MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 041

Another assortment of guys for your delectation.

the Sky Wolf:

Just another masked pilot in a souped-up named plane (originally the Silver Bullet, followed by the Golden Bullet), the Sky Wolf loses both his place in Silver Streak Comics and his plane's name to fellow pilot Cloud Curtis once 1941 rolls around, and to add insult to injury, in 1942 the far more successful character of Skywolf debuts over at Hillman, ensuring that he doesn't even have good SEO. (Silver Streak Comics 004, 1940)

Whiz, King of Falcons:

The Silver Streak is not immune to the sting of pride, so when aviator Sir Cedric Baldwin challenges him to a race around the world to prove who is the fastest man on Earth, he accepts, and is of course fast enough that he not only wins but is able to have a very culturally-sensitive adventure in Saudi Arabia along the way. Silver Streak is knocked out and captured at one point, and the falconry-obsessed villain takes advantage of this to inject his favourite bird with some super-fast blood. 

Astonishingly, this works, despite our only account of the Silver Streak's origin being as a result of hypnotic conditioning coupled with a near-death experience - perhaps the hypnosis was so deep that it mesmerized his very blood? That would explain the falcon's immediate shift in loyalty from its owner to its super-heroic blood doner, at least.

"Whiz, King of Falcons" is technically not this guy's name until Silver Streak Comics 007, which was published in 1941, but I reckon that calling him "Unnamed Falcon Companion" here and then correcting it in six months' time would be extremely wilfully obtuse of me. (Silver Streak Comics 006, 1940)

the Daredevil:

The Daredevil is Bart Hill, a vigilante in the Batman mould, having lost his parents to a gang of crooks and subsequently vowed to revenge himself on crime. Further, those same crooks tortured Bart himself, rendering him mute in the process, and due to a boomerang-shaped brand they left on his chest he devoted himself to the study of the weapon, adopting it as one of his heroic signatures. The Daredevil is one of the longer-running non-Marvel or DC/Fawcett/Quality characters of the Golden Age so he will be making a few appearances here going forward, but there are a few notable things about him:

- his origin will undergo some revision between his first and second appearances, most notably the fact that his muteness is discarded - presumably to enable for easier storytelling

- his costume is also somewhat revised, which is fun particularly because, like his Silver Age namesake, he switches from a yellow to a red colour scheme

- this Daredevil's Golden Age popularity, combined with his public domain status, means that he's a popular choice for modern revivals, but the fact that there is a currently-published character with the same name (and owned by Disney, to boot) means that nobody dares to actually call him Daredevil in their stories and so the more recent versions of him have a wide range of variably terrible alternate names including the Death Defying 'Devil, the Daring Devil and Doubledare.

(Silver Streak Comics 006, 1940) 

Iron Vic:

Iron Vic is a frustrating beast. He first appears as a mostly-dead body washing up near the island laboratory of Professor Carvel, who applies a "certain rare serum" to the task of saving his life before dropping dead from the strain. Vic, as the man comes to be known, is rendered both amnesiac and superhuman by the process. He has one proper super-heroic adventure against Carvel's old colleague Dr Spagna before the strip transitions into one primarily about baseball (and in case you're wondering there is no mention of the ethical quandary that a superhuman participating in regular human sports would cause). The really frustrating part is that Dr Spagna implies that he knows something about Iron Vic, but the Spagna story is never actually resolved anywhere. Vic is merely an amnesiac baseball player until I think he enters the Army at some point? WHERE OH WHERE IS MY RESOLUTION (Single Series 022, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 735: THE SILVER-WORSHIPPERS

(Silver Streak Comics 005, 1940)

Comics book cults, am I right? They'll worship anything. Case in point: the Silver-Worshippers, who believe that silver is sacred and are pretty dang mad that it is being profaned by its use in finance and currency. They also very frustratingly do not seem to have a name that they use for themselves, so the Silver-Worshippers will have to do.

But just how to remove the sacred silver from the hands of the heathen financiers? Why via a series of bank robberies, of course! The Silver-Worshippers devise a system so foolproof that they use it upwards of thirty-five times: set off a big explosion and/or fire on the edge of town and then rob the town bank of all of its silver while the emergency services are busy.

Of course, the Silver Streak is no slouch and so by the thirty-fourth or thirty-fifth silver robbery he is ready to get in on the action, zipping off to Easton, Ohio in time to help with the fire and in grand comics tradition almost catch the bank robbers so that it will be more satisfying when he gets 'em later.

Now to reveal a little bit about the kind of person I am: I absolutely love when an old comic uses a real place (or even better: a real street address) due to the ease with which I can use modern mapping software to check out just where things supposedly happened, and of course I was overjoyed to discover that Easton, Ohio was a real place, but let me tell you, it does not have a downtown, or a bank, or indeed a fire department.

Our adventure in geography continues, as the Silver Streak determines that the Silver-Worshippers have been writing the word DOOM in cursive across a map of the US (this is where my "thirty-five robberies" calculation comes from, by the way), and that Clayton, Ohio is the next likely stop to complete the M.

(Clayton, Ohio is also a real place, by the way, and while it does have a small downtown that I can believe held a robbable bank in 1940 it is not directly South of Easton. What wild geography games was Jack Cole playing with us? did he just pick two names out of the air and get lucky?)

The Silver Streak tracks the cultists sent to rob the Clayton bank back to their hidden temple and comes very close to being gruesomely killed in a wave of molten silver, but because he is a super speed character this only comes about because he clumsily knocks himself out with a bit of falling masonry.

The Silver Streak recovers in time to not be fatally silvered and proves my usual point about speedster heroes vs regular crooks by taking on a whole temple-full of guys using only hand-thrown bricks of silver, only they turn out to actually be silvered bricks, substituted for the real thing by the cult's leader Gregory Randil. "Just who is Gregory Randil?" I hear you cry. Why he is the owner of Randil Silver Co and he has been playing the Silver-Worshippers for chumps by having them steal for him so that he can cut down on overhead. And to forestall any further questions: no, Randil has never appeared or been mentioned in the comic prior to his unmasking. This is the definition of an unfair mystery!

The Randil Silver Co. deception of course does not go down well with the room full of Silver-Worshippers, and the Silver Streak has to bop every one of them into unconsciousness before hauling them off to jail.

NEXT DAY ADDENDUM: Okay, here is a bonus thing about me. Sometimes I get so excited and full of pride in myself for figuring something out that I overlook the obvious. Yes, Easton and Clayton are real places in Ohio, as I so smugly pointed out, but it's a Golden Age comic book - if you see a place name one of the things you have to assume is that there is a simple substitution going on. Forget Easton and Clayton, I should have checked for a Weston and assumed that it was Dayton, and when I did in fact do so, the line between them was almost perfect for the finale of a cursive "m". Weston even has a little downtown which, while it doesn't appear to have many buildings over two stories, probably had a perfectly lootable bank in 1940. Just a reminder for me to stay humble.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 732: THE DOC

(Silver Streak Comics 003, 1940)

Like his super-heroic enemy the Silver Streak, the Doc's story is complicated somewhat by the fact that it begins as an effort by Jack Binder and ends as one by Jack Cole. In the former, the Doc is a mysterious figure who is orchestrating the deaths of the drivers of Silver Streak race cars via giant fly attacks. The reason for this? Never made clear. 

Once the Swami and his race crew are seemingly out of business for good, the giant fly turns to more conventional crime in an effort to extort what will eventually turn out to be New York City for 20 million dollars. This is both where we learn that the fly was created by Dr Katan, a mad zoologist and  also presumably the one writing notes signed "the Fly".

Though the New York authorities feel that they have no choice but to capitulate to the Fly's demands, the Silver Streak has other ideas, and uses his hypnotically-enhanced physique to send the beast to a messy end.

The Fly may be defeated and the monies returned, but Dr Katan is still out there, still capable of creating giant insects...

Dropping the "Katan" (and also the "tor") and now known also as "the Doc", the villain's second appearance is comparatively low stakes, with only one little extortion-based kidnapping before he is forced to marshal all of his insects and arachnids against a Silver Streak out for revenge. the real highlight is these cool-ass stinger bugs - if only there were little gremlinoid insects running around on two legs shooting spikes out of there mouths at one another.

Unfortunately for the Doc, by his second appearance he is up against the super speed Silver Streak rather than the car driving one, so his various arthropods are disposed of and he is captured in fairly short order.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 040

Lev Gleason's finest!

Lance Hale:

Lance Hale is a soldier of fortune and jungle adventurer who is notable mainly for the fact that in his first appearance he is given super strength by a fellow with the pleasing name of Dr Grantland Grey so that he can help out on an expedition to the stars, and then after returning to Earth he just... stops using the armband that gives him his enhanced strength. He keeps on adventuring, don't get me wrong, but as a regular jungle guy, ie, a colonialist race science fantasy figure. 

Hale is slightly more interesting than his contemporaries in the jungle guy community by virtue of the variety of situations that he gets in: there's the initial space trip that ends up turning into an interdimensional one and then a battle with invading animal men from a parallel world, a delve into a lost underground kingdom in which he incidentally becomes immortal, cursed demon-summoning gemstone action... I assume that the thrills are eventually going to stop coming but 1940 was almost all hits. (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

Mister Midnite **HERO UPDATE**:

As you may or may not recall, Mister Midnite is a hero in the classic formal wear style who has one very specific power, to stop clocks by yelling "time stop!" Well! So we thought! It turns out that in his second appearance, Midnite demonstrates a second power, that of being teleported to a vaguely defined location, and also when he has shouts "time stop!" I really wish that there were more than two Mister Midnite stories so that we would have some more data to use in piecing all this together, but as of now I must assume that he has some sort of vaguely defined wishing power and that "time stop!" is its trigger phrase, like Johnny Thunder and "say you." (Silver Streak Comics 002, 1940)

the Silver Streak:

The Silver Streak! Is notable for two (2) reasons, the first of which is that he is a the-title-of-the-comic-book character who doesn't show up until issue 3, which is the opposite to how it often works, where the title character goes from proudly front and centre to gone in as many issues.

The second and more interesting thing about the Silver Streak is his origin, which I have tried and failed to summarize in paragraph form, so here goes as bullet points:

- the Silver Streak is a race car, or rather a series of race cars because every Silver Streak crashes, killing the driver. Nobody wants to drive for the Silver Streak team. The cars are crashing because they are being attacked by a giant fly.

- the Silver Streak's owner is Hindu mystic known only as the Swami. When an unnamed cab driver volunteers to drive the Silver Streak, the Swami hypnotizes him to be a great race car driver.

- the unnamed driver is immediately killed by a giant fly.

- BUT! The Swami has a hunch that the man is not in fact dead! He and a pal go to the cemetery and dig up the driver's unmarked grave, and they are proved right! And what's more, the prior hypnotic conditioning combined with the near-death experience has made the man (henceforth the Silver Streak) superhuman!

The first adventure of the Silver Streak concludes with him stealing the latest prototype of his namesake car and using it to destroy the giant fly that "killed" him, and as presented he seems to have been on track to be a car-based super-hero. However, between Silver Streak Comics 003 and 004, the character was handed off from Jack Binder to Jack Cole and the Silver Streak became a guy with super speed, no car required. I don't know if his origin is ever revised, but I do know that the Silver Streak has several sidekicks over the years and that they all get their powers via a blood transfusion from the man himself, so something's going on there. Unless his blood was hypnotized too, of course - the Swami never returns, so his deal is never fully explored.

Like a lot of super speed characters, the Silver Streak ends up being more about cool speed tricks than having a distinct personality, but he's a fun read nonetheless. (Silver Streak Comics 003, 1940)

Dickie Dean, Boy Inventor:

We love to see a boy inventor, if only because our brains have been warped enough by the Venture Brothers that we can't help but imagine their dysfunctional adulthood, and by "we" I mean "I". Dickie Dean here is particularly good fodder for that little thought experiment, as he is compelled to sign over his inventions to the US government by his misplaced sense of patriotism, so he's either in for a rude awakening or an increasingly delusional relationship to reality as he gets older. 

Some inventions that Dickie fails to patent in 1940 include: 

- a device that can replay sound waves and visualize shadows up to 2-3 weeks old

- a device designed to stop all war by making air as thick as molasses and thus preventing bullets etc from moving fast enough to do harm (importantly, this air is still breathable)

- an enclosed, submersible speedboat equipped with a device that abates flood waters via rapid electrolysis

He does sell a magnetic antigravity device for use as a mid-air brake for airplanes, but only because his father is in dire financial straits.

Dickie Dean is also interesting for the fact that he is from New Castle, Pennsylvania, a real place with a regular amount of history but not otherwise a big name in city circles. Also I just reread the bit where I roasted Dickie for giving away his patents and I want to make it cleat that the part I think is foolish is giving them to, like, the FBI, not donating them to humanity. (Silver Streak Comics 003, 1940)