MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 068

A few classic minor super-heroes. Bulletman and Bulletgirl in particular have just barely managed not to remain relevant - I suppose the pointy helmet is too much of a hurdle for the modern audience.

Bulletman: 

Jim Barr is perhaps the most thoroughly-motivated super-hero of the Golden Age. He is:

a. from a long line of police officers

b. the son of a famed police officer who was murdered for being too good a cop and who

c. told the young Jim that he must become a police officer while on his death bed 

d. and after all that he was too scrawny and bookish to be a cop and so had to settle for being a forensic scientist

Jim ends up working in his father's old station under the command of Sergeant Kent, a pro-torture bully who is often held up as the greatest of all the cops in the city, and who is also the father of love interest Susan Barr. 

Jim's personal project is a serum that will destroy "all germs and toxins" in the human body, including that which he believes to be the source of crime and violence. He chooses to test this serum out on himself and his body, freed from a variety of invisible ailments, develops into a physical paragon over the course of a night's sleep.

(Sergeant Kent really earns his reputation as a great police officer by failing to notice that his colleague has basically doubled in size over night. In his defense, Jim is wearing big clothes)

Jim decides that the best way to use this new power is to operate outside of the law, probably due to all of his time hanging around with top cop Kent. He uses his now super intelligence to build the Gravity-Regulator Helmet, which allows him to fly and also generates a force field that augments his natural resilience to make him nigh-invulnerable and able to smash through things head-first (I swear that somewhere I read a story in which it was explained that it made him bulletproof by drawing the bullets to the helmet but danged if I can find it now.). His costume, yellow jodhpurs and all, is assembled out of things that were lying around at the police station, no mention of where. (Nickel Comics 001, 1940)

If I had to classify Bulletman's personality, I would go with "extremely no-nonsense" or maybe "wooden, which is why it is important that he is eventually joined by his female counterpart: 

Bulletgirl: 

Bulletgirl is the aforementioned Susan Kent, daughter to good cop/bad cop Sergeant Kent and member of Bulletman's supporting cast from the beginning. For about the first year of Bulletman's adventures she fills a low-effort version of the Lois Lane role: curious about the hero's identity but not especially proactive about trying to uncover it. She also gets kidnapped and targeted for death a lot thanks to her father's skill at making enemies. Then, in Master Comics 012, Bulletman is knocked out in a collision with Triple Threat's super vehicle and Susan learns that he is actually Jim Barr. Jim obligingly tells Susan the secret of his origin but resolutely refuses to consider teaming up with her.

Susan of course injects herself with the serum and crabs a spare Gravity-Regulator Helmet and costume (though she goes for hot pants over jodhpurs) the instant that Bulletman is out of the room, and This is a very good illustration of why I am so fond of Bulletgirl: she has all of the personality that Bulletman lacks. She's scrappy and quippy and after an issue or two of "too dangerous for girls" chauvinism from Jim is a full partner in the superheroic exercise. She does get kidnapped and left behind a bit more than I'd like but that's comic books in a nutshell. 

In conclusion: Bulletgirl! (Master Comics 013, 1941)

Minute-Man: 

Like Jim Barr, Jack Weston is the son of a dead hero, though Jack's father Robert Weston died during the Battle of Chateau-Thierry in World War I. We don't get nearly as much background on Jack, other than the fact that he was raised by his father's friend General Milton, but thanks to Milton, Jack becomes Minute-Man, a patriotic super-hero, in what is kind of presented as a draft.

Jack is sent to join the Army as a lowly Private so that he can keep an eye out for sabotage and espionage affecting the armed forces. Despite having no super serum or particular special training, he proves to be physically near-superhuman as he engages a variety of costumed and non-costumed foes over the course of his mid-length career.

Minute-Man also dabbles in leaving calling cards, which I always like to make note of. (Master Comics 011, 1941)

Doctor Voodoo **UPDATE**: 

In Whiz Comics 017, Doctor Voodoo returns home to find that Maxinya (the Heaven-Woman, natch) has gone missing. He tracks her abductors through the jungle until he comes across their destination: a European castle, smack in the middle of the Amazon. 

The mystery deepens as Voodoo enters the castle and finds what seems to be an entire Medieval court, headed by the boorish King Richard, who seeks his aid in conquering the jungle. 

Doctor Voodoo refuses to help King Richard, and so is forced to meet the knight Sir Ganal in combat. Voodoo prevails and wins Ganal over to his side, complete with a promise to reveal the origin of the castle's presence in the jungle. Alas, this shall never come to pass, because the story does a hard pivot in the next issue. 

King Richard plays the whole jungle conquest/attempted murder thing off as if it was some sort of test, and sends Doctor Voodoo off to meet with his court wizard. He. in turn, transports Voodoo back in time to the 1400s or thereabouts to retrieve a magical McGuffin called the Golden Flask, with another promise to explain what this whole affair is about once he returns.

Unfortunately for all us completionists out there, the explanation never comes because Doctor Voodoo never returns. He bops around the oceans for about a year and actually does manage to get his hands on the Golden Flask but his feature is cancelled before he can return it to the wizard and find out just what the heck is going on. Maxinya is waiting for him still, presumably. (Whiz Comics 018, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 062

We're awash in minor super-heroes! 

Golden Arrow: 

Golden Arrow has a more convoluted origin than an Western hero has any right to, but I'll do my best to summarize it without one million images. He is Roger Parsons, whose father, Professor Paul Parsons, develops advanced ballooning technology just before WWI breaks out and determines to test it out before donating it to the US government. To that end, he bundles his wife and infant son into a balloon and sets out on a cross-country voyage that turns out to have been a bit too well-publicized, because he is shot down by the villainous Brand Braddock while passing over the Western deserts. While Brand squirrels away Parsons' technology until the day he can safely sell it on, the infant Roger is found by a prospector named Nugget Ned, who raises him as his own son.

Life in the West suits Roger, and he grows up to be a physical paragon, a crack shot with the bow and arrow (with which he uses impractical but iconic golden-headed arrows, and yes, I do believe there is a story in which a crook goes around committing minor crimes in order to profit from gathering them up afterward) and a superb horseman on his faithful steed White Wind. Nugget Ned eventually dies of being Old, but passes on the truth of Roger's parentage before he goes. Roger then takes back the ballooning technology from Brand (plus his twin sons Bronk and Brute) and donates it to the US Government. Along the way, he kind of falls into being a Western vigilante.

Golden Arrow is also one of my classic examples of a character egregiously transitioning from the Modern to the Old West, since he is so firmly established as being in the present from the start. As usual, it's not easy to pin down exactly when it happens, but it does. (Whiz Comics 002, 1940)

UPDATE 1941 

Spy Smasher:

Spy Smasher is Alan Armstrong, a wealthy Virginia playboy who battles espionage threats to American democracy. He uses both his geographic proximity to Washington DC (via his Virginia estate) and his engagement to Eve Corby (daughter of Naval intelligence officer and eventual Chief of the US Secret Service Admiral Corby) to keep abreast of just what those threats might be and then sally forth to punch them in the face - smashing them, if you will.

Though this setup might at first seem to be a recipe for a comic about a hero battling an endless series of nondescript men in suits, it is in fact the complete opposite, as Spy Smasher only smashes the most eccentric and flamboyant of spies, starting with the Mask, who does, yes, wear a suit most of the time, but trust me on this. He's nutty.

Something that I had forgotten about Spy Smasher is that they were extremely coy about his identity for the first year or so. It's not a particularly mysterious mystery, as Armstrong is literally the only suspect and there is some allusion to the reader being able to figure it out.. They do make an attempt to imply that Armstrong could be the Mask, but there's a period where Eve Corby knows the secret while the reader theoretically does not at I gotta assume that she would put 2 and 2 together if Spy Smasher was not Armstrong but Armstrong was still mysteriously sneaking off just before Spy Smasher and the Mask had a scrap. Basically what I'm saying is that this comic needed more white guys.

Spy Smasher's main bit of crime espionage-fighting technology is the Gyrosub (also Gyro-sub, Gyro Sub), a compact vehicle that combines the functions of a car, an airplane, a boat and a submarine and has a wide array of deployable weapons and technology as the story demands them. (Whiz Comics 002, 1940)

UPDATES: 

Smasher Spy 

Doctor Voodoo: 

Jungle heroes are all kind of samey: they fall into a few broad archetypes and have variably racist adventures in an abstract Jungle that frequently feels simultaneously Asian, African and South American (and indeed one of Doctor Voodoo's own adventures involves Arab slavers raiding the Amazon from a very Sahara-like desert*). What is remarkable about Hal "Doctor Voodoo" Carey here is how he is both a white child who grew up in the jungle and excelled at jungle skills beyond his native peers and also simultaneously a magic white man from far away who brings modern science and medicine to the wilderness. How is this? Why, it is because the comic treats being a white guy as a kind of magical property that Hal has, and so even though he has never left the Amazon and learned all of his medicine from observing his father and reading his old textbooks, Hal identifies as and acts as an American doctor throughout the series.

Hal practices his medicine among the Blanca, a tribe of "White Indians", which is a term that I think originated in the pulps and is basically meaningless except to signal to the reader that the Blancas can be viewed as fully human. They are also the ones who give him the name "Doctor Voodoo" after deciding that his medical knowledge is magical in nature. Which I guess that it kind of is, given my earlier assertions. Annoying! (Whiz Comics 007, 1940)

*this happens in Whiz Comics 017 if you're interested 

Maxinya the Heaven-Woman: 

Doctor Voodoo's companion/ love interest is Maxinya, the Heaven Woman, who is yet another kind of jungle hero in that she was abandoned when her explorer parents were seemingly killed in the collapse of an ancient temple and subsequently raised by jaguars. She can talk the language of jaguars and has jungle life down but ends up not having a lot to due because the focus is on Hal and he is the kind of misogynistic 40s hero who inists that adventure is no place for a lady.

Not enough time is spent on the fact that Maxinya's companion Jappa is a jaguar who is large enough to carry two adult humans on his back, who communicates with Maxinya and later Doctor Voodoo in an actual spoken language, with words. I feel like there's a story there. (Whiz Comics 007, 1940)

(it only comes up once, so I wouldn't necessarily call it an essential part of his character, but here's Doctor Voodoo engaging in Blanca Death Combat against his arch-foe Okoro)

UPDATE 1941 - Dr Voodoo is flung back in time.