course turns out to be Perez, who went mad upon his discovery of the valley and somehow became the leader of the whole place. If I'm honest, the theoretical comic about the sequence of events that lead to that happening (and presumably to that poor woman becoming a goddess-statue) is more interesting than what we got.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 618: THE GREAT WHITE CHIEF

(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940) 

The Great White Chief is a chubby scientist who wears stirrup pants with no shoes or socks and lives in a dormant volcano (that he makes look non-dormant using special effects) where he makes animal-headed monstrosities like Cinu the Unicorn Man here. This is all very good classic villain stuff.

The name is pretty annoying. It implies a lot about his relationship with the native peoples of wherever his volcano is located (probably Africa as he has kidnapped the daughter of an ivory trader) and so I am constantly on edge while reading about him, waiting for him or Captain Kidd to say or do something really racist, but nothing concrete ever happens. But the name!

I guess the only thing to do is to focus on how fun a design the unicorn man is. Look! Captain Kidd is stabbing him with his own horn!

After finishing off poor Cinu, Captain Kidd gets the drop on the GWC and socks him into a boiling sulphur pit. I was going to make a joke about Kidd being just as weirded out by the name as I was but then I remembered that Captain Kidd is himself pretty racist. Welp...

Hey look, more animal headed people! Check out that bird head!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 612: QUEEN IZZUKI

(Fantastic Comics 006, 1940)

The eminent scientist Dr Chandler is being held in Amazoland, home of the Amazons! The extremely diplomatic Captain "Ugh!" Kidd sets out to rescue him! 

This is another one I might have skipped over if not for a couple of remarkable things, the first being that the poorly-named Amazon homeland seems to be just a country, somewhere in Asia if all the references to the Amazon's eyes being almond-shaped (that's not how Captain Kidd puts it, of course) are anything to go by. Are they just another lost jungle civilization and I'm reading too much into things or does Amazoland have a seat at the UN in a decade or so?

The second thing is that this may be the least a character has sexualized a society of scantily-clad women in all of fiction. I'd blame it on the 40s obsession with male vs female roles but Captain Kidd doesn't really say anything about that so I assume he's just too racist to be attracted to Asian women.

Queen Izzuki turns out to be an older woman who is obsessed with regaining her lost beauty and so has captured Dr Chandler to perform plastic surgery on her. Captain Kidd turning up is a bonus: free husband!

Captain Kidd was already against this whole situation but the prospect of having to marry an old woman (an old Asian woman!) really galvanizes him. He does let Dr Chandler get shot with an arrow (fired by Izzuki, who's not some layabout queen who doesn't know how to shoot an arrow at someone) but he's mostly okay afterward. They escape and Amazoland has to consider more conventional ways of attracting a plastic surgeon, like paying for their education in return for a certain number of years of service.