MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 523: NATCHA

(Blue Ribbon Comics 008, 1941) 

Technically, Natcha is just another costumed gang boss, but she has a lot more style than you usually get with those.

This being MLJ's Hercules, Natcha is thematically linked to one of his iconic Twelve Labours, in this case the theft of the Girdle of Hippolyta. Of course, this version of Hercules was ridding the ancient world of evil rather than atoning for his own crimes via arbitrarily hard tasks, so the girdle doesn't come into it and Hippolyta is implied to have been a villain of some sort whom Hercules reformed.

Natcha's victim here ends up as an ad hoc sidekick to Hercules for this adventure and gets saddled with the name "Little Zooey" for no apparent reason, despite his vigorous protests.

I really like Natcha! She's much more of a bruiser than most lady crooks of the Golden Age! Sure she's a crook but she's a crook with panache. Not that that helps her when a literal demigod shows up on her doorstep, even if he does have to take care of Little Zooey.

Both Natcha and Little Zooey are set to reappear in future Hercules adventures but are instead banished to comic book limbo thanks to the Hercules feature never appearing again, a sad end for about one and a half good characters. Natcha in particular should absolutely be BRUNG BACK the next time someone takes a pass at reviving the Archie super-heroes even if Hercules is left in the big pile of also-rans with Lancelot Strong and the Wizard.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 009

All Archie/MLJ edition!

Rang-a-Tang the Wonder Dog:

The Wonder Dog is an uncommon but distinct type of comic book hero and Rang-a-Tang here is typical of the breed: essentially a dog with human intelligence. Rang-a-Tang escaped from a cruel but evidently very talented circus dog trainer and almost immediately teamed up with police Detective Hy Speed, who was perhaps lashing out at the world for his own moniker when he gave his new dog one of the all-time worst names. I mean, I get that it's a knockoff of Rin-Tin-Tin but he also had a very bad name. 

By issue seven of Blue Ribbon Comics Rang and Hy had moved to Hollywood and acquired a third companion in Richy Waters, aka Richy the Amazing Boy, and apparently free-range child actor with no adult supervision to speak of. Richy gradually usurps Rang-a-Tang's place as the strip's protagonist over the next year or so, which is disappointing to those of us who enjoy dogs more than child actors. (Blue Ribbon Comics 001-022, 1939-1942)

Bob Phantom:

As far as his super-hero identity goes, Bob Phantom is fairly regular: he shares with many other Golden Age heroes the power to suddenly appear - in a cloud of smoke in his case (though crucially he is generating the smoke as opposed to appearing in a preexisting cloud like the Vision. Or preexisting fire like the Flame, preexisting water like the Shark, etc. You get it) - and also has some degree of intangibility - definitely enough that bullets don't affect him. Per his name, he's very into spooking crooks out via psychological torment.

Bob Phantom's civilian identity is that of Walt Whitney, writer of the newspaper gossip column "On Broadway" which he uses to taunt both criminals and the New York District Attorney for some reason. Possibly just to be a scamp. (Blue Ribbon Comics 002, 1939)

(between Bob Phantom, Top Ten character Jack Phantom and cartoon character Danny Phantom there are just enough characters with "Phantom" as a last name to make me think I'm missing some sort of very obvious pun)

UPDATE

UPDATE 1940 

Corporal Collins, Infantryman:

An American serving in the French Army (and later the British Army after the Nazis conquer France), Corporal Collins is for no apparent reason a super soldier with crack reflexes,  a danger sense that allows him to dodge enemy bullets and a "fabri-steel flexible repeller" that allows him to effectively deflect incoming bullets back to their source. The more overtly super-heroic aspects of  Collins get toned down after a couple of issues and he becomes just another comic book military paragon with a comic relief sidekick named Slapsie and a rivalry with fellow MLJ military hero Sergeant Boyle and his sidekick Twerp. (Blue Ribbon Comics 002, 1939)

Hercules:

It's time for another Hercules! This Hercules is the real deal Olympian, sent to Earth by Zeus to combat evil (and possibly also as a prank? He seems to be completely unprepared when he pops up in the middle of a New York City analog). Functionally, he's exactly the same as the other two Herculeses we've seen so far: a great big shirtless blonde guy with super strength. He even gets a job as a sideshow strongman like the both of them.

The real innovation in this version of Hercules is the assertion that his famous Twelve Labours were in fact "wiping out the evils of Ancient Greece" and then drawing parallels between them and his adventures in the modern day, including:

- the Slaying of the Nemean Lion -> killing gang boss Leo Nymia, the Lion of the Underworld (Hercules also steals Nymia's suit as a version of wearing the lion's hide)

- the Slaying of the Lernean Hydra ->  deposing political fixer Hy Dralerny and his "Nameless Nine" organization

- the Cleaning of the Augean Stables -> cleaning up crooked gambling at the local racetrack - very tortured and involves both a gambler named Augie King, and two jockeys named Tom and Dick Rivers who had to be "set in the right channels"

- the Capture of the Erymanthian Boar -> very disappointing. Hercules captures a fat pseudo-Nazi General (who isn't even named Hairy Man Ian) and because he shoots down a bunch of planes while doing it shoehorns in the Slaying of the Stymphalian Birds. Absolutely the worst of the bunch.

- Stealing the girdle of Hippolyta -> Contending with the villainess Natch, about whom we shall speak anon.

Sadly for the mythological completionists out there, Hercules stopped appearing after just six labours, so we'll never get to see him take on Mary Diomedes the Cannibal Equestrian or twin cattle rustlers Gary and Gerry Young. (Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 519: THE GHOST OF THE CYCLOPS

(Blue Bolt v2 004-005, 1941)

We open on a bit of... not hubris but it's often framed as hubris. I'm sure that TV Tropes has a name for it but danged if I'm going to go hunting for it. It's the phenomenon in which a character in an ongoing fictional setting jokes about how they're sure glad that *SPECIFIC THING* isn't real etc and that thing is the focus of the next story. In this case, Sergeant Spook says he's glad that mythology doesn't real and so Ghost Town doesn't have to contend with the ghosts of mythological characters and BAM the ghost of the Cyclops starts destroying Alaska.

Although the human world sees these attacks as merely a bizarre and terrifying natural disaster the ghosts of Ghost Town know what's up and dispatch Sergeant Spook northward. On arrival he is met and guided by several of the Cyclops' recent victims - always a handy part of being a ghost cop.

Spook's encounter with the Cyclops follows a fairly predictable pattern: cornered in a cave, he anages to temporarily blind the other ghost and then trace him back to his lair by clinging to his cyclopean sandals. This encounter does serve to further muddy the waters of how ghosts workin Sergeant Spook comics, however: can a ghost hit another ghost with a corporeal snowball? Is Alaska covered in a layer of ghost snow? Or is the Cyclops just super-vulnerable to eye-damaging attacks like a video game boss?

The second issue of this two-parter is a bit perfunctory: Spook arrives at the Cyclops' lair where we learn that when not translucent to signify that he is a ghost in the corporeal world the Cyclops is green. He is also served by other, unidentified ghosts who are presumably being bullied into servitude with the threat of violence like the Ghost of King Tut's slaves. He also captures Sergeant Spook with very little trouble. Things look bad, but then:

HERCULES! Because of course if the Cyclops is real then there's gotta be guys like Hercules (famous foe of the Cyclops) running around too. There's a bit of a scuffle and then he plants a slobberknocker on the Cyclops that decisively concludes things.

Hercules' reward: eternal vigilance. His ghost pledges to guard the Cyclops' ghost for the rest of time, which will presumably entail regular brawls whenever his charge wakes up and wants to cause more chaos. Maybe this is a good outcome for Hercules? I just hope that someone in Ghost Town thinks to ship him some ghost books or the like.

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 005

Just a little crypto-fascist saboteur named Dr Vee who battled Dynamic Man but I like his name and I like his style. His sartorial style. Not the fascism. (Mystic v1 002, 1940)

Lemo here has a mechanical mole-style tank and reckons he can take over the world with it after almost destroying one (1) circus tent. It's a good thing he was blown up by one of Marvel's many Herculeses before he could get too far and get disappointed. (Mystic Comics v1 004, 1940)

This fellow, known only as the Mystery Man, has been working on the problem of how to counter snipers in warfare, and the scheme that he has come up with involves breeding up vicious wolf-dogs, training them to hate a particular smell and then applying that smell to the shoes of enemy combatants so that the dogs hunt and kill them. There's a slight problem with this plan that the two crypto-fascist gentlemen that he's trying to sell this system to don't seem to come on to, even when he offers to sell them the scent and the dogs and doesn't mention offering a dedicated group of scent-applying agents (or maybe he had some smaller dogs trained to do the job and he was going to upsell them later).

The Mystery Man only gets caught because he has been picking up hitchhiking college students and using them to train the dogs and the person responsible for their safety is friends with giant super-hero Mighty Man and long story short the Mystery Man gets eaten by dogs. (Amazing-Man Comics 009, 1940)

This here unnamed fella has a four-step plan: 

1. Capture the Iron Skull 

2. Inject the Iron Skull with a serum that turns him completely to iron

3. Inject his iron blood into robots to make them alive somehow

4. Profit

Steps 1 and 2 go fine but as seen above a major flaw in the plan is that the Iron Skull is now more powerful and mops the floor with his erstwhile captor. The robots don't even show up! (Amazing-Man Comics 015, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO 051: HERCULES

(Mystic Comics v1 003)

Every long running super-hero universe is going to acquire some Herculeses and the Marvel Universe might just have the most of all - I counted an even dozen just now and I'm sure there are more that aren't properly documented on the fan wikis - the DCU doesn't come close even if you count reboots of the same characters. Why? Not sure!

This Hercules is the son of one Dr David, raised on Snow Island in the Arctic to be a mental and physical paragon. He's super-strong and though his height is pretty inconsistent he's gotta be at least eight and up to ten feet tall. He busts up one mad scientist and saves a town from a flood but that's about it. Personally I think that he should come back (sorry, BRUNG BACK), just to add a little confusion to the modern Marvel Hercules scene.

HONOURS - HERCULES

(Hit Comics 010, 1941)

 

Hercules cleans up the Giller Mob and gets the key to... a city. Probably New York? Who can say for sure - he moved around more than most 40s super-heroes.

This also leads to a brief and harrowing Hollywood career in which he stars in one - alas! - unnamed jungle action movie.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 259: THE POWER STEALERS

(Hit Comics 008, 1941)

I gotta say: I really like these guys. Now, obviously they're stinkers of the highest order - their plan involves siphoning all electrical power in the US until they are paid an unspecified amount of big bucks or possibly even placed in charge - but when you spend a little (or a lot of) time thinking about supercrime in a super-hero universe you get opinions about these kinds of things. If these guys had developed this technology I'd have something to say about the risk/reward of crime vs commercial application, but they're clearly a bunch of criminal goons and probably stole it, so using it for crime makes sense!

Further, they are genre-savvy enough to recognize Hercules as the only super-hero in their particular pocket of the Quality Comics proto-universe. Setting out to preemptively take care of the super-opposition never actually works, but I always appreciate the effort involved.

(also I love that they call Hercules a hick. So often the little interesting details about a character fall by the wayside - it's great that Hercules is consistently the super-hero from the country)

The guy in purple is a bad liar.

The guy in green is a loveable jerk.

The gang of shirtless goons is everything I could wish in a bunch of cannon-fodder henchmen, down to the guy with a knife clutched in his teeth.

Finally (well, for my purposes. Finally finally, they get beat up), they actually have a plan! They manage to chuck Hercules into quick-drying cement and cheekily make him into a statue to be displayed on their front porch! And he's there for weeks! Very good job, boys.

(though if they hadn't chiseled off all that extra cement then maybe he wouldn't have managed to get free. Food for thought, dead fictional men)

TROPHY ROOM - HERCULES

(Hit Comics 005, 1940)

Hercules clears up some rotten doings at an auto plant and takes home *Rod Roddy voice* A NEW CAR! 

MINOR SUPER-HERO 032: HERCULES

(Hit Comics 001-021, 1940-1942)

There's nothing too special about Hercules - he's a super-strong guy who shrugs off small-arms fire and is a champion of the people after seeing his mother ruined by unscrupulous businessmen - but I really like the callout text at the start of his first adventure. He's not an alien, you rubes! No mad scientist created our boy Joe Hercules! No, he's just a regular super-powered American with no explanation! Named Joe Hercules, I must repeat. Check and mate, I think, all other other comics.

Sadly for Hercules, he never really hits the big time. He gets a mention in James Robinson's Starman but only to say that he has Alzheimer's, in one of those "all the old heroes who weren't in the JSA are doddering wrecks now" bits of colour he loves so much.

ADDENDUM:

Hercules does have the distinction of being part of the small-but-significant number of super-heroes who got their inspiration by reading about other super-heroes in the comics, specifically Doll Man.