FASCIST GOON CLEARING HOUSE 009

Buncha Smash Comics fascists I lost behind the couch for a while.

Just why this German-American Bund equivalent is called the Groups is a real mystery for the ages - it's possible that these people are protesting, like, all bundist-style organizations at once and calling them "the Groups" collectively, though why they would do so at one specific group's meeting is beyond me. Whatever the truth of their name, the leadership of the Groups meet their ends after an attempt to steal American defense plans is foiled by Wings Wendall. (Smash Comics 007, 1940)

The Batzi Tribe is really just a stand-in for the Nazi party and Hugh Hazzard and his pal Bozo the Iron Man only have to contend with the espionage wing of the group, but it's such a weird wild name that I feel compelled to highlight it here along with the information that their New York headquarters was located in a neighbourhood known as Krautville. (Smash Comics 008, 1940)

The Metallic Army is a very cool-looking bunch who invade the US out of nowhere from the Southwest one day. Almost nothing of their origin or motivation is revealed in favour of hard-core battle action, but based on the names of its officers (Hardt, Zergoff) the Army is a communo-fascist Central-to-Eastern European pastiche.

Wherever the Metallic Army came from I can tell you one thing: those uniforms are not metallic because of any kind of armour or even bullet-resistant cloth - once Wings Wendall gets going he mows them down like grass. (Smash Comics 012, 1940)

The Black Troops are yet another bundist group faced by Wings Wendall, albeit an unusually successful one - they manage to capture a number of large East Coast cities and are beginning to ship American weapons and supplies to their unspecified Axis home country when Wendall manages to bring down the whole operation by throwing its leader out of a plane. (Smash Comics 016, 1940)

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 012

Lotta Hitlers in this one.

Adolf Hitler: 

Thalga, supreme dictator of Govania, is a clear Hitler analog. (Smash Comics 006, 1940)

This unnamed Hitler-with-a-goatee comes with a bonus, very tired-looking, FDR! (Smash Comics 006, 1940)

Hitler look-alike Rudolph Hitz acts as political representative and spy chief for Hitler act-alike dictator Holtz in a plot to rob the US gold reserve at Fort Knox-alike Fort Adam, only to meet defeat at the cold metal hands of Bozo the Iron Man. (Smash Comics 007, 1940)

Hitlin is a Hitler stand-in who we never actually see and who acts as a motivation for the villains of the piece in their struggle to defeat Hugh Hazzard and his Iron Man, Bozo. Almost charmingly, Hitlin's followers are called the Batzis or the Batzi Tribe. (Smash Comics 008, 1940) 

There's a lot of competition for the title of "most unflattering on-the-nose Hitler analog," but Motler here might just take it. He's top five, if nothing else - just an absolute bad'un. Like Hitlin and Holtz before him, Motler is thwarted by Bozo the Iron Man. Unlike them, he then falls off of a cliff and dies. (Smash Comics 009, 1940)

Franklin D Roosevelt: 

Briefed on the approach of the Metallic Army by intelligence agent Wings Wendall (Smash Comics 012, 1940)

Gill Fox:

Golden Age comics man Gill Fox might not be the coworker most often inserted in stories as a gag but he sure is the one I notice the most. Here he is as a college track star. (Smash Comics 012, 1940)

Hollywood Crowd:

Quality Comics comedy character King Archie O'Toole ends up in Hollywood and attends the usual star-studded party, featuring lightly parodic versions of Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, WC Fields, Clark Gable, the Marx Brothers, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and possibly Joe E. Brown,  Laurel and Hardy and Edward G Robinson, plus a guy who looks very specific and who I could probably figure out if I knew the right things to look for.  (Smash Comics 011, 1940)

Joseph Stalin:

Stalin is in the upper right panel here ordering the invasion of Finland, but I include the rest of the page for a history repeats itself kind of view vis-a-vis the invasion of Ukraine. (Smash Comics 010, 1940)

Unknown:

This right here is the kind of thing that preys on my mind: a character with a roughly equal chance of being completely made up or being a reference to a real person who I might know immediately if I were reading the news regularly in 1940, but who would take no small amount of research to identify now without stumbling upon a Wikipedia page titled List of Deposed German Intelligence Officials. (Smash Comics 008, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 544: DR VON THORP & THE IRON MONSTER / MINOR SUPER HERO: HUGH HAZZARD & BOZO THE IRON MAN

(Smash Comics 001, 1939)

We open on a city (later established as almost certainly NYC) in the grip of terror. A robot known as the Iron Monster is wantonly robbing and murdering and also stealing one or more babies for reasons that are never made clear. Seriously, we never find out what the deal was with those babies.

The Iron Monster is the creation of Dr von Thorp, your classic scientist rejected from society for his outre beliefs, though considering the man and his work he may have been ostracized for something other than believing that he might someday build a robot. Regardless of why he was rejected, he has expressed himself in the traditional way, by turning his invention back on society as revenge.

The police have no hope of dealing with the Iron Monster or his boss, so Police Commissioner Hunt calls in private detective par excellence Hugh Hazzard, whose job is made considerably easier by the fact that von Thorp subscribes to the surprisingly common school of robot design that dictates that the robot contain a large, easily accessible space that a human can get inside and also take control of the robot from. Von Thorp's capture is almost anticlimactic, in fact.

The reason for this anticlimax is that this is not, in fact, the story of Dr von Thorp and his Iron Monster but the origin of Hugh Hazzard and the renamed Bozo the Iron Man. As introduced Hazzard is already one of those superhuman-adjacent comic book adventurers complete with a special method for the police commissioner to contact him and a love interest gamely resigned to spending most of her evenings alone. Bozo, despite eventually taking over the name of the strip entirely, is never more than a tool of Hazzard's with no actual personality or volition (though Hazzard does eventually switch to mostly travelling around inside the robot like the other, later Iron Man and Bozo gets a considerable boost in personality once it seems to be spouting quips from its fixed grimace).

In Smash Comics 002 Hazzard upgrades Bozo with both a considerably miniaturized controller (cellphone sized vs the old one's desktop PC) and a weird disc on top of his head that allows him to fly, so I guess that also makes him one of those hobbyist polymath types you get in old comics

Dr von Thorp returns exactly one more time in Smash Comics 018, wherein he and Hazzard battle for control of Bozo by blasting radio waves at him like two people trying to see who a puppy loves more. No surprise that Hugh Hazzard wins but killing von Thorp off-panel at the very end seems a bit mean.

Like I said, Bozo's role in the title of the strip if not as a character continued to grow until the end of their run in 1943. Since then Bozo occasionally turns up in a collection of DC Comics junk that some character has collected. Of Hugh Hazzard there has been no further sign.