MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 073

It's a fine day for a dose of minor super-heroes. 

Alias X: 

Alias, aka just X, is a mysterious master of disguise who has been cleaning up crime in NYC for the better part of a year and who, as of his first appearance, has now deigned to tell his origin story to Police Commissioner Malley and newspaper editor Hunch Armstrong.

Turns out that X was a small-town taxi company owner who was railroaded and sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit, and that after two years in prison he managed to escape, became a master of disguise by sheer willpower and set out to battle crime until he could track down the crooks who really committed the crimes he was convicted for and clear his name.

The police commissioner must be a trusting guy, because he refrains from putting out an APB or whatever on Alias X after he hears this confession. 

As far as I can tell from a skim of the 1942 portion of Alias X's dozen or so adventures, he never catches up with the crooks who framed him - just one of the many loose ends of the comics. Please also note that Alias X is a calling card guy. (Captain Fearless Comics 001, 1941)

Citizen Smith: 

Citizen Smith! Plain old John Smith, who could be any one of us regular Americans! Just a regular guy! So why are we reading a comic book about him?

Citizen Smith is in actuality John Smith, an aircraft factory worker in Washington DC and also an orphan consumed with the desire to know just who his parents were. While stewing on this after work one day he wanders up to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where he receives both great news and a great shock as a ghostly figure appears and tells him that he, the Unknown Soldier, is Smith's father.

Smith's new ghost dad charges him to keep America safe, with the promise that he will appear and aid his son if needed (sadly this does not occur in either of the two recorded Citizen Smith adventures). The newly-created Citizen's Guardian of Liberty and Guardian of the American Way then sallies forth to whale on fifth columnists with his two good all-American fists.

Now, I try to take comics as they are presented to me and not engage in a lot of "what if they were dead the whole time"-style fan theory nonsense but I will say that if I were writing a gritty early-2000s Citizen Smith reboot... all this ghost stuff would just be a hallucination brought on by his obsessions, right? Just a lonely man giving his life meaning by latching on to a powerful symbol to fill the hole in his life. But of course that is not who we are here. Citizen Smith is as he appears: a divinely ordained champion of the American Way. (Captain Fearless Comics 001, 1941)

Miss Victory: 

Miss Victory is Joan Wayne, a woman who works in Washington DC in secretarial and similar roles and who seems to have seen an opening for a two-fisted vigilante and filled it, no further origin necessary. There is some hint that her vigilantism is officially sanctioned in the first couple of panels of her first appearance, but if so she has very little oversight. She is much more willing to resort to violence than a lot of her female contemporaries, which is kind of refreshing.

Miss Victory does share with our old friend the Eagle the inability to really settle on a costume design, so I'm sure that we'll be revisiting her in that capacity. 

Case in point: this revised version of her costume from her second appearance, in Captain Fearless Comics 002. As with most of her costume changes it's a variation on the theme of her previous look and is probably explained by the fact that she  (Captain Fearless Comics 001, 1941) 

Mr Miracle: 

Mr Miracle is of course among the ranks of the obscure Golden Age characters who have the same name as a more well-known modern character, but he is also a member of a much more select fraternity: of characters whose origin involves a suicide attempt, though the precise reason that the unnamed man had for jumping is never given.

The future Mr Miracle is pulled out of the water by a helpful stranger and brought to the great scientist Professor Rietz, who revives him via a twenty hour session under his "mind-ray," only to be betrayed and shot by his assistant Sango at the final hour. Sango turns out to have been a foreign agent who was laying in wait for the mind-ray to be perfected, and now the hour has come.

The still-unnamed man wakes to a ruined laboratory and a dying Rietz, who reveals to him in addition to saving his life, the mind-ray has given him great if unspecified powers. He then extracts a pledge from the man that he will use this power to aid mankind and promptly dies.

The man creates a costume, renames himself Mr Miracle and sets out to use is vast array of abilities (transmutation, teleportation, telekinesis, intangibility, size control, flight, etc, etc. Though Mr Miracle is technically some sort of psychic mutate he is in effect a nigh-omnipotent comic book magic user) to bring Sango to justice. 

Mr Miracle gets to honour the promise he made to Prof. Rietz precisely one more time (by sinking a u-boat) before fading into the mists of comic book obscurity. (Captain Fearless Comics 001, 1941)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 072

Extremely minor super-heroes? Don't mind if I do!

the Flag-Man:

The Flag-Man is one standard unit of patriotic American super-hero: he loves the United States and is willing to put on a costume and punch guys until it is safe. And speaking of costumes: the Flag-Man and his pal Rusty are prime examples of how piggybacking off of the iconography of the American flag can really paper over some pretty bad costume design. I mean, tank-top and cape and flared gloves? Give me a break.

The Flag-Man's alter ego is Captain Hornet (occasionally Major Hornet), trouble-shooter for the President, who presumably knows about the whole Flag-Man thing.

Since Captain Hornet/the Flag-Man seems the be dedicated to solving problems exclusively via the medium of hand-to-hand combat, he is in effect a fist that FDR can send to punch anyone he wants. Mostly Nazis, to his credit. (Captain Aero Comics 001, 1941)

Rusty:

Just as the Flag-Man is the elemental patriotic hero, his sidekick Rusty is the basic unit of kid sidekick: no last name, no alter-ego, just a scrappy teen who tags along on adventures. I do find him the most irritating of all the Golden Age sidekicks we have yet encountered, so that's at least one distinction. (Captain Aero Comics 001, 1941)

Solar, Master of Magic: 

Solar, Master of Magic is as you might have guessed another of Golden Age comics' many, many magic guys, which in practical terms means that he can do basically anything he wants to. In contrast to a lot of his peers, he chooses to use his fists as much or more than his magic. 

Although Solar presents as a pure magic guy, he is in fact a magic item guy, with a magic cape of invisibility and a magic ring of doing everything else. It's a minor distinction but it introduces the possibility of the source of his powers being stolen from him, which does in fact happen during the final of his four appearances. (Captain Aero Comics 001, 1941)

Captain Fearless:

Comics love to tie their characters to history, usually by making them the descendant of someone famous but often by inserting their ancestors into real events, as can be seen in the case of the Wizard. This might be the first time I've seen it done to this extent, however, as John Fearless here is not only the instigator of the Boston Tea Party, but a member of the First and probably Second Continental Congresses and could reasonably be expected to be a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. In other words, he's a whole-ass made-up Founding Father!

John Fearless goes on to die in one of the opening battles of the Revolutionary War, upon which... well, the speech balloon placement is annoying, but either he ascends into heaven as an otherworldly voice tells him that his patriotism will live on in his family line or an angelic being from the newly-formed United States of Heaven descends in full uniform to collect his soul and tell him the same. I prefer the latter, but who can tell.

Regardless of the otherworldly voice's source, its words prove true, as evidenced when young John Fearless VI, latest member of a family of patriots, visits his ancestor's grave and then gets to meet that very ancestor.

The ghost of John Fearless I relates the glorious history of the other four Captains John Fearless, fighting to protect the American values of justice and liberty for all (and also in the Mexican- and Spanish-American Wars) and gasses on for a while about patriotism and so forth.

In contrast to his forebears, John Fearless VI's assignment is not military but vigilante in nature, as the ghost of John Fearless I is concerned about the threat of fifth columnists and is of the opinion that a costumed crimefighter is the best way to root them out. To that end, his great-great-great grandson is outfitted with a not-great costume and sent off to battle.

He also gets an antique powder horn that doubles as a musical one, and annoyingly does not blow it during his first case. Once he finally gets around to trying it out, it summons the ghost of the original Captain Fearless to help him out by invisibly beating people up and flying him around in his ghost arms.  (Captain Fearless Comics 001, 1941)

SUPER-HERO FILE 002: CAPTAIN MARVEL JUNIOR

(Whiz Comics 025, 1941)

After the vile Captain Nazi is knocked into New York Fawcett City Harbor during a battle with Captain Marvel, he is pulled from the water by young Freddy Freeman and his grandfather and immediately rewards their good deed by murdering them both. Or so he thinks! It turns out that Freddy is merely grievously injured, and Captain Marvel is able to bring him to a hospital for care.

Informed that Freddy is not expected to live through the night, Billy Batson makes the decision to bring him to the secret underground realm of the wizard Shazam in hopes that he might be able to do something for him. The wizard's shade is summoned via an apparently mystical brazier (and hey, I think that this is Shazam's first appearance since he was squashed by that huge block of stone during Billy's origin!) but rather than help Freddy, Shazam places the onus of doing so on Captain Marvel's shoulders.

In practical terms, this means that rather than SHAZAM, the newly-minted Captain Marvel Junior says "Captain Marvel" to transform, which as many have pointed out before me means that he cannot actually say his own name without changing identities. Does the fact that Captain Marvel can do this ever come up again? Perhaps it ties in to the more modern conception of him as a sort of larval being who will eventually evolve into a new wizard, but I'm not sure if it come up in the intervening decades.

Perhaps my favourite thing about Captain Marvel Junior is that since his comics were not drawn by CC Beck they have a different style to them and that when the Marvel Family are all together they emphatically do not adjust this. Everyone else (except perhaps Mary Marvel) is running around with that clean art style with those little black eyes and Cap Jr just keeps on looking like a young Elvis. It's always fun!

UPDATES: 

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 039

We're reading Shield-Wizard Comics, bay-bee, so here's some stuff about the Shield and the Wizard.

the Shield UPDATE:

In our original write-up of the Shield, we noted that the origin of his powers shifted from being solely down to his super-suit to being more of an ingrained thing over time, and the time is now! Yes, Shield-Wizard Comics 001 provides a slightly tweaked version of the Shield's origin, in which Joe Higgins' father Tom was not just a US Army Intelligence agent but a gifted scientist who discovered the secret of inducing superpowers but died juuuust before being able to tell Joe the full secret.

Joe grows up to become a chemist himself but remains puzzled by his father's last instructions to remember "anatomy formula S•H•I•E•L•D," and with good reason, because it's a nonsense jumble of anatomical parts that must have been put together only in the specific medical textbook that Joe eventually finds it in. But hey, he needed to find out where exactly to rub the chemical formula, and how would he otherwise know that it boiled down to "your eyes and skin, but especially the skin over your chest and groin" without that handy mnemonic device?

The all-white costume that Joe is sporting before he settles down for a 12-hour session under the fluoroscopic ray shows up in at least a few retellings of the Shield's origin going forward and I always thought that it was a pretty snappy look. Unfortunately, the rays dye his suit (and possibly his limbs?) in patriotic colours and so we get a red-white-and-blue Shield rather than merely a white one.

The other tweak to the Shield's origin is that rather than merely dying in the Black Tom Explosion of 1916, Tom Higgins is blamed for it, so the Shield now not only has a Batman-style motivation (spies killed my dad and now I must battle espionage) but also a Geoff Johns-Barry Allen-Flash one (I fight crime as part of my attempt to clear my father's name). Thankfully, his first case involves rounding up the very German Hans Fritz and forcing him to confess, thus clearing Tom Higgins' name without it becoming a whole thing. (Shield-Wizard Comics 001, 1940)

the Wizard I:

In the original account of the Wizard's origin in Top-Notch Comics 001, the Whitney family's close connection to American history is pretty thoroughly emphasized, with Whitneys present and getting things done at all major American wartimes. Well, Shield-Wizard Comics took up that gauntlet and ran with it: John Whitney organized the Mayflower expedition, and his son John Whitney organized the first Thanksgiving, and his son or grandson John Whitney thought up the idea of uniting the colonies. 

But that wasn't all: the third John Whitney's son Blane (the main line of Whitneys only have time for three male names: John, Blane and Grover. All other named Whitneys are from dead end branches of the family tree, it seems) is just as super-human as his descendant, and in fact was the first of a line of Whitney family superhumans to call themself the Wizard (adopted as an ironic name after John Whitney was burned at the stake for witchcraft after acting on his son's extrasensory visions to protect the colonies).

The Wizard ends up making quite a big difference in the tides of the American Revolution, including:

- informing Paul Revere that the British were approaching Concord and lighting the "one if by land, two if by sea" lanterns

- showing up to participate in the fighting at Concord and turning the tide

- wielding a cannon as a sidearm in the Battle of Bunker Hill and again at the Battle of Saratoga

- saving Nathan Hale from being executed as a spy only not really because he chooses to die and be an inspiration instead

- orchestrating the crossing of the Delaware and the surprise attack on the Hessian forces

-very nearly getting Benedict Arnold before he gets away to join the British forces

- proving instrumental in the capture of Major André

- participating in several key battles, including the charge of Mad Anthony Wayne and the defeat of Cornwallis

- orchestrating the support of the French for the revolution

 This original Wizard also creates a number of anachronistic inventions, including:

- a glider that seems to function a bit more like a full-fledged airplane

- a steam powered speedboat

- something in between a deep sea diving rig and a scuba suit

- a machine gun

- radio communication

- an electrified, battery-powered suit

- a self-propelled sled

- a tiny high-powered cannon

All in all, the tale of the original Wizard holds up as a classic of the form, with the form being "super-heroes added to historical events." Comics love to showcase the great moments of US history in particular, but as a comic book must prioritize action, any super-heroic character who is present must have an extraordinary amount of influence on history. It's great! (Shield-Wizard Comics 001, 1940)

the Wizard II:

The second Wizard, like his father the original Wizard, is essentially a carbon copy of the modern character in appearance, name (Blane Whitney, natch) and abilities. Blane Whitney II also takes after his father in his commitment to inserting himself into important US historical events, including:

- participating in various military engagements, including the defeat of the HMS Gurrierre, the Battle of Lake Erie, the Battle of the Thames (I think?) and the Battle of Bladensburg

- saving William Henry Harrison from an assassination attempt

- almost preventing the burning of the White House by the British

- planning the defense of Fort McHenry and then participating in it

- accidentally enabling Francis Scott Key to get inspired to write the Star-Spangled Banner

This Wizard also has a lot of ahead of its time technology, including:

- a version of his father's glider

- smoke (possibly tear gas) grenades

- a dang tank

The second Wizard obviously has less of a direct impact on the events of US history, if only because the War of 1812 has fewer Stand Up and Cheer moments than its predecessor. Still, he's in there, and there's every indication that we'd continue on to see a Civil War Wizard and a World War I Wizard and so forth, and the stated reason that we don't see them is that as of Shield-Wizard Comics 003, the Wizard's sidekick Roy the Super-Boy was too popular to not feature and so it was contemporary Wizard from then on out. (Shield-Wizard Comics 002, 1940)

And speaking of Roy the Super-Boy:

Tommy the Super-Boy:

A part of any big project is choosing a methodology and then sticking to it and as my project is "reading all comics, in order" I had to figure out what "in order" meant. And while doing things in a month by month basis might be more true to the spirit of the experience, for my own sanity I opted to go alphabetical by year instead - the prep work alone for that other method hurts my head a bit to contemplate.

All that is by way of explaining that Tommy, "the Original Super-Boy of History" (aka the original wonder-boy according to that one panel) is a retroactively created predecessor of the Wizard's sidekick Roy the Super-Boy, who we will not meet until I have read the around 180 other comics between Shield-Wizard Comics 002 and Top-Notch Comics 008. He's your classic orphan kid who gets to hang around a super-hero because he's scrappy, and it turns out that that's not unheard-of in historical youths.

This particular scrappy kid, Tommy by name, is peeling potatoes when he meets an incognito Blane Whitney II and ends up discovering his secret identity after the Wizard participates in a sea battle and Tommy runs off afterward to berate Blane for cowardice, like a normal person does. And once you have discovered a super-hero's identity, you get to become a super-hero! If you are a scrappy kid, of course. (Shield-Wizard Comics 002, 1940)