MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 794: THE GHOST OF ROCKY STONE

(Target Comics v1 005, 1940)

If there's one type of character that the people at Novelty Press liked, it was a young man getting an American-style military education, and Lucky Byrd was one of those very men. A flying cadet at Randolph Field, Texas, Byrd managed to ferret out a variety of espionage and criminal plots as a sideline to his studies, the first of which involved fellow cadet Rocky Stone, a bully turned murderer turned reluctant saboteur who ended up dead at the hands of his unseen handler when he tried to confess all.

Now, some months later, the ghost of Byrd's old rival has seemingly returned for revenge as a glowing spectre piloting an eerie ghost plane that looks just sick as hell.

As is so often the case with unexpected ghosts, it turns out that Rocky Stone had an identical twin brother, Bob, who has been seeking revenge on Lucky Byrd due to some unreliable information supplied to him by his nogoodnik sibling. And Lucky, good guy that he is, refuses to press charges once everything comes out in the open, so Bob Stone comes out of the whole thing with nothing more than an amazing icebreaker to bust out at parties. Assuming that he also was not prosecuted for stealing that plane from the US Army.

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 021

Another truckload of half-baked mooks for your viewing pleasure.

The otherwise-normal gangsters who have gotten ahold of a piece of superscience and are using it for crime are an important part of the super-hero comic ecosystem. Here is a wonderful example of such in the form of a gang who have access to disintegrator ray pistols and are using them like regular guns during a bank robbery. Fantastic stuff. The Invisible Avenger hits them with a train. (Superworld Comics 002, 1940)

He may be a mere hold-up man in a bandit mask (surely the lowest tier of costumed villainy until the invention of putting a nylon stocking on your head) but I am very pleased to tell you that this fellow's real name is Solo Mogart. Also that he eventually gets beaten up by the Raven. (Sure-Fire Comics 002, 1940)

This fairly nondescript gang of generically foreign spies have access to an invisible fighter plane and the best thing they could think to use it for was smuggling people into the US. Baffling! They make the mistake of tangling with flying cadet Lucky Byrd and end up in the slammer. (Target Comics v1 003, 1940)

This fellow is pretending to be Rip van Winkle or an analogous long-term sleeper for some reason related to moonshining. Maybe the full plot is interesting enough to be an entry on its own but sadly the extant copy of this comic is missing the first few pages of this story and so I have very little idea what is going on. He gets beat up and tossed in the clink thanks to crusading reporter Phil Manners. (Target Comics v1 003, 1940)