MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 799: GLORK

(Target Comics v1 009, 1940) 

Glork here is a candidate for election to the post of King of Mars who manages to lose despite massive political interference on his part. This is probably because he is a very unpleasant and transparently evil person.

Despite some recent real-world examples, Glork might still reign supreme as the worst-ever loser of an election. He immediately settles upon a plan to pull the moon Phobos down to the surface to destroy the entire Martian civilization, while he flees the planet in his personal spaceship to seek glory in the wider Solar System. 

It can't be a surprise at this point: Spacehawk does not take this kind of thing lying down. He busts into Glork's secret lair disguised as a Martian, reverses the polarity on the device so that Phobos returns to its normal orbit, and when Glork makes a run for it Spacehawk uses the attractor machine to crash his spaceship in his own pit full of man- Martian-eating beasts. 

Special shout out to this guy, who I completely thought was being set up to murder Glork in a fit of pique later in the story but who I guess was just an object illustration of what a jerk Glork was.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 785: THE PHOENIX

(Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

Flash Lightning's first stop after getting juiced up with brand-new electric powers is New York City, super-hero capital of the world, and it's a good career move for him because he immediately gets mixed up in some super shenanigans. An explorer named Parker has gone missing in Central America and the agents of someone named the Phoenix are doing their damnedest to prevent his daughter Mary from looking for him. Lightning and Mary dodge fiery deathtraps, tommy gun-wielding gangsters and threatening coffin deliveries and set out regardless.

Mary and Lightning travel to what is now the Parque Nacional Sierra De Las Minas in Guatemala (there are coordinates!) and dodge some fellows known variously as the Tzutuhiles, the Jewel Men and the Python Men, a bunch of snake worshippers who help the Phoenix advance his plans for world domination by using slave labour to create artificial gemstones that are then shipped around the world to be sold (and this is not the first nor the last time we will see the creation of artificial jewels, a victimless if not virtuous activity, treated as equivalent to counterfeiting currency).

It is at this point that the Phoenix makes an actual appearance in the story, and just what does a guy named after a mythical firebird who makes and distributes gemstones with the aid of both hard-boiled gangsters and snake worshipping tribesmen look like?

You guessed exactly right: he looks like a character from a 1930s sci-fi movie serial. Unfortunately for the Phoenix he is completely unprepared for a superhuman opponent and he appears in a whopping four panels before being sent to his doom at the bottom of his own volcanic crater by Flash Lightning.

Special shout-out to this fellow, John Roan, aka the Reptile Man, who accompanied Parker Sr on his expedition and managed to escape and return to New York for help only be killed by the Phoenix's men. Just what is his deal? Was he a reptile man when the expedition started or is this something that happened to him at the hands of the Python Men? I'm asking but nobody is telling me anything.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 048

The triumphant return of Ace Magazines to the round-up!

Flash Lightning:

Educated and possibly also raised by Ancient Egyptian mystic the Old Man of the Pyramids, young Robert Morgan is eventually deemed worthy of the Amulet of Annihilation, a mystic artifact that grants him the powers of flight, super strength, bulletproof skin, the ability to hurl lightning bolts and sundry others (the amulet is also immediately forgotten about, as far as I can tell - the armband design remains a part of Lightning's costume design for the rest of his appearances but his powers are treated as integral).

Flash Lightning is eventually renamed Lash Lightning, and the word on the street is that this was done so as to avoid confusion with prominent lightning-themed DC Comics character the Flash. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

the Raven:

The Raven, like his fellow Ace Magazines hero the Black Spider, is your classic pulp style vigilante wanted by both the police and the underworld, with the added twist that he is primarily focused on Robin Hood-style monetary redistribution/ stealing from the crooked rich to return their ill-gotten gains to the bilked poor. At first, at least - over time the Raven starts dealing with more conventional super-threats and gangsters.

In addition to his loyal assistant Mike, the Raven's supporting cast includes Police Captain Lash - his boss, because the Raven is really Detective Sergeant Danny Dartin - and Lash's daughter/Danny's fiance Lola. Like the Black Spider before him, the Raven's love interest Lola eventually discovers the secret of his dual identity, which must have been a particular relief for the Raven because she, like her father and (supposedly) her fiance had up to that point been dedicated to the task of capturing the Raven and had come close to doing so once or twice.

Though the Raven's costume starts out as a huge hooded cloak of the type more commonly worn by villains, he eventually switches to a more conventional cape and cowl number, which is a shame, as the original look was much more distinctive. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

Whiz Wilson:

Whiz Wilson is a time-travelling man, but one who very specifically only travels into the future. It's like my voice, complaining about how comic book time travellers just can't stop interfering in historical events, itself echoed back in time and helped to create a character mostly immune to temporal paradox, as long as he doesn't run into any older Whiz Wilsons in his travels.

Wilson's time harness also incorporates a space-travel functionality (as any time machine necessarily must lest one be rocketed off into the void instead of ancient Mesopotamia) and he very satisfyingly employs this as a teleportation device whenever he is in the future, though the mechanics of whether he is instantaneously transporting from one place to another or zooming very quickly between them vary according to the needs of the plot. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

Marvo the Magician:

Marvo is another tuxedo-wearing magician from the same tradition that previously brought us such luminaries as Zatara. Like many of his peers he fills the time between stage performances by driving around aimlessly and meting out justice to the random criminals he encounters, with the two distinctions that a. he has a little monkey companion  named Tito and b. unlike many of his peers his powers do mainly seem to be illusions and not reality-warping chaos majicks. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 635: KAOS

(Fantastic Comics 012, 1940)

Kaos, a Venusian scientist, has a plan that in true comics book fashion is both simple (invade the Earth with overwhelming force, thus taking over almost immediately) and overly complicated (hypnotize the local population of giant vultures and then feed them super vitamins extracted from a specially-bred vine, thus making them even more giant and so fast that they are unbeatable, then teleport them to Earth as your main invasion force). Also: those are some crazy legs on those vultures.

Kaos may be the villain who benefits the most from a frequent plot element in Stardust the Super Wizard adventures, that Stardust lives so gosh darned far away. Thus, despite the fact that Stardust watched Kaos' entire plan unfold on his View-Plate and Thought-Recorder, Kaos has enough time to effectively conquer the planet while the Super Wizard is on his commute.

Once Stardust actually shows up, Kaos is subdued in exactly two panels. The vultures take a bit longer but in short order both they and "Kaos-the-Worm" are on their way back to Venus. There's no mention of removing the birds' physical enhancements so I guess it's now up to the Venusians to deal with millions of huge powerful super-fast vultures.

This is the issue in which a young woman orphaned in the vulture attacks attaches herself to Stardust and ends up returning to his star with him to live. I don't know if this was intended to be a sexy situation or not - the two of them certainly do seem to be giving each other significant looks, but the same panels are really emphasizing just how much bigger Stardust is than her. It's unsettling! Though she never appears again in a Fletcher Hanks story, this unnamed character is a frequent feature of more recent Stardust works, so I felt I should include her.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 004

the Lone Warrior (and Dicky): 

The Lone Warrior and Dicky are Stan and Dicky Carter, son of the now-deceased "world's greatest scientist" and recipients of his Power Elixir injections, leaving them generically physically enhanced and well-equipped to battle pseudo-Nazi forces seeking to wreck America's military. Plus he made them a land/ air/ sea plane/tank called the Wonder Ship which is very useful.

There is of course a knee-jerk impulse to snidely point out that a guy called the Lone Warrior is never seen without his sidekick, but... I think it's on purpose? They don't explore it well but I reckon that it's meant to be a joke: big tough dude calls himself the Lone Warrior and can't avoid being tailed everywhere by his little brother? It's not a bad joke! Too bad they only had 4 or so appearances and never really explored it. (Banner Comics 003, 1941)

Samson:

Samson from the comics is, unsurprisingly, based off of Samson from the Bible. In fact, he's a descendant of the Biblical Samson, which seems hard to prove. Like his supposed ancestor, Samson possesses superhuman strength as long as his hair remains uncut, which in his case means that he must maintain a sort of shoulder-length mullet. His hair of course frequently gets cut for dramatic effect but luckily for Samson his other super power is that it will grow back preternaturally fast and always into the same style, like Wolverine's.

At some point in a comic I have not yet read Samson finds and adopts a boy named David. David has no super-powers and is in constant peril. He also has a scientist pal named Professor Brun who acts as a sort of Samson dispatcher using advanced surveillance tech to find trouble and a teleporter with the fun nmae of the "demoleculing ray" to send Samson and David to the scene.

Finally, Samson is a stone cold killer. He wipes out crooks by the dozen with a frankly concerning lack of care for the legal process. (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

Late in 1941, Samson got a bit of sprucing up. I don't know if this was a deliberate attempt on the part of Fox Features to rectify the formulaic nature of Samson comics or it was a simple case of a new artist/ writer shaking things up but suddenly Samson had a supporting cast beyond David: namely a gal pal with the incredibly on-the-nose name of Lila Dee and a comic relief artist named J. Rembrandt Speedball. 

The best addition, however, was... not exactly a secret identity for Samson but an Incognito Mode in which he dressed in street clothes, but since he was an enormous, long-haired guy what this entails is his wearing a huge overcoat buttoned to the neck with the collar flipped up over his mullet. Truly great. Sadly, this revamped Samson only appeared in a handful of issues before Fox Features had the troubles that lead to them halting production for a few years. Like most of their characters, he was never seen again.

UPDATES: He really is the descendant of the Biblical Samson (Samson 001, 1940)

the Flame:

Found by Tibetan lamas as a baby and taught their mystic secrets, the Flame has a lot of the standard flame powers - immunity to fire and heat (and explosions), control over flame, a high enough body temperature that bullets melt on contact with him - a few more unusual ones - the ability to walk and climb on sheets of flame as if they were solid, the weirdly common Golden Age super power of appearing suddenly in the element that they embody, in this case any size flame down to a match - and surprisingly no actual ability to produce flame. Instead, he carries a pistol-sized flamethrower (over time, the amount of heat and flame produced by his body does increase, but he's never at Human Torch level). The Flame's enemies of course frequently attempt to set fire to him.

While I appreciate the Flame's classic costume stylings, he is ultimately a pretty generic guy. Plus he's at least as bloodthirsty as his fellow Fox Features alum Samson. (Wonderworld Comics 003, 1939)

(the Flame also has a very cool car, as seen in Big 3 002, 1940)

Like Samson, the Flame eventually gets a more fleshed out world just in time for Fox Features to go to heck for a few years and then fail to bring him back. In the Flame's case he does adopt a secret identity: as Gary Preston, private investigator. He is joined by former boxer and general goofball Pug and future Flame Girl (watch for future round-ups, I guess) Linda Dale.

UPDATE 1

UPDATE 2 

Stardust the Super Wizard:

Stardust the Super Wizard is an enormous, nigh-omnipotent fellow who lives in a star and deals out bizarre and ironic punishments to a cartoonishly evil rogues gallery with incredible ease - the only real obstacle that he faces in an average adventure is the travel time between him and his villains. The second-greatest creation of outsider comics artist Fletcher Hanks (after Fantomah, of course), Stardust is well-known enough that I don't really need to go into much detail on him here but it seemed weird to leave him out. (Fantastic Comics 001, 1939)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 425: THE ONE THOUSAND AND ONE

(Keen Detective Funnies v2 019-020, 1940)

Love a number name, particularly one so precise as the One Thousand and One. It's tied to the number of criminals in their employ, but does it go up and down as they gain or lose members? Is the One a very harried HR guy frantically filling positions as they are vacated? Is it just a nice-sounding number and the actual staffing is a bit more loose? These are the important questions.

It's a shame that for all their skill at recruiting, the three leaders of the One Thousand and One were unable to secure the services of a decent tailor. The sheet ghost look is surely in the F tier of villain costumes (unless your theme is sheet ghost, of course) but a little love and it could be made to work a lot better than it is here.

The One Thousand and One are of course taken down, but not entirely by the hero of the piece, G-Man TNT Todd. No, he is bailed out of a real jam at the last second by an eerie figure called Mr Death. There's a promise that Mr Death will return in Keen Detective Funnies 021 but that story is instead devoted to TNT Todd getting explosion-based superpowers and the opportunity never arises - Mr Death will forever remain a mystery.

(an informed guess based on my knowledge of the genre: Mr Death would either turn out to be a criminal rival of the One Thousand and One or a hypercompetent female vigilante. If a mysterious figure bails out the hero at the last second it's almost always one of the two)

NOTES - DECEMBER 2023

Weaknesses: 

A very specific weakness for the Spectre: a once-in-a-hundred-million-year alignment of constellations that surely will never happen again. (More Fun Comics 071, 1941)

Misc:

This is my first encounter with Golden Age Johnny Quick so I'm not sure if the slow-down formula that he uses in the third panel above is a regular thing or a one-off but it sure has been left by the wayside. (More Fun Comics 071, 1941)

EDIT: He does it again in More Fun Comics 072! 

Memes of Yore - Keep 'em Flying!

Johnny Quick (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

Green Arrow and Speedy (More Fun Comics 074, 1941)

Drawn without reference:

A wonderful 11-legged spider! (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

Origins:

Poor ol' Earth-Two Aquaman. Nobody even remembers that he exists half the time, plus he got eliminated in the Crisis. Anyway, here's his origin: his dad found Atlantis and trained his son to breathe water (also a cheeky Fate of Atlantis - it sank and now Aquaman lives there). (More Fun Comics 073, 1941)

Great Folk:

I had completely forgotten about this story, but the old man who hoots and hollers and calls for detective Russell Granville until he's on the case is the spectacular character find of 1939. Really, really great way to build up the detective before his appearance and I'm a bit sad that this is the only Russell Granville story because that old man needs more panel time. (Keen Detective Funnies v2 011, 1939)