MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 791: CATS ROMELT

(Lightning Comics 004, 1940)

Though Cats Romelt is the head of a gang of river pirates who organizes a fake warehouse guard union in order to call a general strike and leave the dock warehouses easy pickings, none of this is the reason for his being here. No, it is his sheer bloody-minded commitment to using starved alley cats with poisoned claws as weapons of terror and mass destruction that tipped him over into the category of super-villain. It's an idea that certainly works better on paper than in practice, but the real question is: is he constantly doing it because his nickname is "Cats" or is that his nickname because he breaks out a poison-clawed alley cat as the solution to any problem?

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 789: THE GRAND DICTATOR

(Sure-Fire Comics 003a, 1940)

The Grand Dictator, aka Miko, is on a mission to conquer the US, and he's doing it from a cool flying fortress. Miko and his men are probably intended to be at least Nazi-adjacent, but they don't really come off that way, at least as compared with their contemporaries. I mean, sure, they've got the uniforms and the attitude, but where are the dimwitted goons named Hans and Franz shouting "Jah, jah!" as they scuttle off to commit civilian atrocities?

The Grand Dictator's forces really stand out in the coolness of their military tech, including these very imposing flame guns...

The aforementioned flying fortress (including the terrific detail that the GD's forces have solved the problem of how to make something huge in the sky look like a cloud by stapling cotton batting to the bottom like it's a prop in an elementary school play)...

And in a bit of a combination of the first two, some fairly impractical-looking flame throwing planes.

We're still quite early in the career of Flash Lightning, and so he's still kind of finding his level with regards to the relative power of he and his opponents. Case in point: the main challenge that Lightning faces in this issue is in getting his companion on the lower right to safety, after which he destroys the Grand Dictator's entire operation with one big lightning bolt.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 786: THE TIGER MAN

(Sure-Fire Comics 002, 1940)

The Tiger Man (also referred to as the much snappier Tiger Mask in one panel but I reckon that was just some sort of lettering error or other style of brain glitch) is a fellow in an extremely cool cowl mask who is trying to corner the pearl market in the South Seas using some very crooked tactics, such as sticking pearl bed owner Rita van Dyke on a raft and abandoning her at sea. Only the intervention of Flash Lightning saves her, and he only knows to do so because the Old Man of the Pyramids tells him to.

This is in many ways a fun little adventure, marred frequently by the threat being stated as "those dastardly South Seas natives trying to steal the pearl trade from the virtuous white people" (barely a paraphrase).

Eventually, the Tiger Man is unmasked and it turns out that he didn't kill Rita's uncle as she had thought but rather that he was her uncle and that in addition to the harrowing near-death experience she just had she is going to have to really reevaluate a lifetime of memories and maybe have some serious talks with any other parents/cousins/etc who might be kicking around. Talk about an awkward next Thanksgiving dinner, am I right?

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 785: THE PHOENIX

(Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

Flash Lightning's first stop after getting juiced up with brand-new electric powers is New York City, super-hero capital of the world, and it's a good career move for him because he immediately gets mixed up in some super shenanigans. An explorer named Parker has gone missing in Central America and the agents of someone named the Phoenix are doing their damnedest to prevent his daughter Mary from looking for him. Lightning and Mary dodge fiery deathtraps, tommy gun-wielding gangsters and threatening coffin deliveries and set out regardless.

Mary and Lightning travel to what is now the Parque Nacional Sierra De Las Minas in Guatemala (there are coordinates!) and dodge some fellows known variously as the Tzutuhiles, the Jewel Men and the Python Men, a bunch of snake worshippers who help the Phoenix advance his plans for world domination by using slave labour to create artificial gemstones that are then shipped around the world to be sold (and this is not the first nor the last time we will see the creation of artificial jewels, a victimless if not virtuous activity, treated as equivalent to counterfeiting currency).

It is at this point that the Phoenix makes an actual appearance in the story, and just what does a guy named after a mythical firebird who makes and distributes gemstones with the aid of both hard-boiled gangsters and snake worshipping tribesmen look like?

You guessed exactly right: he looks like a character from a 1930s sci-fi movie serial. Unfortunately for the Phoenix he is completely unprepared for a superhuman opponent and he appears in a whopping four panels before being sent to his doom at the bottom of his own volcanic crater by Flash Lightning.

Special shout-out to this fellow, John Roan, aka the Reptile Man, who accompanied Parker Sr on his expedition and managed to escape and return to New York for help only be killed by the Phoenix's men. Just what is his deal? Was he a reptile man when the expedition started or is this something that happened to him at the hands of the Python Men? I'm asking but nobody is telling me anything.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 048

The triumphant return of Ace Magazines to the round-up!

Flash Lightning:

Educated and possibly also raised by Ancient Egyptian mystic the Old Man of the Pyramids, young Robert Morgan is eventually deemed worthy of the Amulet of Annihilation, a mystic artifact that grants him the powers of flight, super strength, bulletproof skin, the ability to hurl lightning bolts and sundry others (the amulet is also immediately forgotten about, as far as I can tell - the armband design remains a part of Lightning's costume design for the rest of his appearances but his powers are treated as integral).

Flash Lightning is eventually renamed Lash Lightning, and the word on the street is that this was done so as to avoid confusion with prominent lightning-themed DC Comics character the Flash. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

the Raven:

The Raven, like his fellow Ace Magazines hero the Black Spider, is your classic pulp style vigilante wanted by both the police and the underworld, with the added twist that he is primarily focused on Robin Hood-style monetary redistribution/ stealing from the crooked rich to return their ill-gotten gains to the bilked poor. At first, at least - over time the Raven starts dealing with more conventional super-threats and gangsters.

In addition to his loyal assistant Mike, the Raven's supporting cast includes Police Captain Lash - his boss, because the Raven is really Detective Sergeant Danny Dartin - and Lash's daughter/Danny's fiance Lola. Like the Black Spider before him, the Raven's love interest Lola eventually discovers the secret of his dual identity, which must have been a particular relief for the Raven because she, like her father and (supposedly) her fiance had up to that point been dedicated to the task of capturing the Raven and had come close to doing so once or twice.

Though the Raven's costume starts out as a huge hooded cloak of the type more commonly worn by villains, he eventually switches to a more conventional cape and cowl number, which is a shame, as the original look was much more distinctive. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

Whiz Wilson:

Whiz Wilson is a time-travelling man, but one who very specifically only travels into the future. It's like my voice, complaining about how comic book time travellers just can't stop interfering in historical events, itself echoed back in time and helped to create a character mostly immune to temporal paradox, as long as he doesn't run into any older Whiz Wilsons in his travels.

Wilson's time harness also incorporates a space-travel functionality (as any time machine necessarily must lest one be rocketed off into the void instead of ancient Mesopotamia) and he very satisfyingly employs this as a teleportation device whenever he is in the future, though the mechanics of whether he is instantaneously transporting from one place to another or zooming very quickly between them vary according to the needs of the plot. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

Marvo the Magician:

Marvo is another tuxedo-wearing magician from the same tradition that previously brought us such luminaries as Zatara. Like many of his peers he fills the time between stage performances by driving around aimlessly and meting out justice to the random criminals he encounters, with the two distinctions that a. he has a little monkey companion  named Tito and b. unlike many of his peers his powers do mainly seem to be illusions and not reality-warping chaos majicks. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)