MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 030

Some real obscurities from the Hillman House of Ideas:

the Sky Wizard:

The Sky Wizard is an otherwise-unnamed super-scientist who seemingly dresses in his futuristic super suit 24/7. There's not too much else to him other than that because he's one of those characters who has so many gadgets and gizmos that all the narrative focus goes to them rather than him. A partial list: wing suits, super planes, super strength serum (the amazingly named "powerstrength formula"), a paralyzing Q-Ray gun...

... and by far the coolest of the Sky Wizard's accessories, his laboratory base, the grounds of which are composed of the elastic metal rubberium and which can be filled with helium so that the entire estate becomes a mobile floating island. (Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

Dash Dixon:

Dash Dixon works for an unnamed police department in an unnamed city in an undefined role (he is described only as a "top athlete with the police force" in his first appearance), Assigned to protect one Dr Lorenz and succeeding in doing so, Dixon is rewarded with a chance to be the subject of an experiment in which he is injected with "perpetual life rays" which render him super strong, at least partially invulnerable and presumably immortal.

To counter the fact that the ray would seep out of Dixon's body within 24 hours, Lorenz equips him with a suit of pliable metal that he will presumably have to wear for the rest of his presumably immortal existence. Two things about this suit:

1. Dr Lorenz has a fantastic look with his lab getup and green dome helmet. Why Dixon's suit is charitably Very Bad Looking is beyond me.

2. It might not be clear from this picture but the suit includes a haircut-shaped black helmet held on by a strap. It can thus be implied that the ray will leak out of Dash Dixon's scalp but will not do so from his face and hands.

Frankly the whole suit thing gives me mild anxiety. If I were Dash Dixon I might just opt to receive my immortality treatment daily.

One last thing about Dash Dixon is that the first issue seems to imply that he exists in a near future world with air taxis and commuter rockets but it doesn't really come up otherwise. A mystery for the ages. (Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

the Scorpion:

A regular-style two-fisted vigilante, hated and feared by the underworld, occasionally wanted by the police, etc. The real thing that makes the Scorpion (aka Hal Ward) stand out is that he doesn't really bother with a mask or any other way to not be immediately recognized by all of his mortal enemies. (Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

Blanda the Jungle Queen:

Blanda the Jungle Queen really lives up to her name by being the most by-the-book version of the White Goddess style of jungle adventurer, right down to the fact that she immediately abandons her adoptive people and their ways in a wave of horniness the second that a mediocre white guy hoves into view. (Miracle Comics 001 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 673: THE UNHOLY ONE

(Miracle Comics 001, 1940)

The Unholy One is the major antagonist of scientist-hero the Sky Wizard for three of his four appearances, although for the first two of those appearances he is present only as a voice on the radio directing his American agents Hawk Armand, Vera the Tigress and Butch (a fourth crook, Spud, doesn't make it past the first encounter with Sky Wizard). And here I must lay out my major problem with the Unholy One: he is a bad boss. He has set his agents a task - to acquire the plans to the Sky Wizard's new stratospheric jet plane - and no matter what progress they report toward that goal he yells at them and threatens to kill them. And they always have progress to report! If these three were managed well then I have little doubt that they could do the job set to them but the Unholy One does nothing but sow dissent and stress among his underlings.

The other big problem with the Unholy One is that he's just a boring Yellow Peril criminal mastermind who just kind of sits around in a secret Himalayan city telling his much more interesting henchmen (note the winged Himalayan Snow Man in the above image) to do things and threatening people with the Death of a Thousand Slashes, which ultimately turns out to be a room with a spiked ceiling that lowers and squashes/impales you.

The Unholy One ends his run by falling off of the Sky Wizard's flying island after an unsuccessful attempt to stab him to death and good riddance, I say.