MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 844: ZOM

(Weird Comics 002, 1940) 

Space adventurers Blast Bennett and his pal Red are tooling around the Solar System one day when they are hailed by and then hauled aboard an enormous space vessel.

This vessel is Plane-City, the mobile headquarters of the space pirate Zom. Actually, I don't know if "space pirate" is quite the right label for Zom, as his main passion seems to be taking and keeping prisoners rather than the more traditional piratical pursuit of taking prisoners and then ransoming them back to their home government or loved ones. I mean, just look at that dank stone dungeon that he has installed on his spaceship, presumably at great expense!

Zom's downfall comes thanks to the terrible state of his security - firstly, they allow Blast to get their boss in a headlock and chain him up in his own dungeon, and then it turns out that they didn't even bother to check their new prisoners - one of whom, may I remind you, is named Blast - for ray guns. Just professionally shameful.

Zom's prisoners are all freed via space parachute, while Zom and his men meet their end at the barrel of that same ray gun. Plane-City, alas, does not survive the altercation.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 058

A number of minor Fox Features characters for your perusal and delight.

the Bird Man: 

The Bird Man, descendant of "an ancient Indian god" (no further detail provided) uses his weird demigod wing-flaps to fly around the American Southwest and render aid to people. (Weird Comics 001, 1940)

In Bird Man's final appearance, in Weird Comics 004, he has conformed to the heroic norm a bit more by moving to a penthouse apartment in what might be NYC (please note that he keeps a little statue of his divine ancestor on top of his TV). He also has slightly more conventional wings in this appearance, but I have to say that I prefer the flaps.

Typhon: 

Typhon is a near-future undersea adventurer who not only has access to various super-submarines and ray guns and so forth but also sometimes has a magic ring that allows him to combat the various supernatural threats of the deep ocean. (Weird Comics 001, 1940)

Thor, God of Thunder: 

Thor, God of Thunder (the Norse god) gets restless one day in 1940 and decides to invest a mortal man with some of his power, making him Thor, God of Thunder (the super-hero). This is a not-uncommon origin story for a super-hero to have, but the really important thing to note is that the human, Grant Farrel, is not some paragon of virtue or descendant of Thor, and that he isn't being sent out into the world to combat injustice on Thor's behalf. No, he's just kind of a sad sack who just got dumped and Thor hands him the power with a kind of "have fun with it" attitude. Grant seems like he might be the type to get into super-heroics of his own accord but he doesn't really have any choice because Glenda, the girl who dumped him, is a real magnet for spy rings and secret invasions of France and so forth. They do eventually get back together, don't worry.

Like many of his contemporaries, Grant/Thor goes through a lot of different costume variants over the course of a short career, but the thing I really want to highlight is this very weird style of Viking helmet that both he and Original Thor wear in hist first three or four appearances. I mean, what's with the discs? 

Thor is of course wildly over-powered, as shown in this pretty awesome sequence in which he lassos an entire Luftwaffe attack on Paris and throws it at Berlin. He can also throw both his hammer and thunderbolts to devastating effect, and kind of alternates between flying under his own power and cartoonishly riding around on a big jagged bolt of lightning.

In his final appearance, in Weird Comics 005, Thor is sans hammer for no particular reason. This doesn't really slow him down but even so he gets a bit of divine aid via the gift of Thor's strength-boosting gauntlet. (Weird Comics 001, 1940)

Dynamite Thor:

Dynamite Thor, the Explosion Man, is actually Peter Thor, wealthy mine owner and explosives expert. I was all ready to roast him for including his surname as part of his superhero identity, but on review of his five appearances it appears that the actual name he goes my is merely Dynamite. This also leaves me with no material with which to roast Thor's fiance Glenda (same as our last Thor - what is it with Thors and Glendas?) for not realizing just who the mysterious man she so idolizes it.

In his initial appearance, Dynamite Thor is merely a man with a belt-full of explosives and a pretty hammer-and nail approach to problem-solving. Crooks holed up in an old shack? Blow up the shack. Crooks getting away in a vehicle? A controlled explosion will bring a nearby object down and stop their flight. A big fire? Blow it up.

By his second appearance in Weird Comics 007, someone had evidently decided that Dynamite Thor needed more of a hook or perhaps they just couldn't figure out a good explosion-themed vehicle for him to fly around, because he gets his signature move, which is absolutely the only reason that he is still talked about: he flies by the simple expedient of setting off a series of explosions under his ass. Finally, by his next appearance in Blue Beetle Comics 006, 1941, he is explicitly mentioned to be immune to these explosions, something that must have come as a great relief to him (edit to add: I was mistaken and they do make sure to mention that he is immune to explosions at the same time as he starts flying around on a column of them). (Weird Comics 006, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 057

Two MLJ Round-Ups in a row! They're just churning out the heroes! 

Galahad:

Hey, it's Galahad! Or rather a version of Galahad who is standing in for a pretty wide array of different Knights of the Round Table with lesser name brand recognition. It's some clean-cut knightly action. (Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

Shanghai Sheridan:

Jack "Shanghai" Sheridan, aside from having a sounding like a cheeky nickname for a POW camp, is notable mostly for the fact that he is one of many characters who have "the Batman origin but for...", in this case, the Batman origin but for the Japanese invasion of China. His adventures are nothing particularly special, alas. (Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

Firefly:

Oh hey, it's the Firefly, wearing one of the great super-hero costumes of the Golden Age!

The Firefly is really Harley Hudson, a young biochemist who sought to understand the tremendous proportionate strength possessed by insects and found that it was as a result of their "muscular coordination," and further managed to unlock that same power within himself! Now he's on an anti-crime crusade, and I'm not sure if he's able to glow because of his muscular coordination abilities or he just has some phosphorescent paint slapped onto the front of his costume - the brief appearance of the character in the 60s Mighty Crusaders comic suggests the former, but they were also trying to make him some sort of equivalent of the Fireball and Inferno, so I don't know if I'm going to take that as canon. (Top-Notch Comics 008, 1940)

The Firefly also gets around in a "combination airplane and glider" called the Fireflier (or Fireflyer), which is an objectively great name for a subjectively terrible-looking vehicle. (Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940) 

the Black Hood: 

The Black Hood is perhaps the Archie/MLJ super-hero with the greatest number of different versions, both legacy and reboot-style. He also bumps the Wizard out of the top spot in Top-Notch as soon as he appears - someone at MLJ clearly really liked this guy from the start.

This original Black Hood (and a pretty decent percentage of his successors) is named Kip Burland, and he was a New York cop until he attempted to arrest super-villain the Skull while he was doing some crime and ended up framed and then murdered for his troubles. Except the murder didn't take, and Burland was found by an old hermit who nursed him back to health.

In an amazing coincidence, the hermit in question turns out to be a former sheriff who was also framed by the Skull, and who took so long in training for his revenge/redemption that he grew too old for the job. This turns out to be a perfect combination: the Hermit teaches Kip all that he knows, and the Black Hood sallies forth to mete out justice to the Skull. (Top-Notch Comics 009, 1940) 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 829: LOBELO

(Thrilling Comics 008, 1940) 

Lobelo is a modern day pirate, as you might guess from the splash panel above, and while my strong pro-pirate bias means that he was an easy inclusion in the ranks of the minor super-villain he is also a source of great frustration to me.

 

First, though, I will note one thing that I really like about Lobelo and that is his array of costumes. Not only does he wear two distinct pirate outfits during the course of the adventure but he wears a separate classic early-1940s suit-cape-and-mask number while he is robbing the Metroploitan Museum in New York. This is clearly a man who loves an outfit - it's like he's padding out an action figure line over here.

My problem with Lobelo is that he goes into piracy because he is the descendant of the famous 16th Century pirate Redhand. He sets up his headquarters on Redhand's Crossbones Island and he is hunting for Redhand's treasure with the help of Redhand's map, which he stole from the museum. So why the heck doesn't he call himself Redhand, or Redhand II, or something other than his own last name? The gall of it!

(I'm also somewhat put out that the comic features a costume party and Doc Strange attends in a tuxedo rather than his super-suit. I suppose that Lobelo is attending in (one of) his super-villain outfit(s) at the very least)

Lobelo has a pretty good run thanks to some poison he feeds Doc Strange at the party having a long-term weakening effect but ultimately comes up against the simple fact that he is a man armed with a sword versus a man who is completely invulnerable to harm and able to powerbomb a battleship. Lobelo is so outmatched here that maybe Doc Strange doesn't need to kill him like a bear swatting a salmon, and yet he does. So long, Redhand Lobelo.

MINOR SUPER-HERO SPECIAL: THE SPIRIT

For almost two years, this blog had a huge post buffer thanks to its origins as a Twitter thread. At it's height, the buffer was almost two months long, but for most of its life there were somewhere between two weeks and a month of pre-written posts sitting at my fingertips, and that meant that I could establish certain habits, like trying to make sure that a Minor Super-Hero Round-Up containing the relevant protagonist was published before talking about the villains that they had faced off against, stuff like that. But over time the buffer eroded, as do all things, to the point that now I'm posting about comics that I just finished reading, like some sort of animal.

All this is to say that I don't have the usual four super-heroes required for a proper Minor Super-Hero Round-Up but the villains are piling up in my now days-long buffer so here's a special one-hero one-shot:

the Spirit: 

Yeah, yeah, I hear you: we all know who the Spirit is. Why, he's got to be a median super-hero at least, right? Well, tough. I have too many categorizations to keep track of as it is, and as influential as the Spirit is odds are that your parents don't have a clue about him, so he fits the brief as specified by yours truly.

The Spirit is ambitious young private detective Denny Colt, who attempts to bring in criminal scientist Dr Cobra and is doused in suspended animation fluid for his trouble. Believed dead, Colt is buried in Wildwood Cemetery and upon waking decides to become a spooky vigilante, with a lot more emphasis on the "spooky" in the early days. 

"The Spirit" might just be the perfect synthesis of the nascent super-hero genre and the established newspaper adventure comics. It also has a large barrier to entry for the modern reader in the form of Ebony White, the Spirit's driver/sidekick/ethnic stereotype African American comic relief character. Frankly, I don't really want to spend a lot of time talking about Ebony, so here's his weirdly positive Wikipedia article that kind of deemphasizes the fact that Will Eisner removed Ebony from the comic after repeated complaints about him in 1946. And also completely omits the fact that Ebony was instantly replaced by Blubber, a sidekick/ethnic stereotype comic relief Inuit character, in what I personally have always seen as a fit of creative pique on Eisner's part.

Aside from Ebony, the Spirit's supporting cast consisted of Police Commissioner Dolan, friend of Denny Colt and initially the only one to know the Spirit's secret identity, and the Commissioner's daughter Ellen, the Spirit's primary love interest and thorn in his side. Over time, the Spirit would also collect a galaxy of femmes fatale occupying basically every square on the D&D alignment chart, but they're a bit thin on the ground in the 1940 comics. 

The Spirit is a two-fisted criminologist, probably the best to ever wear the "suit + domino mask" costume, and embodies the pulp detective technique of Getting the Tar Beat Out of You Until You Get to the Bottom of Things. And of course you probably already knew all of that.

 

The Spirit also handed out little tombstone calling cards/messages for his first few appearances, which I think is neat. (The Spirit, "The Origin of the Spirit", June 2, 1940)

ADDENDUM:

However could I have forgotten that the Spirit also had a flying car, and one of the goofiest-looking ones in comics, to boot. 

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 797: JARK AND ZORG

(Target Comics v1 007, 1940)

Jark and Zorg, an alien duo of unknown provenance, continue the trend of Spacehawk villains who could broadly be described as space pirates. They also a) have a very hard pair of names to remember without accidentally mixing up some of the letters and b) are possibly the most phallic-looking alien designs that weren't just ambulatory ding-dongs that I have ever seen.

Jark and Zorg's plan is... not simple, per se, but it doesn't have a lot of steps. It goes like this: 

1) get a planetoid and fit it with propulsion devices 

2) fly around until you are in the path of a space freighter 

3) use a tractor (bumper) beam to ensure that the freighter only crashes a little, so that the precious cargo is okay

4) unleash a bunch of creatures called Snurls to wipe out the passengers and crew

5) loot and profit

It's a solid enough plan, albeit one which requires a lot of advance effort and advanced technology, and Zorg even adds a step 6) kidnap a lady off of the first ship they bring down and transform her into an attractive phallus-alien for a little non-Jark companionship. Unfortunately for him, this particular lady is the same one who Spacehawk rescued from Grovak the Martian not two issues prior, and he seems to have some sort of Superman/Lois Lane ability to sense when she is in mortal peril, as despite Zorg's certainty that their planetoid will never be discovered by the hero he is in fact already in orbit.

Jark makes a go at taking care of Spacehawk with his atom rifle but it's simply not enough firepower and he ends up mashed to a pulp.

Zorg, building on his deceased partner's efforts, seems to succeed where Jark failed, and further managed to unmask the Spacehawk to reveal that he was a robot the whole time!

OR WAS HE? No, he wasn't. Instead, the Spacehawk turns out to be a man with a collection of robot doubles that can substitute for him or otherwise aid him in his crusade against evil. Zorg ends up joining his partner in whatever afterlife that ding-dong aliens get and Spacehawk gets a smooch.