MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 771: CAPTAIN DAVY JONES JUNIOR

(Super Comics 027, 1940)

A tough-talking femme fatale pirate captain is a pretty good foil for super magic jungle guy Magic Morro - he might be able to walk through fire and juggle three grown men like rubber balls but one thing that he definitely can't do is hit a lady, not even a pirate lady.

And speaking of her being a lady, that sure is an interesting name for a 1940s lady pirate, I wonder where she got it? My initial thought was that it was just a cheeky reference to the sea spirit with the famous locker, but then one of Jones' grizzled old pirate crew members mentions sailing with her father, which introduces the possibility that it is her literal name and that her dad performed a rare cross-gender junioring. Fun!

In addition to having a dynamite name, Captain Davy Jones Junior just generally rules. She and Morro's crew come into conflict over a treasure map that has been split into thirds and that they each have part of. They agree that whoever finds the third piece will get the whole treasure, at which point Jones begins trying to double cross Our Heroes: trying to steal their portion of the map, trying to seduce Magic Morro over to her side, preparing to steal the treasure anyway after Morro finds it, etc. Ultimately the question of just who is going to get the treasure is decided by a third party, a crazed hermit who blows up the island rather than let the others get their filthy hands on his precious gold. We last seen Captain Davy Jones Junior as she is stranded, presumed dead, on the smouldering wreckage of what was once a tropical paradise, but fret not! A little bird (in the form of me reading ahead) has informed me that she returns in 1941!

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 006

Minor super-heroes need to be rounded up now and then.

Blackstone the Magician: 

There are a fair number of comic versions of real life people: movie cowboys by the dozen, big game tracker Clyde Beatty a couple of times, etc. Not too many of them quite cross over into the super-hero side of things, but here we have magician Harry Blackstone Sr, who absolutely did (Blackstone is also a great example of someone who was at one point wildly famous and has now receded far enough from the public consciousness that you might not have heard of him unless you're really into the Dresden Files).

Blackstone's adventures fall more into the Action-Packed World Travel to Places Where Ethnics Live category of comics, with the gimmick that he uses stage magic to overcome various obstacles. But stage magic in a controlled environment using your own props and ad hoc stage magic using random items out in the world are different things, comic! (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

Black Fury:

Rex King is an adventurer who spares the life of a panther in the jungles of Borneo because it has a white star marking on its throat. Later, that same panther saves Rex from a leopard attack and he takes this as a some grand life lesson about how animals can be full of humanity while men are bestial - long story short, he dresses up like something halfway between Black Condor and Wildcat and teams up with the panther (now named Kato) to beat up evil. (Super-Magic Comics 001, 1941)

the Blue Bolt:

Harvard University student Fred Parrish had the misfortune to be struck by lightning twice in the same storm, the second time while he was attempting to fly his light aircraft for help. Lucky for him, he crashed near the underground lair of Doctor Bertoff, a scientist looking for just such a lightning-charged person to experiment on and empower to fight in his ongoing war of Bertoff's land of Deltos with the Green Sorceress and her kingdom of Voltor (later sumply "Bertoff's Scientific City" vs "the Green Kingdom").

Blue Bolt was a willing conscript in this war, although he tempered Bertoff's bloodthirstiness somewhat by seeking to reform the Green Sorceress rather than kill her outright, destroy her kingdom and salt the earth. This could be traced to a "don't hit girls 1940s sense of fair play and also because he had the hots for her.

Up to Blue Bolt v1 010 the Blue Bolt comic was written by Joe Simon and drawn by Jack Kirby and it was full of all kinds of crazy fun sci-fi malarky. Sadly, the instant they left to create Captain America it all went out the window and Blue Bolt became a regular-syle super-hero fighting Nazis on the boring old surface of the planet.

For a few issues, Blue Bolt follows his kid brother Kip Parrish around as he serves with the RAF but this gets boring after a while and he heads back to the States. Once the US enters the war he ditches the costume entirely and seemingly forgets that he has super-powers and becomes a regular-style soldier with the unusual name Blue Bolt. Ho hum.

This, by the way, is part of a pattern with the good folks at Novelty Press. They had it in their heads that their readers didn't want stories that were "too fantastic" and this was reinforced by their letters page which every month featured missives from little killjoys asking for more boy inventors and fewer giant robots. I assume that these kids grew up to be the people hectoring DC every time Batman cracked a joke in the 60s and 70s and that their children form the vanguard of the "gritty realism" movement.

Sergeant Spook:

Sergeant Spook here started out as a cop already named Sergeant Spook in a clear case of nominative determinism. After blowing himself up with a carelessly placed pipe in perhaps the least dramatic origin of any of the surprisingly large number of dead police officers to return as undead super-heroes, he basically just carries on as normal. He's intangible and invisible, per regular ghost rule, but can interact with the material world just fine. (Blue Bolt v1 001)

Then, in Blue Bolt v1 006 Sergeant Spook meets legally-distinct-from-Sherlock-Holmes ghost detective Dr Sherlock, who informs him that not only is he not unique but that there is a large community of ghosts that he is flouting the rules of by for instance beating the tar out of gangsters who can neither see nor touch him. He relocates to Ghost Town and becomes the de facto troubleshooter of its President, George Washington until rounding up the ghosts of dead troublemakers begins to get stale, at which point Spook heads back to the mortal world to deal with human/ghost conflicts.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 499: NELS LAMBERT

(Big Shot Comics 017, 1941) 

Like a lot of Skyman's enemies Nels Lambert is a disaster causing guy. Specifically, he has a rig called an Electrical Wave Generator, with which he can create waves - presumably of all sizes but as he is a criminal scientist he's mostly focused on the largest and most destructive ones.

A note on naming: the Electrical Wave Generator is an okay name at best but he does refer to his base here as Nels Lambert's Floating Island and I personally choose to believe that that is it's official name because it's extremely whimsical..

Like our old friend the Ice Menace, Nels Lambert's plan is to weaponize the ocean and demand ransom from nations bordering the Atlantic in return for not being flooded. And he almost gets away with it, thanks to the fact that the Electrical Wave Generator is a multifunctional doomsday device: not only can it be used to create waves using electricity but that same electricity can be discharged into the atmosphere around Nels Lambert's Floating Island™ in order to for example very nearly electrocute Skyman and his pal Chubby as they fly in to investigate the source of this wave nuisance.

And speaking of Skyman's pal! Chubby Weeks is an old college friend of Allan "Skyman" Turner who ends up going along on this adventure through medium-level plot contrivance. The real interesting thing about Chubby is that he's a radio news reporter and that according the the callsign in the background of this picture he works at Station WBSC, which is the same station that Tony "the Face" Trent owns and/or works at. This is my first time reading any comics from the Columbia Comic Corporation so I have no idea if there's any further crossover action in the future but this evidence of a very mildly shared universe is very mildly exciting!

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 479: DR BLOOD

(Big 3 001, 1940)

There are a couple of interesting things about Dr Blood but I'll be honest: it's mostly the name. Great, over the top villain moniker, Dr Blood. Furthermore, Dr Blood runs a costumed gang called the Inner Crime Ring, which is not nearly as good a name as Dr Blood but still better than an unnamed collection of gangsters.

What Dr Blood is a doctor of is hard to say. The Inner Crime Ring has access to paralysis ray technology so I suppose we must assume that he invented that rather than stealing it from a lesser scientist with an unimpressive name. Or he could be a Doctor of Larceny.

The other thing about Dr Blood and the Inner Crime Ring is that they make the mistake of tangling with the super-hero Samson and his pal David and Samson absolutely destroys them. Like, straight-up murders them. This is my first Samson story so I'm unsure if this is his usual MO or if it's because Dr Blood almost killed David earlier in the episode but what I can say for certain is that those cops should not be as okay with this level of vigilante justice/ mass destruction as they are.