MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 669: ARCO

(Jungle Comics 011, 1940)

Arco, aka "the immortal mummy of Ancient Egypt! Old Arco, the super-scientist of long ago!" comes to the attention of Fantomah when he begins blinding the inhabitants of her home jungle using a ray with the fairly awesome name of the Scarlet Shadow. His ultimate goal - like so many Fantomah foes - is to conquer the jungle and establish an empire for himself.

(Arco is also, somewhat surprisingly, our first actual mummy. The current ratio of fake to real mummies stands at 5:1)

While an ancient mummy attempting to take over a quasi-mystic omnijungle using a blindness ray might be relatively normal as far as comic book plots go, Arco's next move is amazing. In order to finalize his conquest he requires a population, and what better subjects for a mummy emperor than more mummies? What seems like most if not all Egyptian mummies in the world are reanimated and flown in on the wings of Arco's ancient magics. Presumably he also protects their dry, dry bodies from the jungle humidity, perhaps using another ray to do so.

Arco of course rejects Fantomah's ritual attempt to warn off her foe. In his defense he is riding a justifiable high based on the fact that he and his followers are all already dead - how could he know that his mummy troops, so effective at attacking blind and confused people, would prove easy prey to the most powerful beasts of the jungle?

(I can't imagine what a blow this must have been to the fields of Anthropology and Archaeology in the world of Fantomah. Museums all over the world must be full of little plaques saying "this sarcophagus formerly held the mummy of Amenhotep III, preserved from 1353 BC until the Great Mummy Reanimation of 1940. Recent expeditions have brought back evidence that the mummy was subsequently dismembered and partially consumed by a lioness (see bone fragments in case to your left)")

Arco attempts to blind Fantomah in revenge for the defeat of his forces but finds himself on the receiving end of sequentially, his own ray, a fall, and a river full of crocodiles. What an end for an immortal mummy man.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 667: ANGEL EYES

(Jungle Comics 010, 1940)

It's a c-c-c-combo breaker! Ordinarily Fantomah swans around observing the villains of her comic adventures and periodically telling them that they should stop what they're doing before it's too lat, ie, before she delivers unto them an ironic punishment. This issue features one of the few foes to catch her completely flat-footed and she is as surprised as anyone when giant flaming hands start tearing through the jungle, indiscriminately murdering both people and animals. Who or what could be behind this?

The culprit turns out to be a scientific prodigy called Angel Eyes, who has the Batman origin except his parents were killed by a jungle and so he has vowed to destroy all jungles. He has created artificial life forms out of chemicals and known as the Flaming Claws for the simple reason that they are completely invisible except for their huge flaming clawed hands.

I really appreciate Angel Eyes' design! He really captures the look of a person who would be extremely attractive if they didn't constantly wear their foul mood in their facial expression.

Not that Fantomah ever has much of a hard time dealing with guys like this, but Angel Eyes is an especially easy one: she just hangs him from a tree and has his own creations attack him until he has a heart attack and dies. As for the Flaming Claws, why, they get melted back into the constituent chemicals that they were made of.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 666: MARK LORD

(Jungle Comics 009, 1940)

Minor Super-Villain 666 is somewhat in line with how underwhelming our milestone numbers in the past have been. Just two entries away from being the Devil his own two-headed self. I suppose I could have shuffled things around to make it work out in a more satisfying way but that would really taint the pure joy we'll experience when entry 1000 or 1600 or 69420 turn out to be amazingly apropos.

Who we have instead is poor little rich boy Mark Lord, a villain in the classic Fletcher Hanks sense in that he has a real problem with civilization and wants to destroy it. To that end, he has seemingly been flying aimlessly around until he finds something that he can use to advance his plans - in this case a valley full of royal panthers, the largest big cats in the world! Hanks really seems to enjoy writing about and drawing these beefy felines and dedicates large swathes of the narrative to the mechanics of Lord capturing and transporting 50 000 of them.

Lord's plan - bomb New York and release tens of thousands of enormous hungry panthers into the ensuing panic - is certainly an effective terror attack but I can't see it leading to a total dissolution of human civilization. For one thing, you probably wouldn't get even half your panthers back if you wanted to keep up the momentum and move on to another city quickly. Hell, NYC's population was about 7.5 million in 1940 and I don't know that you're going to kill or scare off enough of them with this stunt that you could declare human civilization ended in the city. I suppose we aren't looking to a guy like Mark Lord for cold rational thought but come on.

As is her way, Fantomah, though she has been watching and warning Lord the entire time, only steps in once things his a crisis point. We are treated to one of Hanks' signature images, a bunch of levitating creatures, as Lord and the panthers are transported back to Africa.

And of course Lord is ironically punished for his transgressions by being transformed into an uncivilized caveman and left to deal with a valley full of cheesed-off panthers on his own. Maybe next time he has a beef against civilization he'll reflect on where his last one got him.

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 016

 Bless 'em, they're trying.

The first few adventures of Hydroman, a character I have an inexplicable affection for, are concerned with what at first seems like some real standard Yellow Peril bullplop ("Oriental invaders" and so forth) but then there are gangsters involved and the two factions variously mention a higher-up named "the Great One" and "the Big Boss", respectively. Still later, the whole operation seems to be run by this collection of pseudo-Nazis on a yacht in New York Harbor. It looks like the bald guy in the monocle might be in charge but the whole issue of just who exactly the Great One is is ultimately rendered moot by Hydroman blowing up the yacht and killing them all before their org chart is fully conveyed. 

Good costumes on those henchmen, though. (Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics 001, 1940)

I quite like "the Snarl," the nom de crime that this fellow has chosen for himself, and he gets up to all sorts of classic villainy to boot: bank robbery, deathtraps, sending taunting notes to the police, mass murder, etc, but he gets caught with ease by semi-comedic actor/detective Fuller Spunk in just a couple of pages so there's not quite enough meat for a full entry. (Hyper Mystery Comics 002, 1940)

Jungle comics are crawling with guys like Zan Marzov, a crook who murders and pillages with the aid of a gang of men dressed in leopard skins. Few can match his look, however. Between the leopard scar, haunted eyes, shrunken head necklace and horrible goatee, Marzov may have achieved the pinnacle of the Evil Explorer aesthetic. He ultimately gets blown up by virtuous explorer Buck Barton, by the way. (Jungle Comics 001, 1940)

This guy calls himself Mr X and he has stolen a sacred mask from a temple in the jungle dimension that Fantomah calls home, thus invoking a curse that threatens to flood the entire land with boiling mud. Needless to say, Fantomah does not look kindly on that sort of behaviour and he is rounded up post haste and sent to a weird cavern to "eat mud and fire for the rest of your days." Tough but fair, Fantomah! (Jungle Comics 008, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 663: THE JUNGLE DEMON

(Jungle Comics 006, 1940) 

The Jungle Demon starts out as an unnamed boy lost in the jungle and true to the old trope he is found and nurtured by a beast - we've seen it many times before. The beast in this case is a mind-bogglingly large constrictor snake, which is fun. Boy grows to man and he and the snake (charmingly named "Powerhouse") are at peace with the people and animals of the jungle until one day the still-unnamed young man chows down on what turns out to be some AD&D Alignment-flipping berries and Nice Boy becomes the Jungle Demon.

My memory had filled in some details and I was thinking of this fellow as one of the big Fantomah villains but in fact although he talks a big game about conquering the Jungle, mostly he just steals jewels and defrauds his workers.

Fantomah steps in a couple of times throughout the story to warn the Jungle Demon away from pursuing his darker impulses (pulling down a city to build a palace, enslaving people with dark majicks, etc) but he just can't help but be evil and eventually she is forced to feed him an antidote salad to reverse the effects of the berries (and she exiles him and his snake to an isolated plateau, which seems a bit mean). I hadn't really thought about it before but this tendency of Fantomah's to watch the unfolding action but not really step in until she does so decisively at the moment of crisis is the equivalent to Stardust the Super Wizard's very long commute: a way for there to be a story with an effectively omnipotent protagonist in which anything actually happens.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 660: MUNDOOR

(Jungle Comics 005, 1940)

Mundoor is a scientist who hangs out in the Fantomah part of the Jungle Comics Omnijungle and has seemingly been spending his time looking for a vitamin-rich plant that will induce giant growth in those that eat it, and in an astonishing turn of fortune an asteroid bearing that very plant lands on his doorstep one day! And the asteroid is also stuffed full of viable monster eggs! What a day for Mundoor.

Mundoor raises his reptiles on a diet of super-vitamins and hypnotism and sets out to conquer the jungle. He also coats them in phosphorescent paint to make them scarier which is frankly overkill.

Quite a bit of the adventure concerns Fantomah playing keepaway with the treasure vaults from Mundoor's first target, one of those Indian style palaces that Fantomah's mostly African style jungle is dotted with.

Mundoor eventually crosses Fantomah's mental line, from "prevent this guy from doing crimes" to "get rid of this guy for good' when he orders his beasts to destroy and loot an entire (kind of Middle Eastern style) city. He and his pets are unceremoniously dumped back on the asteroid and blasted into space, where they presumably get extremely huge on a diet of nothing but growth inducing plants.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 657: THE SCIENTIST

(Jungle Comics 004, 1940)

The Scientist (no other name given) is a man with a very comic book plan: develop a serum capable of giving gorillas superhuman intelligence, do so to a population of the particularly huge Gorgon Gorillas, and use the resulting army to conquer the world, presumably after a period of rapid gorilla breeding.

Though the Scientist is a compelling villain in his own right (he is a world-class asshole, for example, like all the best bad guys), the stars of this adventure are absolutely the Gorgon Gorillas, who for example respond to a gorilla call by marching single-file through the jungle beating their chests until they just kind of topple into a pit trap.

The post-enhancement gorgons are even better, as they exhibit a range of amazing facial expressions from "benignly intelligent" to "absolutely fucking mental" depending on input from the Scientist.

As is her prerogative, Fantomah waits to step in to the situation until the crisis point, in this case the Scientist ordering his gorilla army to scour human life from the face to the jungle. Alas, he learns too late that the old adage is true: you live by the army of demonized gorillas, you die by the army of demonized gorillas.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 028

Panther-heavy haul this time.

the White Panther: 

The White Panther is (along with his ancient father) the last survivor of some sort of lost jungle civilization that seems to have based their fashion sense along Jack Kirby lines, not that I'm complaining. He only has one appearance, in which he uses his supposed precognitive abilities to help a scientist and his daughter get ahold of some healing gemstones before a crook does.

Since he never appeared again, by far the most interesting thing about the White Panther is his outfit, in which the lower portion seems to be pants and the upper to be his unclothed, chalk-white torso. Also, he appears to be using an unsheathed dagger as a belt buckle and while wildly impractical you can't deny that that is very cool. (Jungle Comics 001, 1940)

the Red Panther:

The White Panther never returned, but the next issue of Jungle Comics featured the first appearance of the Red Panther (no relation), a fairly standard jungle hero and also a fairly standard costumed vigilante, a combination that I have a lot of affection for. Don't get me wrong, the broader structural problems of the jungle adventure comic are still front and centre but at least the protagonist has a fun look so you can distract yourself occasionally with a chuckle. (Jungle Comics 002, 1940)

Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle:

Tabu, the Wizard of the Jungle! He saved a witch-doctor's life and was blessed with a "sixth sense" in turn unlocked a very wide range of powers and abilities that he uses to keep the peace in his jungle home! These powers include: physical abilities that outstrip those of the various jungle animals around him, including flight; the ability to communicate with and compel the actions of the animals and plants of the jungle; the ability to control the elements of the jungle to cause weather events (mist, wind) or disasters (earthquakes, plagues of insects); and his most spectacularly realized power, to change shape into animals or plants:

Yes, this is the power that Tabu uses to dispose of a group of "slave raiders" in his first appearance by transforming into a carnivorous tree and... eating them? It's possible that Tabu ate those guys, you guys.

At the end of that first appearance the witch-doctor (who implicitly loved the way that Tabu ate those guys) grants him a seventh sense to allow him to "be in touch with the invisible spirits of the jungle." Who knows what might have come of this new well of power if Fletcher Hanks had ever returned to the character but he had better things to do (see below) but sadly he never did. Tabu kept on appearing in Jungle Comics basically for the entirety of its run and the things he could or could not do varied wildly depending on who was on Tabu-duty that issue. (As far as I know he never ate any more guys) (Jungle Comics 001, 1940)

Fantomah:

The reason that Fletcher Hanks never went back for another pass at Tabu was presumably because he was too preoccupied with what is perhaps his finest creation: Fantomah!

I won't spend too much time attempting to write the definitive Fantomah biography a) because many people have already written a lot about her and what can I add and b) because there isn't really too much to write about. Like Stardust the Super Wizard she is just this omnipotent, all-seeing justice force who unleashes variably-proportional retribution on various Chaotic Evil criminals, only Fantomah confines her activities to either a jungle or all jungles - it's hard to tell if Hanks was depicting different cultures and areas on purpose or just didn't care about, eg, whether tigers lived in Africa or not.

Fantomah continues after Fletcher Hanks stops making comics, so watch out for her wild new look when we cover the 1941 issues of Jungle Comics! (Jungle Comics 002, 1940)