ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 015

A veritable bounty of aliens for your perusal.

People of Venus, the Jibbering Giant of Jupiter, Weird Inhabitants of the Strange Planet: 

Blast Bennett has lost his little pal Red, and his solution is to just kind of bop around from planet to planet, asking random aliens if they have seen a red-headed guy. I've grouped these alien together because they all represent a very boring alien design trend of the 40s and 50s (and beyond!): the alien as just some guy. The Venusians are short, bald guys; the Jovian is a really big guy and the weird inhabitants of the strange planet are guys who could use a shower. (Weird Comics 004, 1940)

Ceresians:

During an unscheduled stop on then-asteroid/now-dwarf planet Ceres for water, Ted Hunt and Jane Martin, aka the Star Rovers, stumble into a conflict between the underground-dwelling native Ceresians and gargoyle-like invaders known as the Harpies.

This is a pretty classic setup! The planet full of generic white guys vs some horrible space monsters scenario is a surefire way to engender sympathy in an early 20th Century American audience! It does however leave you with some fairly uninteresting humanoid aliens - I do appreciate the seeming shift in Ceresian society from a Medieval to more of a Roman aesthetic as they are forced to abandon their castles for retrofuturistic bunkers, but that's about it. (Exciting Comics 005, 1940)

Harpies: 

The Space Rovers make their way to the Harpy home on Asteroid Nunda and are almost immediately captured after being incapacitated by the thin Nundan atmosphere. They find that rather than being simple predators, the Harpies have an advanced society that places great value in both science and the democratic process. They are, sadly, complete Harpy chauvinists who don't recognize the humanity harpianity shared intelligent experience of other species, which is why they're so happy to raid Ceres for fun and food.

Ted and Jane escape this fate due to the Harpies' scientific curiosity about them, and manage to parley that into a successful escape attempt. Once back in their ship and armed with superior firepower, perhaps they will be able to force the Harpies to stop their vicious ways at the barrel of a gun!

Just kidding! As a nonhuman species who pose a threat to a world of white guys, the Harpies are of course fair game for utter and total annihilation - I'm talking blow up their cities and hunt down all of the survivors. But don't feel bad, because as Jane says, "they're nothing but enormous, blood-thirsty bats!" Now the Ceresians are free to go back to inventing feudalism or whatever. (Exciting Comics 005, 1940) 

Lunaris:

The way I do these Alien Round-Ups is that the first entry is from whatever comic I'm reading at the moment and then I pluck the rest from a big ol' spreadsheet that I've been maintaining for years, which is why it's a pretty fun coincidence that the the next aliens on my list after the Ceresians were the Cold Men, who rule the surface of an unnamed icy moon while a race of white guys called the Lunaris hide in tunnels below. Once Ray Darrow, aka the Star Rover (another little coincidence there) stumbles into this conflict he of course sides with the noble Lunaris against the horrible Cold Men, and it doesn't hurt that the Lunaris Queen is somehow descended from Earth humans, so that Darrow can feel okay with being attracted to her, I guess. (Doc Savage Comics v1 003, 1941)

Cold Men: 

Cold Man society isn't quite as fleshed out as the Harpies' was, but Darrow's conclusion is the same: to ensure the continued safety of the much more familiar-looking Lunaris, the Cold Men must be utterly annihilated - sure hope that the newly surface-dwelling Lunaris don't find the headquarters of some sort of Cold Man organization dedicated to fostering peace between the species or they might end up feeling guilty about their role in this genocide some day. 

... I do like that the Cold Men seem to actually be made of snow or ice. (Doc Savage Comics v1 003, 1941) 

DIVINE ROUND-UP 005

Once again we add to the scriptures. 

the Shadowman: 

 

Like his predecessor/inspiration Yarko the Great, Mr Mystic also has a semi-friendly/ semi-adversarial relationship with the personification of death. In this case, Death is a guy in a cool suit with a half-cape, and he is called the Shadowman, presumably because of his perpetually-in shadow face.

The Shadowman's first couple of appearances cast him as a mysterious stranger who helps Mr Mystic in his battle against various evils (including scientist Ghantse, who the Shadowman seems to work for in his initial appearance). At this point the Shadowman is merely a mysterious man who has a miraculous ability to survive the most deadly of situations.

In the 17 November 1940 Spirit Section, Mr Mystic ventures into the Land of Mythology on a quest for the Ring of the Gods, which turns out to be held by Death. This version of Death is a traditional Grim Reaper style skeleton in a robe, and he swears vengeance on Mr Mystic for the theft of the ring. 

The Grim Reaper version of Death is never explicitly tied to the Shadowman, and it's possible that they were intended to be different in some fundamental way - different aspects of death, perhaps. The Whole Ring of the Gods incident is not brought up by the Shadowman the next time he meets Mr Mystic (1 December 1940), so Mystic might be off the hook for that. It's a bit of a moot point, however, as this installment of "Mr Mystic" is all about him saving the life of a little girl named Joan Barton, and it allows us to get more of a grip on the Shadowman's code: he objects to bot murder and life-saving interventions as equally disruptive to the natural order. Mr Mystic now has two threats from Death hanging over him. 

(this episode also establishes the deal with the Shadowman's shadowy face: if you look at it sans shadow, you die) 

The second-to-final Mr Mystic comic of the year (22 December 1940) features the Shadowman's revenge on Mystic: he is going to seduce/kill his fiance Elena.

While the Shadowman seems to have access to some sort of primordial seductive power relating to the inevitable entropic march toward the grave, he is not above employing cheap romantic comedy plot devices to drive a wedge between the lovers.

Death is the inevitable winner of the contest, of course, and Elena goes off with him to... the afterlife? His home? Are they married now or is she just dead? We shall never know, alas, though we will see the Shadowman again.

God Style: real anthropomorphic personification (The Spirit Section, 22 September, 1940)

Jwang Tyoy:

We don't get a lot of the teachings of Jwang Tyoy beyond the fact that he is the god of a South American "anti-civilization" cult. The focus of the comic is much more focused on the very off-model pterodactyls that the cult leader uses to do he bidding, and for good reason!

God Style: idol (Shadow Comics v1 004, 1940) 

Kutu: 

Kutu, aka Tuku, is possibly a moon god, definitely South American, and has the traditional jewel socketed into his idol for adventurers to steal and get into Big Trouble. 

God Style: idol (Comics Magazine 002, 1936)  

Nahapatan: 

Nahapatan, the Golden Idol, is housed in a hidden Aztec city, where it is the subject of active worship. Does this stop Professor Roberts, his nephew Tim and adventurer Ken Masters from barging in and stealing it to put in Robert's museum? It does not.

God Style: idol (Masked Marvel 001, 1940)

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 009

You know how it is with these guys. Their science is mad and/or criminal!

Felix Zurich, lab assistant to Professor Trent, has hidden the professor away in a castle improbably located in the middle of the jungle in Africa, all so that Zurich can force him to perfect his invention of the ever-popular engine-killing ray. This is a Blackstone the Magician story so of course Zurich is also an accomplished stage magician and there is a pivotal duel of illusions. Ultimately, a high-speed canoe chase ends with Zurich going over Victoria Falls while Blackstone and his companions serenely float down on parachutes. (Super-Magician v1 002, 1941)  

This here scientist and his brother are for some reason trying to turn young women into statues. They don't get very far before being beat up by Ted Parrish, the Man With 1000 Faces (Speed Comics 001, 1939)

Senor Anza here is one of your scientists with mysterious motivations: he's been blowing up passing ships on their way to or from the Panama Canal using his very cool Radium Ray, but just why he's doing it is not elaborated on. Top possibilities are "as a weapons test prior to some other scheme" and "on behalf of the Axis forces" with a possibility of "straightforward homicidal madness" but as Anza ends up stone dead at the hands of super-spy K-51 and his colleague/ fiance/ fellow super-spy Z-19 all speculation is purely academic. (Wonderworld Comics 004, 1939)

The Professor Maxon mentioned above never appears in person in the story but does carry a scientific rivalry far enough that he completes the extinction of the dodo rather than allow his rival Professor Stone get credit for his discovery of a remnant population. (Champion Comics 006, 1940)

PROBLEMATIC ROUND-UP 001

The kinds of character that are a part of comics history so it would be wrong to ignore them but are also pretty racist (usually - I'm sure that eventually I'll find something else distasteful enough to put here) and unpleasant to dedicate a whole lot of time to. We're going with a round-up!

Our first culprit is George Harvard AKA Big Sun, a guy with a way too complicated plan to sell oil to the Axis out of the Florida Everglades under the cover of being a geological surveyor or prospector or something. He comes to the attention of adventurer Clip Carson due to not accounting for his partner maybe poking around looking for samples like their job is supposed to be? It's a bad plan.

I'm mad at myself for finding Big Sun's mask so cool looking, but it's mitigated by how dumb his gimmick is: he has a shiny breastplate on under his robe and he reveals it flasher-style to blind his foes. Hence the name, I guess. (More Fun Comics 069, 1941) 

I didn't even know that Zingaro was an Italian slur for people of Romani descent until I looked up this guy - just why it was used as the name of a fellow trying to take over Mexico I will never know. On the one hand he is stopped by weirdo character the Voice so that's good. On the other, he gets away so there's a chance he could appear again, which is bad. It's okay though: the Voice only ever had two adventures and this is the second one.

Thankfully there aren't too many characters whose names are racial slurs. (Amazing-Man Comics 022, 1941)

I don't know if you could call it lucky, per se, but it is kind of fortunate for the purposes of this round-up that I'm hitting a lot of the major categories of racist super-villains all in one go. We'll see if this questionable luck holds for the fourth entry.

So: Banga the Elephant God is predicated on the old trope that indigenous peoples are so credulous and superstitious that they will believe that anything (eg, a big mean elephant with a guy in a skull mask on it) is a god or other supernatural occurrence - in this case the people of the hidden jungle civilization of Yenya are helped along by the fact that the human part of the Banga gestalt is actually their witch doctor (called a "wizard doctor" in this case, which is kind of a neat linguistic variation if nothing else). Banga is eventually unmasked by jungle hero Morak the Mighty and meets his dual ends.

As with so many racist characters it is very unfortunate that Banga the Elephant God looks sick as hell. (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

The very next issue we have more of the same: a bunch of white guys dress up like the very cool looking Lizard-Lion Men of local legend and fleece ivory out of villagers in... Malaysia? If Rex King aka Black Fury stayed put between issues then it's Malaysia.

There's not too much to these guys: one of them hides inside the statue of the Lizard-Lion in the local temple and says for the locals to bring all of their ivory hence and then costumed goons go beat up anyone who refuses. And then Black Fury beats them up. (Super-Magician v1 002, 1941)

We didn't hit all the greats in one go - there's a lot of untapped racism coming up once we hit the comics of 1942 after all - but it's a good - bad? - sample.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 006

Minor super-heroes need to be rounded up now and then.

Blackstone the Magician: 

There are a fair number of comic versions of real life people: movie cowboys by the dozen, big game tracker Clyde Beatty a couple of times, etc. Not too many of them quite cross over into the super-hero side of things, but here we have magician Harry Blackstone Sr, who absolutely did (Blackstone is also a great example of someone who was at one point wildly famous and has now receded far enough from the public consciousness that you might not have heard of him unless you're really into the Dresden Files).

Blackstone's adventures fall more into the Action-Packed World Travel to Places Where Ethnics Live category of comics, with the gimmick that he uses stage magic to overcome various obstacles. But stage magic in a controlled environment using your own props and ad hoc stage magic using random items out in the world are different things, comic! (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

Black Fury:

Rex King is an adventurer who spares the life of a panther in the jungles of Borneo because it has a white star marking on its throat. Later, that same panther saves Rex from a leopard attack and he takes this as a some grand life lesson about how animals can be full of humanity while men are bestial - long story short, he dresses up like something halfway between Black Condor and Wildcat and teams up with the panther (now named Kato) to beat up evil. (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

the Blue Bolt:

Harvard University student Fred Parrish had the misfortune to be struck by lightning twice in the same storm, the second time while he was attempting to fly his light aircraft for help. Lucky for him, he crashed near the underground lair of Doctor Bertoff, a scientist looking for just such a lightning-charged person to experiment on and empower to fight in his ongoing war of Bertoff's land of Deltos with the Green Sorceress and her kingdom of Voltor (later sumply "Bertoff's Scientific City" vs "the Green Kingdom").

Blue Bolt was a willing conscript in this war, although he tempered Bertoff's bloodthirstiness somewhat by seeking to reform the Green Sorceress rather than kill her outright, destroy her kingdom and salt the earth. This could be traced to a "don't hit girls 1940s sense of fair play and also because he had the hots for her.

Up to Blue Bolt v1 010 the Blue Bolt comic was written by Joe Simon and drawn by Jack Kirby and it was full of all kinds of crazy fun sci-fi malarky. Sadly, the instant they left to create Captain America it all went out the window and Blue Bolt became a regular-syle super-hero fighting Nazis on the boring old surface of the planet.

For a few issues, Blue Bolt follows his kid brother Kip Parrish around as he serves with the RAF but this gets boring after a while and he heads back to the States. Once the US enters the war he ditches the costume entirely and seemingly forgets that he has super-powers and becomes a regular-style soldier with the unusual name Blue Bolt. Ho hum.

This, by the way, is part of a pattern with the good folks at Novelty Press. They had it in their heads that their readers didn't want stories that were "too fantastic" and this was reinforced by their letters page which every month featured missives from little killjoys asking for more boy inventors and fewer giant robots. I assume that these kids grew up to be the people hectoring DC every time Batman cracked a joke in the 60s and 70s and that their children form the vanguard of the "gritty realism" movement.

Sergeant Spook:

Sergeant Spook here started out as a cop already named Sergeant Spook in a clear case of nominative determinism. After blowing himself up with a carelessly placed pipe in perhaps the least dramatic origin of any of the surprisingly large number of dead police officers to return as undead super-heroes, he basically just carries on as normal. He's intangible and invisible, per regular ghost rule, but can interact with the material world just fine. (Blue Bolt v1 001)

Then, in Blue Bolt v1 006 Sergeant Spook meets legally-distinct-from-Sherlock-Holmes ghost detective Dr Sherlock, who informs him that not only is he not unique but that there is a large community of ghosts that he is flouting the rules of by for instance beating the tar out of gangsters who can neither see nor touch him. He relocates to Ghost Town and becomes the de facto troubleshooter of its President, George Washington until rounding up the ghosts of dead troublemakers begins to get stale, at which point Spook heads back to the mortal world to deal with human/ghost conflicts.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 436: THE HEAD

(Shadow Comics v1 004, 1940)

Yo, it's the Head! The Head is a mystic oracle that takes the form of a spooky head in a box and uses his position as a popular upper crust medium to gather info on crime targets, then sends out gangsters (named things like Squint, Chipmunk and Beak Thungle) to plunder them.

The Head is also Zovex, a bulletproof cube-man who is supposedly just a servant of the Head but is mostly just a pile of armour plating.

The way the Head operates both as Zovex and as the head-in-a-box oracle is that he is in actuality just a tiny little guy who probably didn't pose enough of a threat for the Shadow to have to gun him down like he does, even if he was wearing tiny little curly shoes.

This is all pretty standard fare as far as the comic book fake medium racket goes, but I appreciate a villain in a traditionally hands-off role getting out there in a suit of armour and mixing it up, you know?