ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 017

A panoply of wonders awaits.

Karnak's Slaves: 

This otherwise-unnamed race from an unnamed planet get a pretty raw deal: conquered and mind-controlled into servitude by scientist Karnak, they all seemingly die when he does. It's a real shame. (Weird Comics 007, 1940) 

the Deadly Plants: 

It's hard to say much about the so-called "Deadly Plants" of planet Vegeto, aside from the fact that they work together to capture a handful of prospective human colonists and dump them in a pit, and that for this act of moderate aggression the Red Comet dumps the entire termite population of Earth on them, seemingly wiping out their entire species. This is what we call "disproportionate response" but is in perfect keeping with the 1940s (and beyond!) view of the relative value of human life vs all other life. (Planet Comics 004, 1940)

Dhakka Snail-Men: 

Every undersea race in comics needs a selection of other undersea races to have conflict with, and Neptina's Fish-Men are no exception. They are menaced by the Dhakkas, aka the Snail-Men, led by Prince Petor, who attempts to invade the territories of Amloza for no stated reason - I guess that's just what you do when you have an army and an abyssal plain to march across. Unfortunately for Petor and his ambitions, Neptina and the Fish-Men are backed up by Brad Fletcher and his Super-Sub, which are enough to decisively turn the tide. 

The Snail-Men also might be some of the least like their namesake of any of the [animal]-Men we have yet encountered. They ride snails, sure, but about the only thing that they themselves have in common with snails are some pretty modest eyestalks. (Champion Comics 009, 1940)

Dragon-Lizard Men: 

Encountered by detective Fu Chang as he searches for treasure on fabled Money Pit Island, the Dragon-Lizard Men are not so much guardians as obstacles on the way to wealth. The most remarkable thing about them is that if they are as Fu Chang asserts descended from the "lizard and dragons" left on the island by the treasure-burying pirates they managed to not only evolve into fully humanoid forms but also enough of a sense of shame to wear briefs over their mysterious lizard and/or dragon genitals. Nature is really amazing. (Pep Comics 009, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 033

Minor super-heroes, we got 'em.

Little Giant: 

Professor Rednow has some inventions to test and he has secured an orphan boy named Rusty for that purpose. Rusty is first given a serum that is supposed to turn him into a big hunk of beefcake but instead he becomes a kid with super strength. He then gets an outfit with anti-gravity properties that allow him to leap around like a small Hulk and finally is coated in "impurvogen," a high-tech chemical that renders him invulnerable.

In case you were having some doubts about Professor Rednow's devotion to scientific ethics: I don't think that he has any. It's just lucky for young Rusty that all of this stuff works or he might end up buried in the Professor's back yard alongside half a dozen other orphan boys.

Rusty and the Professor end up moving to NYC and becoming special deputies in the NYPD but, as with the Phantom Knight before him, the Little Giant only really had a couple of adventures and the second one continues to be out of my price range. (OK Comics 001, 1940)

the Shield:

The Shield is Joe Higgins, "G-Man Extraordinary," an FBI agent who battles threats to the US using a super-suit of his own design (a design that supposedly was the reason for Captain America switching from his original shield to the round one so as not to look too much like his patriotic counterpart, by the way). 

Over the years the Shield's status is subject to the usual comic drift: his powers go from being solely derived from his suit to involving some sort of super serum or ray or two of those, or all three. We're talking about the 1940 version of the character, though, and he was all suit, baby. The suit itself did slim down considerably from the first issue to the second, but we can chalk that up to a refinement of the technology (and to the more form-fitting top being a bit more flattering than the big chunky breastplate look).

One thing about the Shield that I had never known prior to reading his first appearance was that his motivation for becoming a costumed crimefighter was that his father died in the Black Tom Explosion as a result of German sabotage during WWI. Thus, the Shield has the Batman origin but for espionage!  (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

UPDATE (Shield-Wizard Comics 001, 1940)

the Comet:

John Dickering is a scientist who invents a gas that when injected gives him super jumping abilities. Too late he learns the reason that so many scientists do extensive testing before trying out serums etc on themselves, as the gas also gives him disintegrating ray vision that can only be held in check by a glass visor, Cyclops-style. Thus, he becomes the Comet.

There are a number of remarkable things about the Comet over the years but the only ones relevant to the 1940 version of the character are 1. the fact that he has one of the truly great Golden Age costumes and 2. just how very willing he is to kill his foes. I guess when all you have is a disintegrating ray every problem looks like a disintegratable nail. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

the Rocket:

The Rocket is your classic example of an explorer coming to a lost/hidden/alien world and becoming its greatest champion. The most common example of this is your garden-variety jungle adventurer, with "modern man transported into an effete future" and "guy falls through hole into underground world" being other common examples.

The Rocket's adventures, on the other hand, happen... somewhere. He arrives via his namesake rocket ship - is the Diamond Empire located in the future? on an alien world? on a lost mesa or in a hidden valley? No idea, never addressed. He just shows up because he heard there was a hot queen running the joint and that's all we get.

After a rocky start, the Rocket manages to win over the titular Queen of Diamonds, going from her slave to her bodyguard to eventually becoming her lover/ adventuring companion. And if you read the above panels you might have noticed how very racist the Queen's origin story is, another thing that is extremely in keeping with this man-in-a-strange-land style comic: white guy exceptionalism. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 682: CLEA

(OK Comics 001, 1940) 

"The Further Adventures of Ulysses" is a feature that posits that Ulysses/ Odysseus, after a gruelling twenty year journey home from Troy to Ithaca, immediately got bored and left again upon hearing a rumour that one of his men had been left behind on the island of the Cyclopes and still lived. This is a fun idea and very in keeping with both the lifestyles of the Greek heroes and a particular 1940s idea of manly disdain for settled domesticity. The only problem is that the one extant TFAOU story is all retellings of the greatest hits, from the return to Cyclops Island to Clea here, who is Circe in all but name.

Specifically, Clea lives on an island and uses her magic wand to turn humans into beasts - Ulysses' crew here all end up as tigers, so they must have had better table manners than the last bunch who all turned into pigs - and does not either provide Ulysses with information on how to enter the underworld or have between 2 and 5 children with him.

Clea almost gets away with it too, but that meddling Mercury gives Ulysses a sprig of protective ivy and her weirdly long wand has no effect on him. Frankly embarrassing, Clea.

BONUS: Just want to highlight this giant two-headed monster lady as the only novel concept in the adventure.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 032

Just a few more minor super-heroes.

Paul Bunyan: 

What's better than a regular two-fisted lumberjack protagonist? Paul Bunyan himself, that's who. This version of Bunyan works in a modern-day lumber camp and has been toned down a bit with the suggestion that he's just some guy who was born in Maine and grew to a mere ten feet tall. His adventures aren't that much different than those of other lumberjack heroes, but there is something about an enormous man with a giant blue ox that add a bit of spice to the proceedings. (National Comics 001, 1940)

(Bunyan gets an ape-man sidekick named King for a couple of issues and this is the best place I could think of to note that (National Comics 006, 1940))

Wonder Boy:

Wonder Boy is an alien from the planet Viro who is a take on the Superman origin (last survivor of a destroyed planet rocketed to Earth where he is superhuman in comparison to the locals) while simultaneously being a prototype of Superboy (special super-powered boy who can only do good and is loved by all the world). DC Comics bought the rights to him along with all of the other Quality characters but has never seen fit to use him for anything, which I suppose is reasonable. (National Comics 001, 1940)

Quicksilver:

He's got a lot of personality, that Quicksilver. Like other Golden Age super speedsters he handily outclasses most of his opponents and so the main draw is watching just how stylishly he beats them up. Much much later, Quicksilver will be brought back under the name Max Mercury and incorporated into the Flash family but that's more than a few years out yet. (National Comics 005, 1940)

the Phantom Knight:

The Phantom Knight, aka Prince Philip of Kyle, is a very fun concept! As presented in his initial appearance, Philip is a real jerk, a man who cares about nobody and nothing but his horse Lightning.

Philip is mean, vengeful, faithless and murderous. He kills two men in what were supposed to be bloodless contests because he felt that they insulted them. He joins and then deserts what is presumably the First Crusade, which could be a good act except that he deserts because there isn't enough slaughtering and he gets bored.

Philip eventually meets his end at the tusks of a wild boar and finds himself denied access to the afterlife until he makes up for his life of extreme dickishness, so he returns to Earth to do good as the Phantom Knight!.

Now, here's the problem: the Phantom Knight appeared twice, in OK Comics 001 and 002, and OK Comics 002 is not available to read anywhere that I know to look (well, there is a copy on ebay right now but I'm not prepared to pay $500 Canadian for the privilege). Thus, all that we really know about the Phantom Knight is that he was a colossal ass in life and now roams the mortal realm as a tormented spirit doomed to do good deeds. Is he still an ass? Is he operating in his home time period or has he been brought to the present - the location of Kyle is never established beyond being in Central Europe, so if he is operating in the modern day there's a decent chance he fought some Nazis. (OK Comics 001, 1940)

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?

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)

MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 010

We have mad scientists at criminal scientist prices.

Dr Koch is one of the many people hungry to get their hands on the secret vitamin supplement that turned the Champ (derogatory) into the Champ (aspirational) after its creator Dr Marlin is murdered. Koch's mild claim to fame is the fact that he's the first one to get ahold of the formula long enough to do anything with it. What he did, specifically, was to mix up a big batch and pump it directly into a poor guy named Cris, thus turning him into a lumpy rage-filled monster-man.

Koch gets away at the end of his encounter with the Champ and his little pal Henry (Cris sadly does a header off a cliff) but characters later in the story talk about him as if he's dead. Dead or hiding out in a cave in Mexico: either way he's not bothering the Champ any more. (Champ Comics 011, 1940)

Dr Bolms (excuse me, Doktar Bolms) here is a mere gangland plastic surgeon, which was enough to draw the attention of Secret Agent Z-2 here but not necessarily enough to draw ours. What really sets him apart from his peers is the fact that he has captured a government agent named Monty Wood and has been practising facial surgeries on him. Horrible! (Crash Comics Adventures 001, 1940)

Dr Sax is a doctor/spy who needs Tornado Tom's good good blood to rejuvenate his spy chief, but since he's an evil man he is determined to take all of his blood instead of just some of it. (Cyclone Comics 005, 1940)

These youngsters are the Space Rovers, Jane and Ted, a coupla youths who were forced to flee in Jane's father's spaceship rather than have it and its ray cannons fall into the hands of enemy spies and now just kind of ping pong around the Solar System in the hopes of getting home. Their first port of call is Mercury, where they have the misfortune of meeting the Mercurians of Thian, who only live twenty years, are mad about it and thanks to their head scientist Flaedo here have exactly one proposed solution: capture longer-lived beings and vivisect them.

I love his little mustache! Don't worry, he gets electrocuted in the Space Rovers' escape. (Exciting Comics 002, 1940)

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 005

You can't deny that they were real people.

Adolf Hitler:

This unnamed leader of the unnamed forces that the Flying Trio are battling on behalf of the little nation of Sylvania is a real Hitlerian fellow (Crash Comics Adventures 005, 1940) 

Amelia Earhart:

Two variations on a theme: using the story of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart as fodder for a damsel-in-distress story. The first (Amazing-Man Comics 018, 1940) involves the Shark rescuing Amelia Reinhardt from an old man who has her trapped in the jungle in hopes that she will fall for him. The second (Big Shot Comics 019, 1941) features aviator Rocky Ryan and his pal rescuing Amy Every from cartoonishly racist cannibals.

Captain Kidd:

Crooks try to pull a fast one by purchasing Captain Kidd's authentic treasure chest and then "discovering" it after filling it with stolen gold (Cyclone Comics 001, 1940)

Ethan Allen: 

The Liberty Lads are back at it, getting their grubby mitts all over the American Revolutionary War. This time they meet Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys on the eve of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. (Champion Comics 009, 1940)

John Hancock and Samuel Adams:

More Liberty Lads shenanigans. This time they're saving Samuel Adams and John Hancock from capture by the British, something that as far as I can tell almost happened in our timeline. (Champ Comics 011, 1940)  

Joseph Stalin:

"Nilats," leader of "Aissur" is tracked to his office in "Wocsom" by Strongman, who objects to the Aissurans' invasion of the Balkan country of Rutania (Crash Comics Adventures 003, 1940)

Orson Welles:

For a while, Orson Welles' 'War of the Worlds' broadcast is used as a shorthand for a reason that the cops blithely ignore multiple calls about some fantastic threat, only they certainly never do more than allude to the real thing. This time it's giant mutant ivy plants and the dumb police are talking about a broadcast by "Worsen Welds". (Amazing-Man Comics 006, 1939)

Saladin:

Makes a one-panel appearance in the otherwise undistinguished Crusades comic "Reynard the Fox". (Cyclone Comics 005, 1940)

Tecumseh:

Whether "Metumseh" is a stand-in for Shawnee leader Tecumseh or they just mushed around his name to make up one for this fellow I cannot say, but they were certainly thinking of him while they did it. (Champion Comics 010, 1940)