MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 023

Perhaps we should make ethics a mandatory subject for the sciences again.

Kruger: 

While tooling around in the desert one day, Diamond Jack encounters a young woman named Ruth West, whose physician brother has been captured by the diabolical scientist Kruger and taken to Terror Valley in order to help in Kruger's work turning men into hybrid creatures called Vulture Men, with the ultimate goal of using them to take over the world. If that plot sounds at all familiar, it's because it is almost exactly the same as the one in Wonderworld Comics 015, featuring the Flame and Dr Belos, right down to the name of the valley, the colour of the Vulture men and the fact that the scientist has his own private hydroelectric dam.

Just how did this happen? Three distinct possibilities spring to mind:

1. The Diamond Jack writer (Gus Ricca? He's got the generally accepted art credit) just plain old cribbed the story off of the Flame adventure, which came out about six months earlier

2. Gus Ricca and the Flame writer (unidentified) knew one another and came up with the idea for the story together in the reasonable expectation that nobody would notice. Alternately, the same person might have written both stories for two different artists.

3. The biggest coincidence in the history of mankind.

Whatever the reason for it, we are left with two very similar stories to compare:

Kruger's Vulture Men are much more appealing to me than Belos' - particularly their weird pawlike hands. While Belos' version does look a bit more like something you could do to a person via surgery (except for the part where they have functional dragon wings coming out of their backs of course), the lack of humanity in the bird heads of Kruger's really drives home the horror of their being transformed against their wills. I also appreciate their seemingly organic feather kilts.

Kruger also has a better look than Belos - his having a bit of the vulture to his look makes a lot of aesthetic sense! I do miss Belos' one long tooth, though.

The one place where Kruger loses out to Belos is in means of destruction. Being drowned by your own bursting dam doesn't hold a candle to getting fatally beaned with the skull of one of your own failed experiments (though "I'm drowning - AAAGH!" are pretty good last words). (Wow Comics 001, 1940)

Categorized in: Animals (Birds) 

Professor Stargaze: 

Professor Stargaze is a mad astronomer (nominative determinism) who discovers that the wandering and flaming planet Inferno will soon pass near Earth and wipe all life from its surface. Not only does Stargaze decide not to share this information with the world (possibly a morally neutral act) but he is so convinced that it is the right thing to happen that he tags along with Zambini the Miracle Man and tries to prevent him from stopping it (actively evil).

Stargaze is ultimately fried to a crisp when he attempts to assassinate Zambini with a flaming spear, then reincarnated as a rat by magic, then restored to his human form back on Earth once it is saved. Has he learned a lesson from all this? Unclear. (Zip Comics 002, 1940)

Categorized in: Day Jobs (Astronomers), Doctors and Professors

Doctor Igor:

Doctor Igor is a scientist with a vision: to develop a method of creating giant men via electrical stimulation of the pituitary gland, and to use an army of these men to take over the world. To that end, he has taken over a remote island (probably because it already has a castle on it) and used its inhabitants as guinea pigs.

Igor probably saw the fact that the island had a copra plantation on it as a plus, since it provided a supply experimental subjects for him, but what he failed to anticipate was that an interruption of commercial product is likely to draw the attention of an adventurer such as Lance Rand to investigate just what the heck was going on. Igor is ultimately undone when his own creation trips over some equipment and blows up the castle. (Cat-Man Comics 002, 1941)

Categorized in: Accessories (Castles), Doctors and Professors 

Borcia:

Borcia (also called "Garcia" one time which is probably an editorial oversight but possibly means that his name is either Garcia Borcia or Borcia Garcia) is a formerly-famous scientist whose mind cracked due to overwork and who now dreams of world conquest. And how better to achieve that dream than by stealing the magic gem owned by small-time super-hero Dr Diamond?

Once both the gem and Dr Diamond are in his clutches, Borcia reveals his world domination plot: let loose a moderately cool-looking giant robot called Najar to just kind of indiscriminately rampage through the nearby town of Verez, Mexico. Presumably there will be more robots later on. As for the magic diamond: it seems to play no real role in the plan. Borcia just wanted it, I guess.

As so often happens, Borcia is betrayed by his own step-daughter Elena, who just wants a normal, non-evil life and resents being part of a super-villainous household. Dr Diamond proves more than a match for Najar, and despite some typical super-villain bluster as he is lead off to jail, Borcia is never seen again. (Cat-Man Comics 003, 1941)

Categorized in: Accessories (Gems (Magic), Giant Robots), Location (Mexico)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 074

Some more of those "minor super-heroes" you like so much. 

the Cat-Man **Update**:

Hey, it's the Cat-Man! As you may or may not recall, the Cat Man (sans hyphen) debuted in Crash Comics Adventures in 1940 and was the only survivor of that comics short run. The most obvious change to his character is his costume, which goes from its former jungle chic look through a blue-and-orange phase  before settling on the orange-and-darker orange look that he will stick with for the rest of his career.

In addition to the costumes and the hyphen, Cat-Man got a slight tweak to his origin: rather than being orphaned by a hostile tribe in India, David Merrywether's parents are now said to have been killed by bandits in Burma. David also has a job now: he's a private detective for the first four issues of Cat-Man Comics, after which he enlists and becomes a lieutenant in the US Army.

The Cat-Man also gets a couple of new powers in 1941: he is able to see otherwise-invisible radiation and displays some degree of super strength.

Finally: his nine lives. Though he still has this power, David manages to only die once during the whole of 1941, bringing his total remaining lives down to six.

the Kitten: 

Actually, not quite finally, as this is also the year that the Cat-Man gets a sidekick. While en route to investigate a series of train explosions, Lt David "the Cat-Man" Merrywether picks up a hitchhiking man and his niece. The man turns out to be a real scumbag, but the girl, named Katie Conn, turns on her uncle rather than see him rob and possibly murder Merrywether. Once the uncle is tossed in the hoosegow it's a classic case of a child just entering a super-hero's orbit and getting auto-adopted.

Katie turns out to be the orphaned child of a pair of circus acrobats, which as we know is a perfect background for a potential super-hero's sidekick to have. She also appears to be a few years younger than your typical kid sidekick - if they average in at about 13-15 I'd call her 11 or 12, though as usual the limitations of Golden Age art make estimating the age of kids difficult at best.

Merrywether does his best to conceal his dual identity from his new ward but doesn't quite manage it, and her self-assigned new role as the Cat-Man's sidekick is announced in the final panel of the last Cat-Man story of 1941. More specifics on her in action as a sidekick in 1942. I will say that it's nice to see a kid sidekick with both a costume and a code name. (Cat-Man Comics 005, 1941)

Blaze Baylor: 

Blaze Baylor is the son of the famous fire chief Smoky Baylor, who was killed by arsonists, and who is now a very specific anti-arson crimefighter. Though the name of the strip is "'Blaze' Baylor and the Arson Ring," there is no indication in any of his adventures that the arsonists he battles are connected to one another in any way. (Cat-Man Comics 001 1941)

Dr Diamond: 

Dr Drake Gorden is bound for the South Seas when the freighter he is travelling on is sunk by a waterspout. He passes out after washing up on a beach at the base of an unscaleable cliff and is carried off by an eagle that takes him to the home of a frankly weird guy who has dressed him in a generic super-hero costume.

This never-named man explains that thirty years prior he had come into possession of a legendary black diamond that conferred great physical power to its wielder, and that he had retired to the island to await the arrival of someone worthy enough to receive it. Dr Gorden, a man who he just met and who has spoken all of thirty-three words to him, several of which were to refer to a pair of brown pants as his "American clothes," is his pick.

Whatever the opposite of the Refusal of the Call part of the Hero's Journey is, that's what Dr Gorden has. He immediately renames himself Dr Diamond and launches into a monologue about just how hard he's going to bust up crime that is so over the top that it would make me personally reconsider giving him any sort of power whatsoever. Despite my misgivings, Dr Diamond does an adequate job of using the powers conferred by the gem (super strength, enhanced speed, some degree of invincibility) to battle crime for four issues before fading into the mists of obscurity. (Cat-Man Comics 001, 1941)