CATALOGUE OF WOUNDS 003

It's a dangerous ol' job, heroing. Thus, the Catalogue of Wounds!

Green Lantern:

While tied up in a burning house, Green Lantern must thrust his hands into the flames to escape. (All American Comics 031, 1941)

Hawkgirl: 

Hawkgirl is shot in the back by an agent of Mister X while acting as a Hawkman decoy on her very first outing in costume (All-Star Comics 005, 1941)

Hawkman:

Shot in the left shoulder by Alexander the Great. (Flash Comics 002, 1940)

Shot in - I think - the left shoulder again while working on the case of the Hand. (Flash Comics 015, 1941) 

Shot in the right shoulder for a change, as Carter Hall. (Flash Comics 019, 1941) 

Perhaps Hawkman preferentially takes bullets to the left shoulder because he took an arrow there during his original incarnation as Prince Khufu. (Flash Comics 001, 1940)  

Speaking of Prince Khufu, he (along Princess Shiera, off-panel) is famously stabbed by the evil Hath-Set. Hey, a fatal wound is still a wound. (Flash Comics 001, 1940)

the Human Torch:

During one of the periods in which the Human Torch is being hunted by the law, he takes a police slug to his right arm. (Marvel Mystery Comics v1 011, 1940)

the King: 

Gets his scalp creased by a bullet. (Flash Comics 003, 1940)

And again a year later. (Flash Comics 016, 1941)

Aquatic toughie the Scarlet Mermaid gives the King a fashionable bullet wound in the left shoulder while making her escape. (Flash Comics 019, 1941)

the Pied Piper: 

Shot in the right arm while wrasslin' with the Black Panther's panther. (Cat-Man Comics 004, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 254: THE SMOKE THIEF

(Flash Comics v1 023, 1941)

I'll be honest: this is a very charitable entry on this list. The Smoke Thief is Dr Lucius Darrell and his gang of toughs, who use smoke bombs and special goggles to rob people on trains. If this was the main focus of the story, that might just be enough for full Minor Super-Villain status, but it ain't.

The real point of the story is this. Darrell captures Hawkman, then tries to kill him by chucking him out of a plane, which leads to a whole sequence where Hawkman is nursed back to health by the birds, earns their trust and eventually becomes their leader, leading them in righteous vengence against poor unsuspecting Dr Darrell.

So yes, I'm being charitable. Being absolutely destroyed by Hawkman and an army of birds isn't particularly villainous but it must be terrifically unpleasant. Plus the Smoke Thief is an excellent name.

NOTES - MARCH 2023

New Powers:

An injured Hawkman is tended to by birds and learns to speak their language. (Flash Comics v1 023, 1941)

Just some of my favourite alien designs ever: the Kriglo AKA Martian Spider-Men (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)

Super Hero Costume Party:

Hawkman attends a costume party with Shiera Sanders as Hawkgirl. Though not the first time she wore the costume, this does mark the start of the two as a crime-fighting duo ongoing, no matter what stinky ol' Hawkman says. (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)

Rick Raleigh might have intended to attend this party as the Red Bee in that classic cheeky move, but ended up getting mixed up in a murder and attending as a different guy dressed as the Red Bee. (Hit Comics 014, 1941)

Really enjoy the selection of creature that inhabit the inner earth in the year 50029 CE: Mud Men, Rock Men, hot ladies, and down at the very bottom: guys with beards. (Hit Comics 003, 1940)

Quality comics with another entry for the list of increasingly unhinged patriotic heroes: Don Glory, the xenophobic jingoist former boxer (Hit Comics 008, 1941)

SUPER-HERO COSTUME PARTY

This bit where Hawkman intends to attend a costumed event as himself but doesn't quite make it (Flash Comics v1 022, 1941) made me realize that I've missed a few examples of super-heroes attending costume parties as themselves, one of my most favourite tropes in comics! Time for some catchup rectification!

Here's the Red Gaucho being mistaken for someone who was dressed as him, who is then impersonated by a third person in a story that was not called "Too Many Gauchos" but could have been (Nickel Comics 006, 1940)

Similarly, Rex Tyler attends a costume party as Hourman and gets mistaken as part of a whole gang of Hourmen who are planning on sticking the place up (All-Star 003, 1940)

And finally we have USA, the Spirit of Old Glory attending a party in her own costume with no impostors to horn in on her idea. (Feature Comics 048, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 252: EGON

(Flash Comics v1 021, 1941)

This one's got a lot of setup. First, Hawkman sees a spaceship crash, as you do. Venturing inside, he finds a deceased Neptunian couple, their egg son and a Rosetta Stone of a  ship's log. He makes off with the egg and the journal and just leaves the ship and its former crew to rot.

Next night is the Scientist Society Ball, where monocled botanist and creep Noel Ratchford makes a play for Shiera Sanders and is rebuffed. There's an egg-based sequence of events as follows:

-Noel is germinating seeds in eggs

-Carter "Hawkman" Hall thinks this is dumb

-Shiera stumbles across the boy-egg and assumes that Carter is also experimenting with eggs. She steals the egg as a joke and tells Noel about it

-Noel decides to steal the egg and take credit for Carters egg-based research. He ends up hatching out the boy Egon.

Thanks to Neptunian genetics, Egon hatches into a rapidly-growing boy with cool eye-beams and full powers of speech. Noel then hits upon the idea to raise him up to a) hate him and b) believe that his name is Carter Hall, so that he will go out and do evil giant stuff and blame it on Carter, thus presumably sullying his good name enough for Shiera to reject him? it's a flimsy plan at best, but when all you have is a giant you look for rampage-based solutions to your problems.

Everything kind of goes according to plan, except that Carter Hall is of course Hawkman, and that he has the journal and knows all of the Neptunians' weak points and kills Egon and brings Noel to justice. But other than that stuff, A-OK.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 251: BOMB-BABY SATHAN

(Flash Comics v1 020, 1941)

An absolutely ordinary criminal scientist villain completely overshadowed by his criminal rival Big Frenchy in this adventure. Sathan has at-the-time fantastically futuristic guided missile tech, as well as one of my personal favourite bits of super-villain utility tech: the communications cut-in, via which he extorts money from banks lest they get hit by guided missiles.

The only reason Sathan hasn't been relegated to the Criminal and Mad Scientist Roundup queue is this here henchman's inspired nickname game. Bomb-Baby Sathan is a Grant Morrison Making Up a Sixties Villain in the Nineties-style name and it's genuinely joyful to encounter it in a Golden Age comic.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 250: THE HOOD

(Flash Comics v1 019, 1941)

Hey, it's the Hood! I'll be honest: I thought that the Hood was one of those super-villain names like the Masked Man that was super common and that we already had one or more guys with this name but here we are, 250 villains in and welcoming our first.

The Hood is Pratt Palmer, and he's a bog standard scientist-villain of type A: scientist who develops some astonishing new tech and turns it to crime (type B is of course the scientist who turns to crime after being rejected by the hidebound academics they go to for approval, while type C is your classic mad scientist meddling where humanity ought not to).

So yes, Pratt Palmer fakes his own death, forms a gang and is almost immediately captured by Hawkman. There's not much to recommend about him other than his fun bombastic villainspeak, which he really nails off the bat.

The really interesting thing about Hawkman's encounter with the Hood is his tech, which he calls Cold Light, and which functions as a kind of energy blob that wanders around semi-autonomously when not being directed. They don't really explore it much but I reckon that it's pretty cool. More weird tech in comics!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 248: THE GOLDEN MUMMY

(Flash Comics v1 017, 1941)

It's the Golden Mummy! As I have previously stated, I love fake mummies and had read this issue before, so I was anticipating this fellow's appearance with some joy, and it is with great sadness that I must announce that he's a complete disappointment.

My threshold for fake mummy appreciation is quite low - usually they just steal a few antiquities before getting tripped up by Archie and Jughead or the Scooby Gang, after all - but the Golden Mummy's only admirable quality is his dedication to theme. He has the costume, a cave hideout, a bunch of gangsters that he paid well enough to paint themselves gold and pretend to be called the Sect of the Golden Mummy (and of course the only thing better than henchmen in themed costumes is when they also have a cool name). 

. He even dies lamely, by stumbling into a trap set for Hawkman.

So why do I dislike this guy so much? The reason is twofold: firstly, the whole Golden Mummy thing is just some incel shit: he's a guy named Dr Selkirk getting revenge on his ex-fiance for dumping him by murdering her. This is one of those motivations that sucks some of the fun out of super-villain analysis.

Secondly: the Golden Mummy is a completely unnecessary affectation. He kills her as she's onstage singing opera, via a poisoned blowdart. The Mummy and his Sect spend the entire adventure coping with Hawkman, and it kind of seems like Selkirk made up the persona expressly because he was afraid of Hawkman - I don't know if he'd have gotten away with it by not calling attention to himself with cryptic warnings and golden men but it couldn't have hurt.

Boo to the Golden Mummy. Booo!

THE FATE OF...

(Flash Comics v1 016, 1941)

Have you ever wondered what happened to the ancient Dravidians and their kingdom of Dravidia? No, because they're an extant ethnic group and that would be a bit like wondering about the fate of the Caucasians and their fabled land of Caucasia? Excatly. But nevertheless, here's Hawkman flying into Dravidia, somewhere in Mongolia.

Furthermore, the Dravidian king claims that his people originally came from a now-sunken land called Eden. An intriguing concept - that Eden is truly lost because it sank into the sea. Nothing comes of it though.

The really interesting thing to come out of this adventure is the idea that a prior incarnation of Hawkman might have ruled Dravidia as Keft, known as Icaro, the Redeemer. My experience with Golden Age Hawkman is limited to his JSA appearances, so I don't know if the exploration of his prior incarnations is a running topic or if this is a weird outlier, decades before the idea of Hawkman and Hawkgirl being endlessly reincarnated gained steam.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 247: THE HAND

(Flash Comics v1 015, 1941)

It's old hat by now: like former Hawkman foe Czar the Unkillable Man and his ilk, the Hand is a henchbeing who is far more interesting to read and talk about than their creator. This is the risk you run when you set out to create an autonomous crime-servant via... I'm guessing magical means? It's unclear in the text but magic seems more likely than science.

In this case, the creator is a guy named Edward Thayer, the black sheep of a wealthy family who has decided to turn his amazing talking and flying disembodied hand to the sordid task of killing off his brother Elwin and niece Teddy so that he can inherit enough money to convince some lady to sleep with him. Cue my usual complaints about crooks in super-hero universes not aiming high enough.

Edward never gets to see his ill-gotten money, though, because Sandra (the lady in question) decides to bump him off for a quick buck. Which leads to the above panel: not only a rare hero/ villain teamup but an as-far-as-I-know unique hero/ disembodied hand teamup! Sadly, the revenge rampage ends with not only Sandra but the Hand itself seemingly plummeting to their deaths in a crashing car. Boo, says I! The Hand should be BRUNG BACK post-haste! Give it a bartending job somewhere.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 246: KARVAC

(Flash Comics v1 014, 1941)

Karvac himself is strictly ho hum territory: a would-be world conqueror who leads his army of heat ray-toting goons on a path of destruction before being beaten up by Hawkman. Snoresville, man.

BUT: the method by which Karvac managed to acquire his army of heat ray-toting goons, now that's the kind of comic book nonsense that we love around here.

Karvac, you see, unearthed rites and rituals connected to Scorio, Alligator God of the Phoenicians, and established both a temple and cult of worshippers to Scorio in the Eastern US, in order to cast ancient ritual magics and bring Scorio to him.

AND IT WORKS! Korvac summons a god! And that god promptly tells him how to make heat rays for his army of goons to tote! (it's not exactly clear in the text whether the army of goons are also the Scorio cultists that Hawkman sees performing rituals at the temple earlier in the story, but it's narratively satisfying to think so)

Scorio eventually gets banished back to the otherworldly swamp that he usually hangs out in, and as far as I know has never made a return appearance. But he should! Korvac might've been a dud, but an ancient and vengeful alligator god who can hand out secret knowledge to evil men is a really neat foe for a guy like Hawkman, particularly once his reincarnation bullshit really gets going - Katar Hol might not know Scorio from a hole in the ground but Scorio knows a soul no matter how many times it's been reborn. BRING BACK Scorio!