MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 034

Here they are! Some guys you've never heard of!

the Press Guardian: 

In the Press Guardian's first outing he is known as the Falcon, but he has the same core mission as he will throughout his career: to clean up crime in Central City via the free press, even if he must do so in a pretty bad costume. A fair few places online list reporter Flash Calvert as the Falcon's secret identity but this is one of your classic reading comprehension/ research tests: it certainly seems like Calvert is the Falcon right up to the last third of the story, in which they start appearing in the same panels as one another. Thus, a claim that Calvert is the Falcon mean that the claimant either skimmed the story in question or is taking the word of another who did so.

By Pep Comics 002, the Falcon has officially changed his name to the Press Guardian and traded in his Victorian daredevil costume for a classic suit-and-mask combo. His identity is also revealed as Perry Chase, society columnist and universally derided failson of the publisher of the Daily Express. As with a lot of Golden Age heroes the necessity for your secret identity to be the subject of scorn is not really explained - surely the same effect could be achieved by faking a limp or something and then people wouldn't constantly be insulting you to your face.

But the papes must go through, and the majority of the Press Guardians adventures have a hand in ensuring that they do, if only tangentially. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)

Auro, Lord of Jupiter:

Before Auro was lord of anything he was just some kid with the last name Hardwich who was out on a Sunday space drive with his family, when all of a sudden things went wrong and the family space car crashed into the solid, non-gaseous, habitable planet Jupiter. There, the now-orphaned boy is raised by a Jovian tiger, becomes extra beefy in the high gravity environment, and rises to a position of leadership in the nearby tribe of "Jupiter Brutes," who name him Auro, meaning "Unconquerable".

All this is pretty standard jungle orphan, white guy exceptionalism stuff and I'm sure that one could make a pretty good case for it being just as unpleasant a series of tropes even when divorced from any real-world peoples etc, but what I must focus on is the fact that when you put a jungle guy in space he becomes a space barbarian and is actually pretty entertaining to read. (Planet Comics 001, 1940)

the Red Comet:

Speaking of taking character tropes from one comic genre and putting them in another, here's the Red Comet! Like his fellow Fiction House hero the Red Panther, the Red Comet brings super-hero style to a non-super-heroic world, or worlds in this case, as he beetles around the cosmos righting wrongs.

The Red Comet's main trick involves shrinking and growing at will, but over time he demonstrates a wide range of situationally useful abilities including but not limited to: a crime-in-progress sense, insect communication, invisibility, super strength, the ability to survive in space without PPE, flight and the ability to change the size of others.

The Red Comet's ability to change size is initially attributed to advanced technology (an "intra-atomic space adjuster," natch), while his expanded ability set is generally described as "magic." Then, in Planet Comics 009, he is on a dinner date and explains that he got his size control abilities when he was struck by "some outer space force," giving him a more traditional super-hero origin. No word on whether his ability to talk to termites is still magic or as a result of another jolt of cosmic energy. (Planet Comics 001, 1940)

Tiger Hart of Crossbone Castle:

Tiger Hart is one of the more obscure Fletcher Hanks characters, a medieval warrior who spends his sole recorded adventure seeking the Great Solinoor Diamond (time for a Real Folk entry for the Koh-i-noor, I suppose) in order to free Queen Hilda from the clutches of the bandit chieftain Turk-the-Terrible. 

All pretty standard sword and sorcery stuff but, presumably in deference to the fact that the story was being published in Planet Comics, it all takes place on the planet Saturn. This raises many questions! Are Tiger Hart et al Saturnians? Are they from a far enough future that humans have colonized Saturn (and the habitability of Saturn must be taken as a given, alas) and then gone through a societal collapse of some kind, a Dark Age and now a medieval-style era? Or, as the only real reference to Saturn is that the Solinoor is from Saturn, is the story set on a far-future retromedieval Earth? Many things to ponder. (Planet Comics 002, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 532: THE DEVIL

(Blue Ribbon Comics 019, 1941)

This is the same guy as the Dictator but on his time off, I guess? Mr Justice kind of gave up on him after the Green Ghoul incident - maybe he just couldn't get up the energy to keep running a Nazi Germany analog.

I think he continues to pop up and empower Mr Justice foes but more importantly he has some very cute little trident-wielding imp goons. No hell-dimension is complete without them!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 472: THE GREAT QUESTION

(Amazing-Man Comics 005, 1939)

The Great Question is a member of the Council of Seven, the mysterious body of scientists and mystics who trained and orphan boy into John Aman aka the Amazing-Man. The inner dynamics of the Council of Seven can be a bit hard to parse but early on it seems like the Great Question is if not in charge at least an unofficial leader. Later, as he has more and more conflict with Amazing-Man that role is filled by Aman's mentor Nika.

From issue 5 to 11, the first year of Aman's adventures, the dynamic is such: Amazing-Man travels around helping people and inadvertently foiling the Great Question's various schemes while the Question attempts to bend Aman to his will - above is a picture of the one time he managed to actually do it, turning Amazing-Man into some sort of terrifying crime genie.

Then, in Amazing-Man Comics 012, Aman answers a summons to return to the Council and is rewarded with a harness that both makes his "green mist" power permanent and renders him immune to the Question's mental control. Suddenly, everything changes - sure, Amazing-Man is still travelling around foiling the Great Question's various schemes, but without the mind control aspect to their dynamic it becomes a much more satisfying hero/villain pairing.

(This seems like a good place for an aside: it's never explicitly stated but implicitly it seems like the Council of Seven must know that their most prominent member is a super-villain. Did they recruit him because he was one or was it incidental to the other things he brought to the role? Impossible to say. The gift of the anti-mind control harness makes it clear that they preferred Aman in a heroic role but that's about all that can be determined)

From this point the Great Question really comes into his own as an international super-villain. No matter where Amazing-Man goes, the Question has a group of generic goons working on a scheme of some sort. This all comes to a head in Amazing-Man Comics 021, in which Amazing-Man and the Great Question face off on an island base crawling with uniformed henchmen armed with forcefield projectors to bottle up Aman's gas form.

There's even an extremely radical giant robot!

Things really come crashing down in the next issue, as the Great Question not only joins up with the Nazis but rebrands himself as Mister Que, a much worse name. Now obviously there are a lot of classic Nazi villains - they're very easy to cast in the role because they suck - and it's clear that the Great Question Mister Que is using them to further his own goals, but it really does diminish the fun of a classic megalomaniac to see him working to further the goals of the Nazis rather than his own.

There are some interesting developments during the Mister Que era: he demonstrates more super-powers, for one, including a sort of whirlwind form used for rapid escape. He also manages to rob Fort Knox (well, Fort Fox), a classic villain cheevo. And even though I don't particularly like the Nazi uniform look he does have the right smirk to be wearing that mask.

Then, in Amazing-Man Comics 024, Amazing-Man and Tommy the Amazing Kid face off against the Vulture, a Nazi agent with convoluted plan to destroy NYC using US soldiers under the thrall of psychoactive temporary tattoos. In the antepenultimate panel, the Vulture pulls off a rubberoid mask to reveal that he was in fact Mister Que! His reasoning for doing this (to keep Amazing-Man from attempting to kill him) is a bit suspect, but he does manage to get away in the end. Ignominious!

And that's it for the Great Question/ Mister Que/ the Vulture. Odds are that he would have returned to vex Amazing-Man yet again but Centaur stopped publishing comics in early 1942. Both he and Amazing-Man have been brought back a handful of times over the years, of course, but mostly the Great Question languishes, unanswered.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 450: COUNTESS BELLADONNA

(Mystery Men Comics 029, 1941)

We first see Countess Belladonna at the Westchester Flower Show, where she meets young Brenda Talmadge and murders her for her recently-inherited Riviera Ruby.

Now here I'm going to jump ahead and spoil the twist of a comic book that was published more than 80 years ago: Countess Belladonna is actually Judge Talmadge, stepfather to Brenda Talmadge. As with any modern reading of a story with gender ambiguity there is a temptation to read more into things than was perhaps intended by the author, but here we go: whereas there are a lot of cases where a crossdressing man in a comic is clearly doing so for convenience, Judge Talmadge appears to have maintained Countess Belladonna as an alternate identity at least long enough for her to become established in New York society, which would presumably take months if not years - it was easier to establish a false identity in the era before electronic records but you had to put in at least some effort.

Does this dedication to the role indicate that it is an expression of Talmadge's gender identity? No way to tell, really. Countess Belladonna does go on a murder-and-theft spree immediately thereafter but whether it's because she was an identity created solely for that purpose or because the murder was spur-of-the-moment and Talmadge/ Belladonna figures he/she might as well get as much cash as possible before abandoning the identity is too close to tell.

One thing is for sure: Talmadge and Belladonna both have a weird toothless rictus grin and that's probably how the Blue Beetle cottons onto them.

Countess Belladonna returns in the next issue, this time adding a third identity: Dr Zinn the carnival barker. Or possibly Dr Zinn has replaced Judge Talmadge as the new second identity, as he is effectively absent from the story bar these few panels. This time the Countess has retired her poisoned knitting needles for a skull-bedecked fan that not only dispenses pepper but can be used to hypnotize people. He also has bunch of Native South American dudes in a cage as circus attractions/ henchmen, so this is one of those "very racist" comics we all love so much.

Anyway, Dr Zinn is just as reckless as the other two identities, as not only does he return to NYC York City rather than going literally anywhere else in the world. Plus he spends a fair amount of time trying to kill Blue Beetle love interest Joan Mason - not a great way to avoid attracting attention to yourself in a super-hero comic. 

Countess Belladonna ends up getting away and probably would have returned in another few issues with another identity or two, but this is just before the Blue Beetle's publishing status gets weird for the first time as he moves from Fox Features to a publisher called Holyoke for a few years. Nobody at Holyoke remembered the Countess, it seemed, and by the time the Blue Beetle was back at Fox, nobody there did either. A pretty slick escape, I must say.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 436: THE HEAD

(Shadow Comics v1 004, 1940)

Yo, it's the Head! The Head is a mystic oracle that takes the form of a spooky head in a box and uses his position as a popular upper crust medium to gather info on crime targets, then sends out gangsters (named things like Squint, Chipmunk and Beak Thungle) to plunder them.

The Head is also Zovex, a bulletproof cube-man who is supposedly just a servant of the Head but is mostly just a pile of armour plating.

The way the Head operates both as Zovex and as the head-in-a-box oracle is that he is in actuality just a tiny little guy who probably didn't pose enough of a threat for the Shadow to have to gun him down like he does, even if he was wearing tiny little curly shoes.

This is all pretty standard fare as far as the comic book fake medium racket goes, but I appreciate a villain in a traditionally hands-off role getting out there in a suit of armour and mixing it up, you know?