DIVINE ROUND-UP 016

Gods aplenty! 

Tyalpo: 

The god worshipped by Ibis the Invincible villain Piang the Terrible. Probably real, in that Piang has real magical power that he calls upon Tyalpo to activate, even if the god himself shows up only in idol form.

God Style: Idol (Real?) (Whiz Comics 009, 1940) 

Goddess of the Jungle: 

Sandor is a jungle hero who doesn't so much adventure as get into one long series of scrapes and situations in Northern India, the second most popular location to be a jungle hero by my reckoning. One of those scrapes involves him nearly getting sacrificed to the Goddess of the Jungle, about whom we never really learn more than her name. 

God Style: Invoked (New Comics 006, 1936)

the Golden Dragon: 

"The Golden Dragon" is a serial that ran in Adventure Comics for around three years (and in fact started back when the book was called New Comics), about a group of adventurers and soldiers of fortune travelling from China to Mongolia in search of the fabled treasure of the Golden Dragon, while fending off attempts by the villainous Torgadoff to halt their journey, presumably so that he can seek the treasure himself. 

Adventure Comics 034 finds de facto expedition leader Ian Murray at the end of the trail, which turns out to be a very much still in-use Temple of the Golden Dragon, with Torgadoff turning out to be one of the high priests. Does this dampen his desire to strip the place of its treasure? Absolutely not! This is a 1930s adventurer we're talking about! The presence of a non-Christian religious practice only increases his lust for gold!

Even the treasure-hungry Murray is taken aback, however, when the Golden Dragon shows up and turns out to be a real, living creature - presumably some sort of giant snake rather than a more traditional dragon based on how dumb it seems to be. 

Murray's reverence for this wonder of the natural world extends about as far as his respect for other cultures, and he ends up blasting the Golden Dragon at the first opportunity (but not before tossing Torgadoff into it's crushing coils). The death of their god causes the worshippers to retreat, and the heroic adventurers are able to loot the temple and retire to lives of ease and luxury.

God Style: Animist (Adventure Comics 034, 1939) 

the Golden God: 

The Golden God is one of the innumerable gods worshipped by the uncountable made-up Amazon tribes that comics are full of, and like so many of these gods, the Golden God is sought out by adventurers because it is represented by an idol of solid gold. Heroic adventurers the Companions Three seek out the idol after being hired by a woman named Cassie Bennett to find her father, Professor Bennett, who is supposedly after it on anthropological grounds 

As usual, the anthropological value of an artifact outweighs the fact that the idol in question is still being used, but that turns out to matter a bit less than it normally does because the Golden God has in fact been discarded in favour of an unnamed new god, This new god in turn is revealed to be the Companions' antagonist Hook Harroday, who is himself after the gold.

Harroday's plan to messily murder the Companions Three falls apart under a barrage of punches, and the group escapes with the idol of the Golden God, which Professor Bennett sells to a museum in a real triumph for selfless anthropology. 

God Style: Idol (Master Comics 015, 1941) 

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 028

Scoundrels! Mid-tier scoundrels! 

Simon Rudd loves games and gambling and taking chances, and somehow that has led him to a South Pacific island where he wears a full tuxedo and bosses around a local tribe all day. When ocean adventurer Lance O'Casey and his companions wash up on his shores, Rudd engages in a little Most Dangerous Game action with them, presumably out of sheer boredom. This being a Lance O'Casey story, his ultimate fate is to be socked in the nose. (Whiz Comics 010, 1940)

Ordinarily these round-ups have four characters in them, but I'm breaking tradition today and making it either two or seven, depending on how you look at it, because today we look at all of the crooks and ne'er-do-wells who have gotten their hands on Ibis the Invincible's Ibistick.

The Ibistick is first stolen by an unnamed thief as Ibis searches for Taia's mummy in a likewise-unnamed European city. His role in the story is mainly to provide an object lesson of just how the Ibistick works: anyone can use it to, for example, make so many gold coins that they start falling out the window and make you easier to track down, but just try to harm Ibis, the wand's true owner, and your magic will rebound back on you. In this case, the thief is turned to gold. (Whiz Comics 002, 1940)

Murder Malone is a pretty rotten character whom Ibis and Taia first encounter while investigating trouble at a town of orphan boys - the trouble turns out to be that Malone's gang has enslaved all of the boys and is forcing them to manufacture weapons. The experience leaves Malone with a desire to own the magic wand that played such a major role in his undoing, but once he gets ahold of it he makes the classic mistake and ends up turning himself into a toad. (Whiz Comics 005, 1940)

The very next issue features our old pal the Hobo-Millionaire getting all the power in the world and turning himself into ice with it.

 

In Whiz Comics 007, Ibis and Taia travel to Hollywood to see the stars, whereupon they fall in with unscrupulous movie producer Carl Brand, who initially offers to buy the Ibistick and then manages to steal it. He then of course tries to turn Ibis into a rabbit and is made one himself, but unlike the rest of those who have made the same mistake, Brand is given a second chance by Ibis and turned back.

He of course repays this mercy by kidnapping Taia in another bid to get his hands on the wand, only to ultimately be murdered by Piang the Terrible as part of his bid to acquire it.

Piang finally gets ahold of the Ibistick in Whiz Comics 010, only to immediately screw it up by attempting to remove "all magical powers" from Ibis, which of course rebounds on him, leaving him open to be "accidentally" tossed off of a cliff by the hero.

When Piang is stripped of all magical power, the Ibistick flies out of his hand and ends up in a nearby river. From there, it finds its way into the hands of an escaped convict with the unlikely name of Grom Deeters, who weirdly is the only alternate wielder of the Ibistick to almost get away with it, thanks to his initial impulse to merely imprison Ibis and Taia upon meeting them, rather than devising some gruesome magical death for them.

Deeters makes his way to Egypt, where he is undone by his own impulse to be a horny creep: since Taia was the last woman he saw, he summons her to him to try and put the moves on her, then inadvertently animates the Sphinx, then has to summon Ibis in order to calm it down (this incidentally means that in  the Fawcett universe the Sphinx is located a few hundred feet away from where it would normally be found).

The longer that Deeters has the wand, the longer it becomes clear that his initial successes were the merest flukes, as after attempting to bribe Ibis into convincing his wife to "go for" him he commands Taia to stab Ibis to death, only to of course be the one to taste her blade. 

That's all of the Ibistick thieves of 1940 - stay tuned for more in 1941. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 053: PIANG THE TERRIBLE

(Whiz Comics 009, 1940)

A rival magician seeking to steal Ibis the Invincible's mystic Ibistick, Piang dies at the end of their first encounter, is resurrected via careless use of magic by Ibis and then dies again in their second encounter.