Showing posts with label Volton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Volton. Show all posts

Friday, February 14, 2025

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 727: VOLTON

(Science Comics 006, 1940)


In the Science Comics 005, Dynamo develops his Brain-Wave Trap helmet which allows him to read the minds of everyone on Earth. Now, only one issue later, we discover that the range of this device is in fact interstellar, and furthermore that Dynamo can travel to other stars, as he receives a call for help from King Berin of Betelguese (sic) and gets himself there almost instantly - that's somewhere between four and six hundred light years, folks! 

(assuming that this is the same Betelgeuse as we all know and love - aside from the fact that it's spelled slightly differently, it's pretty consistently referred to as a planet instead of a star. Whatever the case, it's still an impressive expansion of the range of Dynamo's power)


Dynamo asserts his heroic privilege by instantly determining which of two warring forces to side with and drives Volton's attacking army from the field. Luckily, Volton is indeed the evil one of the two, as evidenced by the very creepy way he goes about abducting King Berin's daughter Princess Glama.


Here's where I lay out my real problem with Volton: when Dynamo first shows up, Volton is deploying his Lightning Men to attack King Berin's fortifications with their Electrode and Lightning Guns, and even his dang name is Volton. In short, I though that he was going to be another electricity powered guy and that we would see Dynamo in some sort of electric duel or similar. Instead, Volton's personal theme is way more vulture-centric and electricity just seems to be a hobby of his, to the extent that he doesn't consider all of the ramifications of trying to electrocute a depowered Dynamo to death and ends up being firmly punched out by a repowered Dynamo.



There follows a 2.5 page interlude featuring what I will call an inexplicable and disastrous decision by Dynamo, as he transport Volton back to Earth with him and offers him a second chance, only for Volton to immediately blow up an entire city while gearing up for an attempt to take over our planet. Like, one panel immediately. Just why did Dynamo do this? Pagecount, I assume.

Dynamo's faith in alternative forms of justice is forever shattered by this experience, and Volton quickly finds himself hurtling headfirst into a Betelguesian prison.

Wednesday, August 7, 2024

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 581: HENRY SHORT

(Cyclone Comics 005, 1940)

Henry Short is a pretty middling super-villain (it's been a particularly dry stretch of comics, what can I say) but he certainly has the confidence for the major leagues. He's a guy who lives in a castle so nice that it is pointed out by tour guides but who pays a hundred bucks a year in taxes and when local treasury agents come around to inquire about this he openly threatens to put them in the hospital. This is a bad idea, by the way! Governments may be famously okay with rich people avoiding taxes through means like legal loopholes but straight-up refusing to pay is a surefire way to bring the hammer down on yourself.

And that's without adding in the fact that Short's business model is extorting rich people by threatening to turn them insane with a special chair. You especially have to pay your taxes if you're a criminal, man! That's how they got Al Capone!

All in all, Henry Short is lucky that all he got was a butler to the head. Getting caught by a super-hero has to be better for your prison reputation than being pulled in by the IRS, right?

Tuesday, August 6, 2024

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 022

There's a little super-hero in all of us, I reckon.

Volton

Volton comes on strong. I mean, look at the guy: crotch-forward, power device on a chain welded around his waist, moisturized, in his lane. The very second he figured out how to have super-powers he was in his element.

And because Volton (aka Guy Newton) HATES CRIME and HATES CRIMINALS he heads on down to the local police station in his only-the-most-confident-heroes-wear-them sweater vest and beats up cops until they let him be a semi-official vigilante. And he is much more qualified than the pack of ding dongs the Commissioner here has working for him - do any of them have electrically powered super strength or an electrical forcefield or the ability to suck the electricity out of a person to stun them? They do not. 

Volton does such a good job beating up crooks that not only does the Commissioner come around on him but lets Volton date his daughter. This is the workaround for those fathers who ostentatiously display a shotgun when the new beau comes around, fellows: vigilante justice. (Cyclone Comics 001, 1940)


Volton is our second encounter with a future member of Marvel's team of public domain super-heroes-turned-Nazis the Battle-Axis, and it's hard to say if Roy Thomas did him the most dirty or the least. His stated reasons for the heel turn are certainly the flimsiest of all the Battle-Axis members but just like his revised origin of having been struck by lightning they aren't actually true, as this version of Volton is a prototype of the same kind of android as the Human Torch, taken along when Dr Nemesis Death split from Phineas Horton after helping him create android life but before turning to fascism.

All this is interesting in a universe-building kind of way (the Human Torch has a little brother who hasn't showed up in decades! What's up with that?) but a bit of a missed opportunity in that the original version of Volton is more than a bit fascist. Why bother making the Human Meteor go Nazi for Ireland when you could have him be the android and simply let Volton follow his heart?

the Red Knight:

What can I say: I like super-hero-adjacent characters and stories of knightly adventure are full of those. The Red Knight, for example, is Sir Miles of Lorraine and he has special red chain mail! and that's about it. Even worse, his adventures are set during the First Crusade, so there are likely to be fewer dragons and evil warlocks and more historic war crimes heinous enough to still come up in international relations. Lucky for me, the Red Knight series only had two installments and the second one (the one more likely to have war crimes in it) is missing! As it stands, the Red Knight spends most of his energy dealing with his evil uncle rather than in slaughtering all and sundry. (Cyclone Comics 001, 1940)

Robo of the Little People:

Like Electro before him, Robo here is actually a super-powered robot piloted remotely by a scientist (in this case a guy named Vedik). The gimmick in Robo's case is that he was constructed as a giant robot by the inhabitants of an isolated Antarctic valley but once he started to explore the outside world for them it quickly became clear that his creators were in fact very small and Robo was the size of a regular human. 

Robo probably would have transitioned into regular super-heroing at some point but since he only has a handful of appearances most of his adventures are concerned with day-to-day survival in our wacky world. (Cyclone Comics 002, 1940)

The Eye:

The Eye is just that: a huge, disembodied eye with associated lid, lashes, etc, that appears with or without a halo of flame to serve the cause of justice throughout the world. It is, without a doubt, an outlier in the group of beings that can be labelled "super-hero".


About the only thing that we know about the Eye is that it is a well-known figure world-wide. It's been operating for long enough that legends of its deed are present in a number of different cultures and whispered of by the criminal fraternity. Other than that: nothing. The Eye sees injustice and metes out justice and that's all.


Actually, there is one other thing we can infer about the Eye: either its power levels or its willingness to act directly varies over time. Sometimes, as above, it takes the shortest route to justice, employing heat rays and knocking planes out of the air willy nilly. Other times (and particularly by its last few appearances), the Eye contents itself with passing off information to human agents such as lawyer Jack Barrister. Is the Eye periodically short on power? Is it bored of the lack of challenge inherent in eye-beam based justice?

The Eye's eye also flips from left to right sometimes. This is actually quite eerie! (Keen Detective Funnies v2 012, 1939)

DEMONIC ROUND-UP 003

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