MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 018

I'm not sure that these guys all have degrees. 

This fellow is known only as the Professor, and he conducts experiments in long- and short-range mind control on Lost Hope Island until Secret Naval Agent Spike Marlin shows up in search of a missing ship's crew. (Speed Comics 009, 1940) 

This unnamed scientist has developed a drug that puts people into indefinite comas and has used it to kidnap and store ten millionaires, presumably with the intent of ransoming them back to their families. Before he actually gets to the point of sending the ransom notes, however, he makes the mistake of allowing his gangster hirelings go out and use the drug to mug people on the street, thus leaving a trail of mysterious coma victims that the indomitable Detective Crane follows all the way to the scientist's secret penthouse. (Superworld Comics 002, 1940)

Detective Crane is back to investigate the destruction of several West Virginian steel mills. It turns out that remote controlled drone bombers are responsible for the attacks, and he trails them back to a base near Pittsburgh filled with awesome robots, plus one Baranian spy who is merely dressed like a robot, presumably in case someone like Crane were to show up. The whole place gets absolutely annihilated.(Superworld Comics 003, 1940)

Overworked and underappreciated Department Public Sanitation scientist Dr Sheldon might be justified in his workplace dissatisfaction but he expresses his negative emotions in an unproductive manner, by poisoning the city reservoir and killing thousands of people. It must be cathartic though, because the Arrow has to shoot him with one of his trademark arrows in order to prevent him from poisoning the reservoir even more than it was before. (The Arrow 002, 1940)

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 013

Yet again we have a selection of comic book appearances of real-style people for you to enjoy.

Adolf Hitler:

Warak, dictator of Barbaria is a bit generic as far as pseudo-Hitlers go, but a pseudo-Hitler he is. (Smash Comics 017, 1940)

Scraggs, leader of the Green Shirts, is very much a "make the leader look like Hitler as shorthand for These Guys Are Fascists" character, a subspecies that will nearly die out some time in 1941 but survives in small numbers to this day. (Startling Comics 001, 1940)

Devil's Island: 

Black X has himself sent to, and then escapes from, Devil's Island in order to secure a fellow prisoner with valuable US defense secrets in his head. (Smash Comics 013, 1940)

FDR:

An off-model Roosevelt visits Carterville and is kidnapped by Devil's Dagger nemesis Jeff Marlowe (and thus retroactively by Marlowe's boss Mr H). This is a wild move for a regional crime boss to pull! (Master Comics 006, 1940)

Gill Fox:

Probably a different guy to the last "Gil Fox" to appear in a Clip Chance comic - this one is just a small town baseball player. (Smash Comics 015, 1940)

Groucho Marx:

Goucho's look lifted wholesale for this unnamed comedy character. (Star Comics 010, 1938)

Hollywood:

Autograph hound adds Shock Gibson to her collection along with "Cary Trooper" and "Glark Cable," aka Gary Cooper and Clark Gable. (Speed Comics 009, 1940)

Joe Devlin: 

Given the prior instance of Joe Devlin being referenced in a Clip Chance story I must assume that the "John Devlin" mentioned here is another. (Smash Comics 014, 1940)

Joseph Stalin:

The Three Aces (but not the DC Comics Three Aces, the Harvey Comics ones) transport three anthropology-minded sisters to Paraguay to study the Guató people and stumble upon a plot by the sinister witch doctor Ni Lats to bring all under his sway via hypnotic mind control, for which crime he is drowned in a swamp.

(slight aside: the Guató are a real people being used as set dressing for an exotic locale, and weirdly, in checking to see if that was the case I'm pretty sure I stumbled across the exact reference that Klaus Nordling drew from - every detail in the brief entry on the Guató in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica is reflected in the story. The mind control thing is added plot) (Speed Comics 010, 1940)

Samuel Goldwyn:

Is this movie producer named Sam meant to be Samuel Goldwyn or merely a lookalike reference to him? Regardless, this is clearly Samuel Goldwyn. (Speed Comics 010, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 043

A grab bag of old characters I skipped over back in the early days when I thought that this blog wasn't going to be completely self-indulgent. 

Mr Clue: 

He only had one adventure in which he solves the murder of a mayor by a police chief, but Mr Clue is too great a name not to take note of. (Master Comics 001, 1940)

the Red Gaucho: 

A swashbuckling hero in the Zorro mode, the Red Gaucho protects the South American nation of Santa Palos from threats both foreign and domestic before eventually just kind of wandering North to have adventures in a sort of generic Central America. He's a fun character! He has one of the biggest hats in comics!

The Red Gaucho is also a character I think about whenever the topic of white supremacy comes up. White supremacy is one of those topics that gets a lot of people very angry, but at its base it's simply the belief that the world consists of white people and everyone else and more specifically that it's white people versus everyone else in a competition to keep white people on top, where they belong. And the further back you go, the less people felt the need to hide the fact that that was their worldview, and possibly the place that that attitude is most on display is in early Golden Age comics - just read any set outside North America and you'll catch on to it pretty quickly.

Anyway, that is all to say that even though it's more subtle than a lot of other examples of this worldview in comics, ever since I noticed that every single appearance of the Red Gaucho includes a disclaimer assuring readers that he was in fact the child of two Americans and not some horrible South American - heavens forfend! - his smiling face pops into my head whenever the subject comes up.(Nickel Comics 004, 1940)

the Hawk:

On a less heavy note, here's the Hawk! Created by George Brenner, who also created the Clock, the Hawk has the distinction of being the first masked crimefighter to appear in a comic that would eventually be amalgamated into the DC Comics fold (the Clock had only appeared in Centaur comics up until this point and wouldn't make his way into a Quality book for a few months yet). A heady and heavily qualified distinction!

The Hawk is secretly T. James Harrington II, wealthy and useless playboy who hangs around looking bored until some crime happens and it's time for the Hawk to hit the streets. It's a bit Bruce Wayne/Batman only without the parental murder.

Unlike Batman, the Hawk leans pretty minimal on the costume front, with his major identifying feature being a set of slip-on claws. 

The Hawk also has a couple of assistants named Link and Rollo who are touted as the only people who know the Hawk's identity but who don't get much time to show their stuff in this, their one-panel appearance. Astute readers might note that the crook that the Hawk has just captured likely also knows his secret identity at this point but please note that Link and Rollo are identified as the only living people to know the secret. Sinister stuff!

DC has already gone with the Crimson Avenger as the Official First Golden Age Super-Hero but I reckon that the Hawk would be a fun guy to be brung back for some future story involving early mystery men antics. (Feature Funnies 002, 1937)

*Hero Update* Shock Gibson:

It had to happen someday: Shock Gibson disguises himself as a cowboy and in the process abandons his iconic helmet forever. Fare the well, helmet. (Speed Comics 007, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 767: THE COUNT

(Speed Comics 009, 1940)

The Count is a fairly by-the-book pseudo-Nazi spy with a very audacious plan for acquiring US military secrets: kidnap the US Secretary of State (a moderately off-model Cordell Hull) and extract them from him via gear-based torture.

Unfortunately for the Count his plans were anticipated by the US Secret Service, who proactively substituted Ted Parrish, aka the Man With 1000 Faces, for Hull. Led to the spies' farmhouse hideout by a special radium tracking device, the agents gun down the Count and his hirelings with some degree of prejudice, while Parrish just kind of looks on from his torture machine. An unusually passive role for a super-hero but I suppose here he is about three to five identity levels deep, so perhaps he 's just confused.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 766: COMRADE RATSKI

(Speed Comics 009, 1940)

Comrade Ratski's first appearance is fairly undistinguished as far as comic book spymasters go. Sent to subvert US war preparations, Ratski targets an airplane factory operating out of Hollywood, California (for some damn reason) and sensibly decides to do so under the guise of a war movie shoot next door, though at the point that you have all of the equipment required for such an attack in place, why bother going through with the "we're just filming a movie" deception? For the love of the game, of course.

Ratski's major distinguishing feature in this appearance is the fact that he is a pseudo-Soviet rather than the usual pseudo-Nazis who are the mainstay of the spy plot at this time. 

Shock Gibson of course does not like all of this factory bombing, and Comrade Ratski, like Baron von Kampf before him, ends up stranded in the middle of the ocean. And he's even more pessimistic about his chances at rescue!

Ratski returns in Speed Comics 010 and immediately starts to collect top scientists from top universities: Dr Bronson from Yarvard, Prof Capchek from Rinceton, and... somebody from Hale. His goal? Force them to invent at gunpoint so that he can use their creations to destroy America

Dr Bronson creates an earthquake machine which Ratski uses to attack democratic hub Western City. Ratski then makes the bizarre decision to send his men out to loot and plunder in the chaos, which is how Shock Gibson learns the location of Ratski's base after using the tried-and-true method of capturing a henchman and threatening to kill them unless they talk.

But even if Gibson hadn't done so, Ratski just can't stop signposting his location: after Prof Capchek develops an arthropod-enlarging serum Ratski just starts releasing giant beetles and flies from his front door in a way that I would call "highly visible."

Though Gibson does fight his way through various flies and spiders to make his way to Ratski's mountain fastness, the Comrade's ultimate undoing comes at the jaws of a freshly enlarged (and adorable!) cockroach with no sense of loyalty. He survives the encounter, but only with the help of a very ambitious mountain lion.

Shock Gibson rescues Capchek and some guy we've never seen before, possibly the Hale man. Bronson is unaccounted for.

Like Baron von Kampf before him, Comrade Ratski's final appearance is in Speed Comics 011 when the two team up in a version of the Soviet/Nazi manouvres in Poland and Eastern Europe, though I don't know quite enough about contemporary opinions on WWII to say if the fact that Ratski is clearly just exploiting von Kampf for cheap labour courtesy of his Zombie minions is further extrapolation of this relationship or just the writer favouring one villain over the other as the real heel.

For an epic team-up between two men sworn to conquer and/or destroy the United States of America, the stakes on the Ratski/von Kampf plan are pretty minimal - essentially it's just some run-of-the-mill piracy, only done by one-eyed green guys made of animal parts and flying a dirigible.

More than anything this issue is an exercise in making the zombies look cool while also making Shock Gibson look cool: the Zombies are parachuting! The Zombies are firing a machine gun! Shock Gibson is posing on top of a whale! Shock Gibson is protecting the whale!

Zombies in keen gas masks wielding cool gas guns! Zombies setting up a guillotine! Shock Gibson looking smug as hell while the guillotine blade smashes on his neck!

After the guillotine fails to do its job, things go very wrong for Comrade Ratski and Baron von Kampf, culminating in the destruction of their base, the foiling of their plans and they themselves becoming a meal for at least nine alligators. Who presumably represent the Allied Forces.