Showing posts with label human offshoot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human offshoot. Show all posts

Monday, April 20, 2026

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 036

Once again we bring you some aliens.

the Tribe of Gurban:



The Tribe of Gurban come down out of "the upper valley of the Nile" and clash with the ancient superhuman Dynaman in his one Golden Age adventure, and there's a part of me questions whether it's even worth noting groups like this who are just humans but bigger (about eight to ten feet tall if I'm any judge). But no: giants in caveman singlets who attempt to conquer Egypt c. 2500 BCE and who use sauropods as beasts of burden always deserve recognition, particularly when they're very technically canon to the Marvel Comics Universe.


Dynaman doesn't have too much trouble sending Chief Ribur and his compatriots packing, but not before they unleash their ultimate weapon: the Wild War Beasts. (Daring Mystery Comics 006, 1940)

Inhabitants of Phobos:

I didn't really cover them in the entry on Spacehawk's Martian enemy Glork, but his plan to smash Phobos into Mars in revenge for him losing an election wasn't just bad news for the Martians but also for these adorable little dudes. They're just trying to live on a very small moon, Glork! Why are you hassling them? (Target Comics v1 009, 1940)

Insect-Men:



Not two issues after his adventures with the Serviles and their enemies the Heidites, Flip Falcon is hopping back into his all-purpose machine and heading back to Mercury for a little aimless exploring. There, he is confronted by a completely different group of aliens than the two he had already met, and while the out-of-universe explanation for this is simply that the "Flip Falcon" comic was nobody's baby and had a very loose relationship with internal continuity, it is fun to imagine that the sun-blasted surface of Mercury is just teeming with weird life forms. 



Though the Insect-Men are huge cool-looking bug-men who communicate using long warbling cries (and are able to break the strand of energy that tethers Flip to his machine, a strand that can restrain Lucifer himself), by fat the most interesting thing about them is their unnamed queen, who shows up soon after her followers capture Flip and reveals that she is the child of a similarly-unnamed human man and an Insect. This raises an enormous number of questions: just who is this human? How did he get to Mercury? When did he decide to make love to an enormous humanoid bug? How is it possible to produce hybrid Earth mammal/ Mercurian insect offspring? Is it just her feet that are weird looking or does she have insectoid legs? None of these questions are in fact answered in the text.


The Queen of the Insect-Men is, it seems, a more picky lover than her father, and so falls for Flip Falcon the instant she lays eyes on him. After watching a little light gladiatorial combat she is ready for the marriage to commence, and the only thing that saves Flip from a lifetime of caring for weird little grubs with baby faces is that his faithful assistant Adele reinstates the connection between Flip and his machine in time, which fries the wedding party and allows him to fly on home. (Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)

Insects:



Like Flip Falcon, Stuart Taylor has a time-space machine and a penchant for blasting himself into the void to see what is there. In this instance, Stuart has flung himself randomly forward in time and fetched up on the shores of the year 9250 CE to find that while humanity yet endures they are at the mercy of a species of giant intelligent insects. After helping to repel an Insect attack on one of the remaining human settlements, Stuart offers to infiltrate their capitol, where he is quickly captured and taken to the Insects' long-winded ruler.


Stuart jumps the ruler while it is busy manning the city's defenses against an attack by the humans, and I must say that I really like the image of it in its little console chair. It really looks like the artist (Lou Fine) really sat down for a minute and thought about how that would work. Though the Insect ruler outclasses Taylor physically, it is undone by its own prowess, as it throws him into a control console and causes an electrical overload that leads to its own death (Taylor is fine). (Jumbo Comics 013, 1940)

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 025

We're going heavy on the ape-man content this time. 

Ape-Men

These Ape-Men, like most ape men, are some sort of human offshoot population or remnant of another species of homo living in the isolated depths of, in this case, the Amazon jungle. They come into conflict with Doctor Voodoo after breaking their long-held peace treaty with his allies the Blancas and abducting many of them for human sacrifice. Also they use silver arrows for some unexplained reason. (Whiz Comics 013, 1941)

Ape-Men



These particularly wooly-looking Ape-Men briefly vex adventurer Cotton Carver in one of the various lands beneath Antarctica before learning about firearms the hard way, as so many of their fellow sub-Antarcticans do during Carver's travels. (Adventure Comics 048, 1940)

Apemen:

More cave- than ape-men in my estimation, these fellows ambush Bill Dale and his guide Dagoo as they traverse the cheerily-named River of Skulls in Africa on their way to find Bill's long-lost twin Steve. Notably, these are the Apemen who worship the crocodile swam god the Creeping Death. (Nickel Comics 001, 1940)

Link Men


Encountered by Zatara while searching for a missing biologist in modern-day Tanzania, the Link (for Missing Link, natch) Men are the most ape-like in appearance of all of our entries today. They live in a small city atop a plateau and are generally hostile to strangers.



For all that they are literal ape-men, the Link Men are just as weirdly obsessed with the nuances of human race as so many other nonhuman intelligences: their leader is the ever-popular Random Blonde Lady, in this case one named Kara whose presence on the plateau is never really explored. They are also weirdly invested not in human sacrifice but in the sacrifice of a white man to their deity, the Sun-God. Zatara's aide Tong isn't even considered as a sacrifice.

The potential sacrifice above is coincidentally also missing biologist Raoul d'Armand, who Kara has fallen in love with and thus reconsidered being the leader of a society of religious apes. Thankfully Zatara is on hand to foster true love by turning an entire intelligent species into marble statues. One would hope that he would turn them back before leaving but as with so many of the occasions in which Zatara transforms someone into an inanimate object the final fate of the Link Men is left to the reader's imagination. (Action Comics v1 027, 1940)

Saturday, November 8, 2025

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 022

Top-quality aliens, fresh-baked! 

Unnamed Species:



This unnamed species has that most delightful and implausible of features, an organic wheel that they use to locomote around! Other than that they're your typical underground dwelling species: they live far enough under the surface or have an extensive enough range that one can enter their kingdom in the Himalayas and exit in Iran; they have a captured surface woman named Rina as their queen but the real power lies with "He", who is four or five times bigger than the rest of his species; and they are very sensitive to sound. Regular stuff. 

Those wheels though! (Wonderworld Comics 011, 1940)

Earth-Men


The Earth-Men are the fellows who worship the ancestor-god Sakka, as detailed in a Divine Round-Up a couple of months back. They're little bug-eyed guys with a high incidence of male-pattern baldness and a hostile attitude until adventurer Rocky Ryan kind of accidentally convinces them that he is the reincarnation of Sakka. 


In the peaceful times that follow, Ryan's companion Professor Ames is able to explore the Earth-Man city and make some frankly astounding discoveries, including the facts that 

1: There used to be a land mass spanning the Pacific between South America and Asia 

2. At the time, Earth had 2 moons, one of which then exploded

3. The force of the exploding moon sank the Pacific continent

4. The Earth-Men are the remnants of that Pacific civilization, and their shrunken stature and big ol' eyes are a result of living in a dense jungle, somehow.

It's a real upending of everything that we thought we knew about the history of the Earth, plus now Ames has enough material for a book. Publish or perish, huzzah! (Big Shot Comics 014, 1941)

Mercurians (Three Types):  

Space Adventurer Flint Baker and his companion Mimi make their way to the planet Mercury, where he finds a city strewn with humanoid corpses. Eventually, they find a single survivor, who reveals that he is the last of the Western Hemisphere Mercurians, the rest having been wiped out by...

... the Eastern Hemisphere Mercurians, a rowdy bunch of cave-man types who storm in and kidnap Mimi before Flint can do anything to prevent it. Through a series of battles, he recovers Mimi and seemingly wipes out the Eastern Mercurians in turn. Mercury is now an uninhabited planet.

But not for long, because Flint then uses the atomic conversion pistol gifted to him by the last of the Western Mercurians to make a whole new batch of hot Mercurians out of some nearby flowers and install them in the now-deserted city. (Planet Comics 006, 1940)

Erostians


After space vigilante Cosmic Carson's men shoot down a pirate ship over planetoid Eros, both they and the pirates' victims come under attack by the green, caveman-like Erostians, who carry off as many women as they can get their grubby green mitts on (bonus entry: these women are all Venusians).


Cosmic Carson himself sets out to rescue the captives and ends up a prisoner himself, wherein he learns that the Erostians are not simply a species of humanoid aliens, but the former dominant species of Earth, thrown down and banished to Eros by some ancient scientist. Plus, they eat people, with a preference for pretty women. It's actually a bit of a roller coaster, as the standard alien lust for human (or humanoid) women is explained by the fact that the Erostians are also human or at least homo but then their desire turns out not to be lust but gluttony and thus back in the realm of the inexplicable.

Anyway, Cosmic Carson blasts most of them to smithereens. (Science Comics 005, 1940)

Sunday, October 5, 2025

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 020

You won't believe the aliens and alien-adjacent societies we got in here. 

Scorpians and Subterrines




When crack reporter Scoop Smith and his photographer pal Blimp Black fly to Mexico to investigate reports of an "invisible revolutionary army" they get the story in a very direct way when they are shot down and taken captive by the Scorpians, who dwell in the underground kingdom of Scorpia and are extremely on-theme about the scorpion thing at all times, as can be seen in in the throne room of Scorpian King Cortes and its five distinct bits of scorpion decor.

 

Scoop and Blimp are escorted to the Horror Chamber to be eaten by giant scorpions, because even the Scorpian methods of execution are on brand. They escape thanks to a thrown rock and a handy earthquake and discover the Subterrines, a second underground civilization that is also seeking to overthrow the Mexican government.  


While the Scorpians under King Cortes kind of vaguely evoke the conquistadors of old, the Subterrines are pretty explicitly the descendants of native Mexican peoples who fled underground and now seek to reclaim their lands (and may I say that "everyone has long white beards now" is about the most benign version of becoming troglodytic cave-dwellers). The two groups of course hate one another and set to battling to the death for the honour of conquering Mexico, only to be annihilated together by the Mexican army. (Whiz Comics 005, 1940)

Ape Men:


If you've ever wondered if there was a version of the Paul Bunyan story in which he had an ape man for a companion, well wonder no more, because it happened in National Comics, when King, the ape man in question, wanders out of the woods and starts attacking lumberjacks, only to find himself on the receiving end of a beatdown from Paul Bunyan himself. After this, the impressionable King adopts the lumberjack way of life and joins Paul's supporting cast. (National Comics 006, 1940)

Joins Paul's supporting cast for one issue, that is, because in National Comics 007 a scientist shows up at camp with a lead on where King might hail from, prompting Paul and the lads to set out to return him to his people, and if you've ever wondered if there was a version of the Paul Bunyan story in which he traveled through India to the Himalayas, well, you are in luck. Paul and the lads find King's tribe and for the second time in as many issues, Paul Bunyan has to fist fight a Himalayan Ape Man in order to make peace.

Bat-Men:



Though the Bat-Men are very, very vampire-like - bat-winged humanoids who capture humans and drink their blood and can make humans into Bat-Men and are destroyed by sunlight - the keen senses of jungle-man Samar tell him that they are not, though he never really clarifies what they actually are. 

The Bat-Men and their underground city are destroyed when they force Samar to battle a tyrannosaur in their gladiatorial arena and he inadvertently collapses the cave roof while killing the beast with a catapult. (Feature Comics 038, 1940)

the Bat-Men of Mephis


One of the many intelligent races to inhabit the planet Mephistos in the year 2500 CE, the Bat-Men of Mephis as their name suggests live in the tunnels beneath the city of Mephis, posing as statuary until it is time to attack. It's a very urban adaptation, which is fun. I also appreciate their little ears. (Flash Comics v1 002, 1940)

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 040

Weird humanoids as far as the eye can see! Demon People :  The Demon People are seemingly native to the dimension that Breeze Barton trave...