MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 911: RAMESES

(Whiz Comics 025, 1941)

We open in Egypt, where a group of partisans led by a fellow with the unlikely name of "Girbo, the Mad Mullah"* are brainstorming ways in which they might expel both the Germans and the British from their country, and Girbo has an innovative solution: he has procured the mummy of the Pharaoh Rameses, along with a vial of mummy-resurrection juice, and is going to bring the ancient king back to life to lead them. And it works!

The problem that I am faced with here is that Egyptian history features a full eleven different rulers named Ramesses and just which one this was is not specified here. I was all fired up and ready to dig through the history of each one (on Wikipedia, at least), when I realized that there was a clear and obvious front-runner in the person of Ramesses II, ol' Ozymandias himself, if only because he loomed largest in the public consciousness of the time as the presumed Pharaoh of the story of Exodus. 

*while I'm not going to claim that the depiction of Egyptian Muslims in this story is good or even particularly sympathetic, you must believe me when I say that (aside from Girbo) these guys get about as sympathetic a depiction as you get in comics the 1940s, or indeed into the 80s. It's a low bar but they cleared it.

Rameses begins his campaign on a high note, with a raid on a British fort that establishes both his ruthlessness and complete invulnerability to bullets. One must pity his poor horse, however.

Things take a turn when a Nazi officer shows up with the intention of allying with this new faction against the common British for, only to be slain at Rameses' command. This violation of the flag of truce raises some concern amongst his followers but what really gets the talking is his assertion that he should be enough of a god for them and that they should abandon their faith to serve him.

Having driven away his followers with his evil ways, Rameses drives home his point with magical snakes. 

The loss of his followers means nothing to the undead Pharaoh, who simply raises an army of the dead to assist him in his next assault on the British forces. Meanwhile, Girbo attempts to slay Ibis the Invincible to prevent his further interference in their plans but is himself killed when Ibis proves his better in swordplay.

Rameses' undead forces, though formidable, are vulnerable to sunlight, something that the Ibistick can easily provide even though the mechanics of how it might have done so are troubling. But what to do with an eight foot tall megalomaniacal mummy-man? Things look hopeless until Rameses himself lets slip the fact that the only thing capable of containing him is his own tomb that Ibis is able to defeat him, by simply moving said tomb over top of the villain.

Though Rameses is left to stew in the darkness, he is in fact one of Ibis the Invincible's few recurring villains. We will see his bony face and weird mummy tonsure again.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 907: HALF-MAN

(Whiz Comics 021, 1941)

Due to Allied concerns about the Nazis generic Axis use of black magic to ensure victory, Ibis the Invincible is recruited and sent to the front as a counter-sorcerer. His foe: the mysterious Half-Man, occultist and rumoured worshipper of an ancient evil god called the Dark Spirit.

The Half-Man served with distinction in WWI, until an artillery shell cost him a leg, an arm and an eye and he was no longer able to lead troops in battle. He then turned to the study of black magic to make himself powerful and potentially whole again, and with the advent of WWII he has offered his services to the War Lord, Fawcett's all-purpose late-1941 Hitler stand-in.

Some further particulars: 

In his first appearance, Half-Man has these pseudo-Gestapo occultist minions who are masterpieces to design. They could not more obviously be weird creep villains. They also receive planchette-writing intel from "the watchful ones," which could be flowery language describing another set of occultist creeps in a lookout post somewhere but which I prefer to think is some sore of class of spirit. 

Perhaps it's the Ancient Egyptian in him coming through, but Ibis is unable to treat Half-Man with anything but pity and contempt, no matter how often he is proven to be a legitimate threat, as above when he completely is completely trounced by the guy.  

Like I said, the first issue that Half-Man appears in contains a lot of talk of the ancient god called the Dark Spirit helping to ensure the Axis victories, and I had initially thought that his magical power was also derived from this being, like a D&D warlock, but Whiz Comics 023 includes a segment in which Ibis is almost sacrificed to the Dark Spirit, here called the Angry God, and manages to turn the tables and kill the god's one remaining priest instead. This seems to kill the Angry God as well without noticeably diminishing Half-Man's power, so I guess it's more of a Hellboy situation in which all of the Evil Magic Guys are lumped together into a unit.

Speaking of the military applications of mystical power, the final act of Half-Man's villainous career takes place on the battlefield between the War Lord's forces and those of an unnamed Allied nation that starts out on a back foot because someone is scrying their troop deployments with a crystal ball. 

Once Ibis joins the fighting on the small nation's side, Half-Man too is obligated to take the field, and while no mortal army is a mach for the power of the Ibistick, he manages to capture Taia and get away. The back-and-forth between them might have gone on indefinitely, but for the fact that the War Lord himself shows up and treats Half-Man with a sneering condescension instead of acknowledging his clear need for validation. This gives Ibis the chance to step up and be nice to the guy by restoring his lost body parts. Having finally achieved a feeling of wholeness again, from being literally whole rather than from magical accomplishment, the former Half-Man reforms. Hopefully he had some sort of plan in place to get to a neutral country, since he renounced his magics and presumably fascism at the end there and I doubt that the War Lord would be too understanding of that. 

DIVINE ROUND-UP 023

The gods they just keep on coming. 

Osiris: 

Ibis the Invincible's power levels get a bit of a nerf in 1941 when the caveat that his Ibistick is ineffective, variously, against magic, evil magic and in areas of ambient magic (just which is the case depends on the dramatic needs of the story). This forces him to come up with creative solutions to his problems, such as during this attack by a storm demon summoned by his arch-foe Trug, in which he summons the Ancient Egyptian god Osiris to act as divine muscle.

Osiris is one of the more humanoid of the Egyptian gods, so the only major critique to levy about his appearance (other than all of the stuff that any Egyptology nerds who read this are yelling about of course), aside from the fact that he's supposed to be green. I'm not sure if Osiris is the go-to god for demon-battling either. Maybe Horus would be a better choice?

Regardless, Osiris defeats the demon and then takes off. I'm sure that the above panel is meant to represent him returning to the land of the gods, but I get a real kick out of the image of him just wandering off into the California countryside, inspiring religious mania in the locals. 

God Style: Real (Whiz Comics 016, 1941)

Thoth: 

After yet another magical attack by his enemy Trug, Ibis again turns to the gods of Egypt for aid, this time appropriately from the ibis-headed god of wisdom, Thoth.

I appreciate that the artist made an effort, but while this version of Thoth looks reasonably cool that is absolutely not an ibis head. It's more like an angry and disturbingly flesh-toned duck. Duck head or no, Thoth comes through and supplies Ibis with a divination spell capable of locating the magically-shielded Trug.

God Style: Real (Whiz Comics 017, 1941)

the Man of the Mountain:

Once Ibis locates Trug he also has to contend with the Man of the Mountain, a guy with four arms who, appropriately, lives on a mountaine. 

While Ibis calls the Man of the Mountain an evil spirit, Trug insists that he is a "Great God of Revenge." The being in question remains silent, which is a shame because he really could have cleared up this taxonomic problem for us with a few words.

Whatever the Man of the Mountain is, he is also unable to withstand the fall off of his home mountain after Ibis tabletops him. He shatters at the bottom, revealing (to me at least) that he is in fact made of stone. RIP, Man of the Mountain.

God Style: Real (Whiz Comics 017, 1941)

the Snake-God: 

The subject of cult worship and human sacrifice in a cavern somewhere under NYC, this particular snake seemingly has a bit more of the divine about it than its fellow animal subjects of worship in comics. At the very least it is bulletproof, though this does not avail it against the raw might of Dr Occult's mitts. And as a bonus, its entire cult is crushed in its death throes!

God Style: Animist (Real?) (More Fun Comics 027, 1937)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 900: TRUG

(Whiz Comics 013, 1941) 

Trug is a student of magic and of Ibis the Invincible specifically who creeps out of the shadows after Ibis and Taia's ward Tommy has defeated his school's boxing champion and tempts the despondent youth into stealing the Ibistick for him (the sad boy is then turned into a tree and then never mentioned again - very sad).

Trug's Ibis scholarship extends beyond kind of dressing like him and knowing where his extended family hang out into important topics like how not to kill yourself while using the Ibistick. Unlike every poor chump who has gotten their hands on it before him, Trug is aware that it will visit any harm intended for Ibis back on its wielder and so deals exclusively in barriers, crevasses and other nonlethal means of keeping his rival at bay.

Where Trug fails is in not being a creep and kidnapping Taia as he leaves to enjoy his newfound power. Quite aside from any moral implications, this is a sure way to make Ibis just that much more determined in his quest to defeat his foe.

Fore reasons of his own, Trug heads north, subjugates the local peoples and builds a palace, and here I notice that he has kidnapped Taia not as a creepy "I will make you my queen" kind of thing but as a hostage, which I would still not call a good idea but which at least has a bit of logic to it.

One thing that Trug has clearly not considered is that Ibis still has access to magical items that he used the Ibistick to create and that using two of these - the crystal ball and super-plane, specifically - he is able to locate and travel to Trug's new kingdom in swift order. Trug thus makes the mistake of summoning an air force to deal with whoever might be encroaching on his airspace, only for them to turn on him and cause a piece of his own palace to fall and bonk him unconscious.

Trug ends his days as a decorative statue as part of the compensation offered by Ibis to his former subjects. (Whiz Comics 014, 1941) 

Trug isn't a statue for very long before he is carried off by slavers and worshipped as an idol. When Ibis is then asked for help, he restores Trug to human form as part of a scheme to show that he is a mere mortal.

Turning Trug back and forth from statue to man to show that he is in fact powerless swiftly convinces his erstwhile worshippers to abandon him, and somehow also that they should give up their warlike ways and make peace with their former enemies. Trug, meanwhile, is left at liberty and feeling vengeful, though he is under-dressed in the Arctic. (Whiz Comics 015, 1941)

Undaunted by his circumstances, Trug hops on a log and starts paddling his way South, and has the good fortune to encounter a helpful man with a magic bag of wind, who he promptly robs and murders. He makes an opportunistic and unsuccessful attempt to kill Ibis and Taia by summoning a storm demon, then composes himself and... (Whiz Comics 016, 1941)

... kidnaps Ibis and Taia's ward Tommy and uses him as bait in yet another attempt to kill Ibis, and while the first part of that plan works like a charm, his trapping game is pretty haphazard. His ace in the hole is clearly the god-monster the Man of the Mountain (the four-armed guy above) but he also blows up the ship that Ibis is crossing the Pacific on (ineffective) and places fairly obvious traps like a clearly-carnivorous tree and a demon disguised as a pretty lady on the path leading to his cave hideout. (Whiz Comics 017, 1941) 

The Man of the Mountain, though imposing, is not too bright and is lured off of a cliff with relative ease, after which Trug just kind of gives up. There is a small amount of tension as the ambient magical energies of the area render the Ibistick powerless and thus Ibis and Taia are trapped on the side of a mountain, but that barely counts as a deathtrap. (Whiz Comics 018, 1941)

We now enter that phase of any recurring villain's career in which they go from being a legitimate threat to a bit of a joke, and in Trug's case this begins when he is rejected by a loser named Mudge who himself is looking to get revenge on Ibis for foiling his plans. Trug might have fallen on hard times but he knows how to size up a fool, and Mudge is exactly the kind of guy to fall for the old Fake Satan trick. Where he was unwilling to team up with an unsuccessful magician he is more than happy to sell his soul for a chance at revenge, the dope.

Mudge and Satan/Trug attempt to kill Ibis and Taia with a magic bomb, but fail as Ibis saw them coming a mile away and substituted a couple of magical duplicates for them. He afflicts Mudge with donkey ears for his trouble, which only redoubles his commitment to revenge.

The duo next attempt to harm Ibis by killing Taia and are fooled by the same magical duplicate trick, upon which Ibis reveals that he was not only on to them but that he know that "Satan" was actually Trug the whole time. Mudge and Trug are then sealed up in a wall to die, which is pretty tough justice, but we must remember that Ibis is from another time.

Though Mudge's fate is sealed, Trug will return in 1942. (Whiz Comics 020, 1941)