Here they are! Some guys you've never heard of!
the Press Guardian:
In the Press Guardian's first outing he is known as the Falcon, but he has the same core mission as he will throughout his career: to clean up crime in Central City via the free press, even if he must do so in a pretty bad costume. A fair few places online list reporter Flash Calvert as the Falcon's secret identity but this is one of your classic reading comprehension/ research tests: it certainly seems like Calvert is the Falcon right up to the last third of the story, in which they start appearing in the same panels as one another. Thus, a claim that Calvert is the Falcon mean that the claimant either skimmed the story in question or is taking the word of another who did so.
By Pep Comics 002, the Falcon has officially changed his name to the Press Guardian and traded in his Victorian daredevil costume for a classic suit-and-mask combo. His identity is also revealed as Perry Chase, society columnist and universally derided failson of the publisher of the Daily Express. As with a lot of Golden Age heroes the necessity for your secret identity to be the subject of scorn is not really explained - surely the same effect could be achieved by faking a limp or something and then people wouldn't constantly be insulting you to your face.
But the papes must go through, and the majority of the Press Guardians adventures have a hand in ensuring that they do, if only tangentially. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)
Auro, Lord of Jupiter:
Before Auro was lord of anything he was just some kid with the last name Hardwich who was out on a Sunday space drive with his family, when all of a sudden things went wrong and the family space car crashed into the solid, non-gaseous, habitable planet Jupiter. There, the now-orphaned boy is raised by a Jovian tiger, becomes extra beefy in the high gravity environment, and rises to a position of leadership in the nearby tribe of "Jupiter Brutes," who name him Auro, meaning "Unconquerable".
All this is pretty standard jungle orphan, white guy exceptionalism stuff and I'm sure that one could make a pretty good case for it being just as unpleasant a series of tropes even when divorced from any real-world peoples etc, but what I must focus on is the fact that when you put a jungle guy in space he becomes a space barbarian and is actually pretty entertaining to read. (Planet Comics 001, 1940)
the Red Comet:
Speaking of taking character tropes from one comic genre and putting them in another, here's the Red Comet! Like his fellow Fiction House hero the Red Panther, the Red Comet brings super-hero style to a non-super-heroic world, or worlds in this case, as he beetles around the cosmos righting wrongs.
The Red Comet's main trick involves shrinking and growing at will, but over time he demonstrates a wide range of situationally useful abilities including but not limited to: a crime-in-progress sense, insect communication, invisibility, super strength, the ability to survive in space without PPE, flight and the ability to change the size of others.
The Red Comet's ability to change size is initially attributed to advanced technology (an "intra-atomic space adjuster," natch), while his expanded ability set is generally described as "magic." Then, in Planet Comics 009, he is on a dinner date and explains that he got his size control abilities when he was struck by "some outer space force," giving him a more traditional super-hero origin. No word on whether his ability to talk to termites is still magic or as a result of another jolt of cosmic energy. (Planet Comics 001, 1940)
Tiger Hart of Crossbone Castle:
Tiger Hart is one of the more obscure Fletcher Hanks characters, a medieval warrior who spends his sole recorded adventure seeking the Great Solinoor Diamond (time for a Real Folk entry for the Koh-i-noor, I suppose) in order to free Queen Hilda from the clutches of the bandit chieftain Turk-the-Terrible.
All pretty standard sword and sorcery stuff but, presumably in deference to the fact that the story was being published in Planet Comics, it all takes place on the planet Saturn. This raises many questions! Are Tiger Hart et al Saturnians? Are they from a far enough future that humans have colonized Saturn (and the habitability of Saturn must be taken as a given, alas) and then gone through a societal collapse of some kind, a Dark Age and now a medieval-style era? Or, as the only real reference to Saturn is that the Solinoor is from Saturn, is the story set on a far-future retromedieval Earth? Many things to ponder. (Planet Comics 002, 1940)
