DIVINE ROUND-UP 020

Human sacrifice is the order of the day with this bunch of deific bad-boys. 

Shem: 

Shem, the Sun God, is worshipped in the Land of Shem by the Shemmites, aka the Men of Shem. It's a very well-branded religion. 

The Shemmites capture and attempt to sacrifice Kalthar, king of the jungle, but fail to reckon with his tendency to grow to fifteen feet tall and be invulnerable to harm, and are ultimately driven from their lands. 

God Style: Invoked (Zip Comics 004, 1940) 

Marro: 

When the Three Aces set out into the Amazon jungle to investigate rumours of an ancient flying machine they end up discovering a lost colony of Atlantis for the second time in their careers - an astonishing hit rate (though their memories were wiped after leaving the first one and a language barrier probably prevented them from knowing about the Atlantis connection this time, if we're going to be scrupulously accurate). Upon arriving, they are immediately captured and prepared for sacrifice to the Atlanteans' god Marro. 

Luckily for the three aviators, Marro turns out to be the very ancient aircraft they seek, sealed against the ravages of time in a glass dome. They manage to convince the Atlanteans to not sacrifice them if they can make the god fly again as it did in their legends, and being the expert fliers that they are, the Aces pull it off without a hitch. 

God Style: Animist (Action Comics v1 043, 1941)

Moloch: 

The set up for this is a bit convoluted, but here goes: an anthropologist named Dr Chadwick is showing Zero, the Ghost Detective a weird skull that he dug up in Egypt one day when the ghost of the skull's former owner shows up to take it back, and makes off with Chadwick's daughter, to boot. Zero pursues the ghost back to Egypt and through a portal to Ancient Egypt, where he finds himself in a temple to Moloch and learns that the skull had been stuffed full of jewels sacred to the god. Zero manages to escape back to the 20th Century with the girl but wisely leaves the jewels behind.

There is of course a lot of business involving human sacrifice to Moloch via the white hot hands of his idol, and while Moloch himself only shows up in the form of the idol the question remains: just who is raising all these ghosts and powering this time portal?

God Style: Idol (Real?) (Feature Comics 041, 1941)

the "Monster-God": 

The Monster-God is not this fellow's name. We never learn what, in fact, it is, because the adventure he appears in is another boilerplate heroic-white-explorers-versus-evil-native-heathens adventure, handled with all of Fawcett Comics' trademark cultural sensitivity. I include him only for completions' sake and to point out that I like how gangly he is.

God Style: Idol (Whiz Comics 006, 1940)

DIVINE ROUND-UP 014

Once again I present to you some deities. 

Pelenona: 

South Pacific adventurer Lance O'Casey almost gets sacrificed to the volcano goddess Pelenona on the of the same name because a different, more evil adventurer had made off with the island's sacred temple jewels.

The people of the same island also worship a shipwrecked circus gorilla as god-monster the Eepa, 

God Style: Animist (Whiz Comics 008, 1940)

the Creeping Death:

The Jungle Twins were a pair of brothers who were separated as infants when their parents' jungle expedition was attacked by raiders. William Dale was taken back to New York by a loyal nursemaid to grow up in the lap of luxury, while his brother Steve was left behind in the jungle to - you guessed it - become the toughest, baddest dude and rule over all he surveyed.

Years later, William made his way back to the jungle to find Steve, and along the way he and his servant Dagoo were captured by apemen and left as sacrifices for their god, the Creeping Death, which turns out to be a whole river full of giant crocodiles! Dagoo gets them out of this scrape using some magic pipes to put the crocs to sleep, despite William being a total asshole to him. 

God Style: Animist (Nickel Comics 001, 1940)

Dagan the Only: 

Cotton Carver is your classic Golden Age comics adventurer, and in one of his first outings he stumbles into a classic Golden Age adventure setting: a vast network of temperate, well-lit caverns beneath Antarctica. From then on, his adventuring career involves getting into scrapes in underground nation after underground nation as he looks for a way back to the surface world. After making a particularly perilous transition from the Land of the White Witch to the kingdom of Thule (pre-WWII, so not a red flag), Carver and his companions encounter a group of archers who are making their yearly pilgrimage to the shrine of Dagan the Only. 

The actual worship of Dagan the Only is a bit of a mystery - he requires travellers of the Path of Peril between the LotWW and Thule to delivered living unto him, which suggests human sacrifice and triggers a bloody battle between the archers and Carver's people, but that turns out to be a ruse by the princess of Thule to acquire their help in defeating an enemy. Later on, however, Cotton and his pals make the transition to the next underground land by being tossed into Dagan's sacrificial pit. All we can say for sure is that he has a great name.

God Style: Idol (Adventure Comics 039, 1939)

the Devil God: 

A cool-ass idol that Zero the Ghost Detective smashes up in order to banish a ghost in the Guatemalan jungle. Though Zero asserts that the ghost is operating under the Devil God's will, I would say that it's equally likely that the idol is his anchor to the material world. Also, we only have Zero's word for it that this guy is named the Devil God.

God Style: Idol (Real?) (Feature Comics 049, 1941) 

NOTES: JANUARY 2023

Names:

Bulldog Teeters. (Feature Comics 044, 1941)

Zero the Ghost Detective getting straight-up punched by a ghost. (Feature Comics 051, 1941)

Dates: Johnny Thunder born 7th July, 1917 (Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)

Calling Cards:

He only ever used 'em a couple of times but the Flash had metal lightning bolt dart calling cards.

Costumes:

Absolutely the best Hawkman costume variant is the brief period in which he wore a big hat in the shape of a sassy hawk's head (Flash Comics v1 003, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO 026: ZERO, GHOST DETECTIVE

(Feature Comics 032-074, 1940-1943)

Eyyy, it's Zero the Ghost Detective!

I have a blanket love of the psychic detective genre and unusually for the Golden Age Zero's cases almost always end up being actually supernatural as opposed to being a crook in a sheet - the above panels are from a case wherein a bitter old man dies and comes back as a three-fingered ogre to drag the rest of his family into death with him. It's usually something gruesome and lots of people get killed by ghosts. What fun!

Zero himself is a bit of a cypher as his adventures never really dip into his private life but does that really matter? He should absolutely be brought back as a foil to Dr Thirteen. Oh how they would annoy one another!