DEMONIC ROUND-UP 001

I think that demons and devils are the only category of comic book guy I don't have a running round-up for yet (and having said that I'm sure that there will be more), so here we go:

Satan: 

If we're going do do demons, why not start with the one with the most name recognition of all: Satan. As seen here he has been vexing jodhpured adventurer Tippy Taylor in the form of a mad scientist, only to be defeated when his own transformation of Taylor into a greasy-haired demon made him too powerful to handle. (The Arrow 002, 1940) 

Mephisto: 

Stuart Taylor and his pal Dr Hayward are up to their old time travelling tricks, and have stumbled across a wizened old alchemist named Scarpo who has made a deal with the demon Mephisto. Two notes about this exchange: 1. Scarpo is a very bad negotiator. Trading your soul for the secret of transmuting lead into gold is one thing, but then having to go kidnap a queen on top of that? Haggle a bit, bud. 2. Taylor and Hayward witness this demonic bargain and then just wait around for Scarpo to hobble off the Queen Lenore's castle, kidnap her and then hobble back before they get concerned enough to step in.

Once they do deign to get involved, the two time travellers are quite hands-on as demon battlers, and despite Mephisto's jacked bod he is ultimately unable to contend with an axe to the skull from Dr Hayward. (Jumbo Comics 012, 1940)

the Genii 

Genies occupy a weird cosmological space and maybe if they were more prevalent in comics I'd find a more nuanced way to categorize them - I reckon we'll just go on a case by case basis, and this here is a bad'un so he gets shelved with the demons.

Time traveller Stuart Taylor and his pal Dr Hayward have been sent back in time yet again, this time to Baghdad in the very-hard-to-specify period in which pastiche Arabian Nights stories are set. Because Taylor and Hayward are riding on a flying carpet when they enter the city, Stuart is acclaimed as the legendary Cloud Prince, come to claim his throne. This arouses the ire of previous claimant Jir Haffa, who summons the Genii from its fountain home to wreak vengeance on the interlopers.

There's nothing too special about this genie, though he does have a very pleasing pomposity to his speech. The real fun thing about him is that you can explode him with a camera snap because "the genii, being non-physical fails to make an image on the film." Fun! (Jumbo Comics 029, 1941) 

the Kings of Darkness:

By far the best thing about the Genii, however, is that he summons these fellows to deal with Stuart and Dr Hayward. Identical demonic swordsmen/kings? Named Ologa, Kahmo and Madru? And even if you defeat one, his body can be used as the material component to summon five more kings? Just excellent stuff all around. (Jumbo Comics 029, 1941) 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 685: SATAN

(Pep Comics 002, 1940)

Dateline: Florida! A huge and monstrous face has begun appearing in the clouds across the state to demand fealty! Coincidentally, armoured cars have been disappearing up and down the peninsula at about the same time as the facial appearances.

The Comet is of course intrigued by this coincidence and decides to investigate. Plotting out the robberies on a map, he proceeds to the swamp located at the central point, and I've just realized that it's a good thing that he's right because the first thing he does is kick a man into the water and steal his boat and that would be a very embarrassing thing for a super-hero to have done to ,e.g., an innocent game warden. It's no problem, though, because the guy was in fact an agent of Satan.

Satan turns out to be a pretty cagey character: not only does he have a way of dealing with snoopers (dragging their boats through a whirlpool into his sub-swamp lair, as happens to the Comet) but he's got an impressive level of knowledge of current super-hero news. He knows just who the Comet is and more importantly how to neutralize his major offensive ability, by welding his protective eye mask shut. And this is only the Comet's second case!

The mystery of both the monster in the clouds and the disappearing armoured cars, by the way, come down to the same thing: that old favourite, the mighty dirigible. One dirigible equipped with a high-powered projector and loudspeaker and a second with a powerful electromagnet, to be precise - as one is distracting everyone with a big face, the other is making off with the car and the cash (and the unfortunate driver and guards).

Back to the Comet: Satan's anti-super-hero savvy extends only so far. Despite his acumen in capturing the Comet and neutralizing his power, Satan has fallen prey to the super-villain's hubris by leaving him to die in a deathtrap rather than merely shooting him in the head. You see, the really important thing about the Comet's visor is that it's just a sheet of glass and thus easily breakable, which the Comet does by the simple expedient of headbutting a rock. After that, it's just a matter of utterly obliterating not only both dirigibles but the entire swamp base. Satan is toast.

OR IS HE? In a shock twist, Satan returns in Pep Comics 003 and manages to capture the Comet again, this time taking the trouble to pop him into a glass tube and thus completely neutralizing his powers! (and also delighting me personally, because the name Satan is very ambiguously used in his first appearance and I really appreciated this confirmation that it really is his nom du crime. For my records).

Satan's got big plans for the Comet - no cheesy deathtrap this time, no sir. Instead, he brings in put-upon hypnotist Doc Zadar in order to put the Comet to work for him.

And this isn't your namby-pamby "can't be forced to violate your deeply-held morals" hypnotism, this is the real hard-core shit. The Comet goes on a destructive and violent crime spree under Satan and Zagnar's direction. Notably, this is when he kills a whole bunch of cops, which informs the rest of his Golden Age career by making him one of the few super-heroes who the police have some real justification for constantly trying to gun down (I mean, they still shouldn't just be trying to execute him in the street, but it's nice to see them doing it for a reason other than "he's running away from me even though I'm threatening to kill him!")

Once again Satan is undone by his own hubris: this time his failure to see that cheating and abusing the man who controls the actions of a living death ray generator might be a bad idea, and he gets gruesomely dissolved for his mistake. Unfortunately for Zagnar, he forgets the first rule of owning a living death ray generator: always put the safety cap back on. He too is dissolved and the Comet is free to have cops try to gun him down in the street forevermore.

BONUS: All this Comet talk had me feeling nostalgic and I looked up 1983's The Comet 001, which I had as a kid. It's a pretty maudlin book primarily concerned with the Comet castigating himself over what a violent and murderous vigilante he was, and the splash page reflects this via the floating ghosts of the dead who haunt him - note all the cops from Pep Comics 003 at the top there. But just who is that at the lower left?

I am 75+% certain that this is the monster face that Satan was projecting onto the clouds in Pep 002, which is a pretty hilarious thing to be haunting a depressed 80s super-hero. "I contributed to the death of the airship as a viable mode of transport when I murdered those dirigibles!"

(the real if boring answer is that it probably is the face from the clouds but, as Satan himself is never actually pictured in the severely abridged version of the story in this comic, the face is being retconned into being his)