MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 814: SARKU

(The Spirit Section, 25 August, 1940)

I've mentioned before that the foes faced by magical Golden Age super-heroes break down into roughly three types: 1) regular crooks who are there to be clowned upon, 2) legitimate threats with equivalent magical power of their own and 3) crooks with a little magical power, who provide a Iof a challenge but are ultimately also clowned upon. Sarku is the third type, and has set out, fresh out of prison, to get revenge on those who put him there. Also, like all magic users in "Mr Mystic," Sarku has an innate resistance to magic that makes even low-level practicioners more of a challenge to Our Hero than they would be to a Zatara or a Yarko.

By the time Mr Mystic has been brought in on the case, Sarku has already murdered the (police?) Commissioner of the unnamed Indian city he was incarcerated in and escaped via some handy teleportation magic. Though Mystic interrupts his attempt on the life of the French Consul, Sarku escapes again, this time into the far future world of 2050 AD.

(just what had prevented him from time travelling or indeed merely teleporting out of his prison cell over the ten years of his incarceration is not elaborated upon. Perhaps he only just got the knack)

Sarku does a bit of premature gloating before learning that Mr Mystic can also travel through time, and the two are quickly engaged in a high-speed rocket chase to the Moon. 

Mystic ends up shooting Sarku down as they approach the Moon's surface, and he makes the grim choice to pop his corpse into a handy corpse container (originally intended for the evocatively-named by alas never-seen "Moon King's mummy") as a sort of general warning to all would-be murderers who might be wandering around on the Moon. That's it for Sarku!

But perhaps I spoke too soon! Sarku is back in the next "Mr Mystic" installment, and though we don't get to see any mummies, we are treated to a Moon King, as a not-so-dead Sarku is brought before Tan Tan, King of the Moon by his subjects. It turns out that he wasn't quite dead when Mr Mystic shoved him in that tube, which is great for him now but horrifying in retrospect.

Tan Tan turns out to have a weird crush on the (to him) historical figure of Elena, former Mr Mystic villain and current Mr Mystic fiance (stay tuned for her entry), and trades Sarku a space fleet for her.

Sarku's attempt to get revenge on the entire population of Earth for a 1930-1940 AD prison sentence that almost nobody in 2050 AD would have been alive at the same time as, let alone had anything to do with, is foiled once again by Mr Mystic, who leaves nothing to chance this time as he socks Sarku out the spaceship's hatch and into the void of space (Tan Tan, by contrast gets a mere sock in the jaw for his creepy Elena-napping. The perks of royalty, eh?).

REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 1/2+

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 048

The triumphant return of Ace Magazines to the round-up!

Flash Lightning:

Educated and possibly also raised by Ancient Egyptian mystic the Old Man of the Pyramids, young Robert Morgan is eventually deemed worthy of the Amulet of Annihilation, a mystic artifact that grants him the powers of flight, super strength, bulletproof skin, the ability to hurl lightning bolts and sundry others (the amulet is also immediately forgotten about, as far as I can tell - the armband design remains a part of Lightning's costume design for the rest of his appearances but his powers are treated as integral).

Flash Lightning is eventually renamed Lash Lightning, and the word on the street is that this was done so as to avoid confusion with prominent lightning-themed DC Comics character the Flash. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

the Raven:

The Raven, like his fellow Ace Magazines hero the Black Spider, is your classic pulp style vigilante wanted by both the police and the underworld, with the added twist that he is primarily focused on Robin Hood-style monetary redistribution/ stealing from the crooked rich to return their ill-gotten gains to the bilked poor. At first, at least - over time the Raven starts dealing with more conventional super-threats and gangsters.

In addition to his loyal assistant Mike, the Raven's supporting cast includes Police Captain Lash - his boss, because the Raven is really Detective Sergeant Danny Dartin - and Lash's daughter/Danny's fiance Lola. Like the Black Spider before him, the Raven's love interest Lola eventually discovers the secret of his dual identity, which must have been a particular relief for the Raven because she, like her father and (supposedly) her fiance had up to that point been dedicated to the task of capturing the Raven and had come close to doing so once or twice.

Though the Raven's costume starts out as a huge hooded cloak of the type more commonly worn by villains, he eventually switches to a more conventional cape and cowl number, which is a shame, as the original look was much more distinctive. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

Whiz Wilson:

Whiz Wilson is a time-travelling man, but one who very specifically only travels into the future. It's like my voice, complaining about how comic book time travellers just can't stop interfering in historical events, itself echoed back in time and helped to create a character mostly immune to temporal paradox, as long as he doesn't run into any older Whiz Wilsons in his travels.

Wilson's time harness also incorporates a space-travel functionality (as any time machine necessarily must lest one be rocketed off into the void instead of ancient Mesopotamia) and he very satisfyingly employs this as a teleportation device whenever he is in the future, though the mechanics of whether he is instantaneously transporting from one place to another or zooming very quickly between them vary according to the needs of the plot. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

Marvo the Magician:

Marvo is another tuxedo-wearing magician from the same tradition that previously brought us such luminaries as Zatara. Like many of his peers he fills the time between stage performances by driving around aimlessly and meting out justice to the random criminals he encounters, with the two distinctions that a. he has a little monkey companion  named Tito and b. unlike many of his peers his powers do mainly seem to be illusions and not reality-warping chaos majicks. (Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 045

Ah the super-hero.

Ace Buckley: 

Ace Buckley is a time traveller, a subgenre of comic book hero mostly notable for the fact that they have no one to blame for their troubles but themselves. Like most of his peers, Buckley (along with his intriguingly-named companion Toni Stark, whose role in the stories is to get captured and then swan around in minimal clothing while waiting for Buckley to rescue her) flings himself willy-nilly into the hotspots of human history and then murders his way free with barely a though to such things as "causality" or "the grandfather paradox" or "the integrity of the timestream". (Startling Comics 003, 1940)

Magic Morro: 

Some time around 1922, young Jack Morrow and his father are shipwrecked on an uncharted Atlantic island. Proclaimed to be the next prophesied leader of local inhabitants the Utangos, Jack is raised to be a superhuman white jungle guy in the classic Tarzan style, only with all kinds of magical knowledge imparted to him by the former ruler, Tanta Talu. As Magic Morro, he is super strong, immune to fire, possibly bulletproof, can turn himself invisible and move objects with his mind, and those are just the abilities that he demonstrated in his first year worth of adventures!

(Bonus Parenthetical: despite having a fully magical ruler who can do prophecy and summon lightning and stuff, the Utangos also have a standard issue treacherous witch doctor, who is named Mango! What's with all the evil Mangos?) (Super Comics 021, 1940)

Vulcan: 

Vulcan, the Volcanic Man is the descendant of the Roman god of the same name and shares with him a broad dominion over fire, if not an inclination toward metalworking. He generates heat, can pick up and manipulate flame, is immune to heat and flame and also the forces involved in being blasted out of a volcano in the South Pacific and landing in the United States, is bulletproof in the sense that bullets melt before they can injure him, etc. He also has a radical fire-themed haircut.

Like a lot of fire-based super-heroes, Vulcan ends up fighting a lot of hapless arsonists who waste all of their best fire-based deathtraps of a guy who can't shut up about how he used to live in a volcano. (Super Mystery Comics v1 001)

Magno:

Control over magnetism is one of the classic comic book powers and Magno here (not our first Magno and certainly not our last) has the bargain basement version of it: he can pull things toward himself or pull himself toward things, a version of flight that requires enough admin work on the part of the artist that it is eventually rounded up to his just being able to fly outright. He also eventually gets a magnetic anti-bullet force field for a similar reason, I reckon: it's no fun having to do the admin of Magno disarming every crook in every room he enters individually.

Also unfortunately falling by the wayside over time is Magno's power to project his face onto solid objects to vex and annoy crooks and cops alike. Was this meant to be an aspect of his magnetic abilities somehow or just a cool thing he could do? It is never specified.

Finally, I must note that the somewhat abstract design on Magno's chest is a representation of a bar magnet, in one of its few victories over the horseshoe magnet on the battlefields of graphic design. (Super-Mystery Comics v1 001, 1940)