MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 864: THE BLOODY BARON

(Wonderworld Comics 010, 1940)

The Bloody Baron was once Karek, Baron of the Duchy of Morziava, somewhere in the spooky part of Eastern Europe. Nine Hundred plus years ago he went off to war and came back a woman-killing creep and so his people burned him at the stake. Ever since, he's been rising from the dead and carrying off a woman per year - that's at least eight hundred women as of the story we're talking about!

Yarko the Great is passing through Morziava when he runs into the Albert Deach, the son of an old friend, and his Morziavan fiance Sonya Miran. They collectively seek shelter for the night in a nearby castle and have the bad luck to find the Bloody Baron and his cadre of ghostly knights, who grab Sonya and spirit her off to the Valley of Shadows, which is either a euphemism for the underworld or a location in the underworld, take your pick.

Yarko of course pursues, using the Baron's own sword as a link to his spirit and then later as a weapon to stab the ghostly knights with.

The Baron is made of sterner stuff than his subordinate ghosts, and Yarko's magic is hampered by being in the underworld. but this doesn't prove to be a problem, because the Baron has spent eight centuries generating an army of vengeful spirits and is completely unprepared to deal with any sort of ghost-on-ghost violence. Yarko only has to summon three dagger-wielding women before he is completely destroyed and descends to some sort of lower underworld yet. The people of Morziava are finally free!

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 011

Lotsa lil guys.

Mr Justice: 

Like the Spectre or the Wraith (or Sergeant Spook or the Gay Ghost or the Ghost Patrol...), Mr Justice is your classic restless spirit who remains on Earth to mete out justice to the wicked. Specifically, Mr Justice is the 200 year old ghost of the fictional English Prince James, cruelly slain by followers of Prince Richard during the Rogers Rebellion of the 1740s. Astute readers and students of history might have noticed a few things about the preceding sentence that all boil down to the fact that the 1740s were actually recent enough that we know a whole lot about what was going on then, including that people weren't running around in Medieval armour even if they were sometimes still using swords and shields during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Also, this is what the crown prince of England looked like in 1741. (they change it to the 11th Century later on, because that makes a lot more sense).

Prince James' ghost is tethered to the place of his death per the usual ghost rules but he manages to get around that in a fairly unprecedented way: due the the war, the British government decides to move the castle to America and it is sunk by the Nazis on the way there. And since a pile of stone on the bottom of the Atlantic is not a castle, James is free to go become Mr Justice, the ghost super-hero frequently compared to the Spectre but who doesn't really get up to the sames sort of divine judgment stuff. He does fight the Devil/Satan a lot, though.

Possibly my favourite thing about Mr Justice is the fact that his secret identity is a fellow named Mr Justice and nobody really calls any attention to that fact. Mr Justice (secret identity of Mr Justice) is attached to the office of Mayor Clark (city unnamed but very NYC-esque) as a sort of troubleshooter. He kind of has a love interest in mayor's daughter Pat Clark and a rival in District Attorney Roy Winkler, above, but neither is explored very thoroughly. (Blue Ribbon Comics 009, 1941)

Inferno:

Above is an abridged account of Inferno's time as a super-villain, which we will treat separately because... well, because when you're reading a lot of old comics in a somewhat systematic manner you have to have some sort of organizational method and I chose alphabetical by year, and Inferno's time on the lists of crime happened in Zip Comics. I simply haven't gotten there yet. Suffice to say that he was a crook who changed his ways due to the influence of Steel Sterling and opted to do his time.

Despite his best efforts, Inferno is compelled to break jail to stop a group of prison escapees from murdering a judge and then is encouraged by that same judge to go on the lam because the authorities are going to try to murder Inferno. It's a real reciprocal life-saving situation! Although I am tempted to think that that judge could possibly have just called someone and arranged for a stay of summary execution for Inferno.

The rest of Inferno's career as a Golden Age super-hero is kind of a fun twist on the old trope of the super-hero that everyone thinks is a crook, in that he doesn't really have a secret identity per se so just travels around doing itinerant labour until he sees a crime go and changes outfits. The idea of this hobo existence kind of goes by the wayside after a couple of issues when Secret Service Agent Virginia Ames enters the picture, as Inferno's stories were on the shorter side and just didn't have the real estate for both a love interest and workplace drama.

Inferno only managed seven adventures before trotting off to limbo to wait for Archie's 1960s super-hero revival but don't worry! He got a full pardon in his last adventure so the other heroes won't be hassling him. (Blue Ribbon Comics 013, 1941)

Captain Flag:

On the one hand, Captain Flag is a regular-style patriotic hero but on a different, more entertaining hand he is a patriotic hero with a very fun origin. To whit: one day super-villain the Black Hand is attempting to wrest scientific secrets from inventor John Townsend when his playboy son Tom stumbles in half lit. The Black Hand is about to dispose of Tom using his horrible hand when a huge eagle just kind of... flaps into the room and ends up leaving with Tom Townsend in its talons.

Thus saved, Tom just kind of lives with the eagle for a while and transforms from a dissipated youth to a lean, athletic man full of fish protein. And then the eagle comes back one day with an American flag! It's a veritable sign from the heavens it what it is!

And so, Tom Townsend becomes Captain Flag, who mostly fights the Black Hand. Which makes sense. Something else that would make a lot of sense: adding a belt to that costume. (Blue Ribbon Comics 016, 1941)

The Red Mask:

The Red Mask is very minor indeed! He appeared in four issues of Best Comics from Better Publications, of which only issue 2 appears to be available, which in turn was reprinting newspaper strips, of which only a handful are available. 

What we have on the guy is this: he leads a tribe on the island of Kaukura, which is probably but not definitely in Oceania somewhere. Kaukura is chockablock with things like sacred grottoes, immortal monsters and hostile tribes and the Red Mask has assigned himself the task of protecting a bunch of clueless outsiders like Nina and Danny here who have blundered in looking for their friend and found themselves up to their neck in trouble.

The most interesting thing about the Red Mask is that he is by a fair margin the first nonwhite super-hero, though thanks to colouring limitations and some inexact geography it's a bit difficult to get more exact than that. (Best Comics 002, 1939)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 525: RIALB

(Blue Ribbon Comics 012, 1941)

Here's a story about my powers of observation: I immediately noticed that our friend Rialb here had a backward name and spent a good half hour trying to figure out which Blair he might be named in reference to (a 1940s spiritualist? a famous skeptic?) before my eyes drifted slightly to the left and I took in the fact that the story was written by Joe Blair. I still have no idea why Joe Blair named the wet-rag villain of the story after himself, but let's all be happy I figured it out before moaning about it here.

Speaking of wet rags: let's discuss Rialb. He's a fake medium who accidentally discovers that he can actually summon the spirits of the dead but seems to have a knack for bringing back spirits who wish their descendants harm. Further, the first time he does so is witnessed by crooked politician Paul Ventresco, who puts the easily pushed-over Rialb to work as his personal ghost-powered hitman.

The real stars of the story are the extremely grody ghosts that Rialb manages to conjure up. Just look at this gross old misogynist.

Shadow imp, skull-faced spectre, pointillism lizard-man... this comic has it all!

The real star is absolutely this skeleton-limbed hair-face who gets his bony ass kicked back to the netherworld he came from by Mr Justice before he can get up to any mischief. I really enjoy how the unchanging expression on his face reads as both menacing and sad depending on which side of the ass kicking he is.

Just a regular ghost.

It's a bit of a letdown that the last ghosts we see are three sad sack victims of Ventrusco who Mr Justice calls up to cow the pair into surrendering, though he really only needed them for Ventrusco, given that Rialb shows no actual evidence of having a spine during the story - Mr Justice could have just thrown a sheet over a chair and gotten the same result.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 519: THE GHOST OF THE CYCLOPS

(Blue Bolt v2 004-005, 1941)

We open on a bit of... not hubris but it's often framed as hubris. I'm sure that TV Tropes has a name for it but danged if I'm going to go hunting for it. It's the phenomenon in which a character in an ongoing fictional setting jokes about how they're sure glad that *SPECIFIC THING* isn't real etc and that thing is the focus of the next story. In this case, Sergeant Spook says he's glad that mythology doesn't real and so Ghost Town doesn't have to contend with the ghosts of mythological characters and BAM the ghost of the Cyclops starts destroying Alaska.

Although the human world sees these attacks as merely a bizarre and terrifying natural disaster the ghosts of Ghost Town know what's up and dispatch Sergeant Spook northward. On arrival he is met and guided by several of the Cyclops' recent victims - always a handy part of being a ghost cop.

Spook's encounter with the Cyclops follows a fairly predictable pattern: cornered in a cave, he anages to temporarily blind the other ghost and then trace him back to his lair by clinging to his cyclopean sandals. This encounter does serve to further muddy the waters of how ghosts workin Sergeant Spook comics, however: can a ghost hit another ghost with a corporeal snowball? Is Alaska covered in a layer of ghost snow? Or is the Cyclops just super-vulnerable to eye-damaging attacks like a video game boss?

The second issue of this two-parter is a bit perfunctory: Spook arrives at the Cyclops' lair where we learn that when not translucent to signify that he is a ghost in the corporeal world the Cyclops is green. He is also served by other, unidentified ghosts who are presumably being bullied into servitude with the threat of violence like the Ghost of King Tut's slaves. He also captures Sergeant Spook with very little trouble. Things look bad, but then:

HERCULES! Because of course if the Cyclops is real then there's gotta be guys like Hercules (famous foe of the Cyclops) running around too. There's a bit of a scuffle and then he plants a slobberknocker on the Cyclops that decisively concludes things.

Hercules' reward: eternal vigilance. His ghost pledges to guard the Cyclops' ghost for the rest of time, which will presumably entail regular brawls whenever his charge wakes up and wants to cause more chaos. Maybe this is a good outcome for Hercules? I just hope that someone in Ghost Town thinks to ship him some ghost books or the like.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 514: THE GHOST OF ROCK ROOK

(Blue Bolt v2 001, 1941)

"Rock" Rook is a gangster with an incredibly annoying name: hard to parse, seems like it should mean something but doesn't, plus its' always written as "Rock Rook" and that's probably just a quirk of early 20th Century English but it makes me think that his last name isn't even Rook and that makes me think that it means something again but it still doesn't.

Anyway, he is sentenced to and executed in the electric chair, ostensibly for murder but his annoying name must have contributed some judicial bloodthirstiness.

As this is a Sergeant Spook story, Rook's vow to revenge himself on the judge and jury is not carried out by the traditional methods (fake your own death, hire a mad scientist to resurrect your corpse or put your brain in a gorilla, die but have your secret twin pretend to be your ghost, etc) but rather by his coming back as an actual, factual ghost.

Unfortunately for Rock Rook the freedom to be a ghostly murderer comes with a major catch: your victim's ghost can call the ghost cops on you. Sergeant Spook is on the case faster than Rock Rook can line up his next target.

After that it's just a matter of experienced ghost vs inexperienced ghost and Rock Rook finds himself in the ghost-proof jail lickety-split.

Sergeant Spook is still a comic searching for its sweet spot and and for my money this kind of ghost-on-human crime is where it should focus, particularly if it involves stuff like the murder victim calling the ghost cops on the murderer.

JUDGE AND JURY REVENGE KILLER SCORE: 1/19+ (very weak showing from a unstoppable killing machine)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 508: THE GHOST OF KING TUT

(Blue Bolt v1 009-010, 1940)

This is a simple one but there are a lot of Lore Implications so I had to use a lot of pictures. To start, Sergeant Spook and his pal Dr Sherlock notice that there are no North African ghosts in Ghost Town (aside from Cleopatra, who was mentioned a few issues earlier) and resolve to go solve that mystery. They get the permissions and passports necessary to enter the mortal realm and head out.

Arriving in North Africa, Spook and Sherlock are captured by ghost soldiers and brought to a ghost city via ghost chariot where they meet the person in charge of the whole ghost shebang: the ghost of Tutankhamen! And tangentially learn that ghosts turn green when they get sunburned - LORE!

Tutankhamen (and just why he rather than any other North African ruler ended up in charge is not explored) further reveals that the reason that no ghosts leave North Africa is that he has enslaved them all and is making them build him an enormous ghost pyramid, presumably so that he can be entombed in style if he every dies a second time (and forget my usual questions about how blocks of stone might have become ghosts - just why has this pyramid taken so long to make? Literally thousands of years longer than any other! And with an immortal workforce!).

Sergeant Spook escapes, of course, and makes his way home to appeal to Ghost Town president George Washington for some good old American-style overseas interventionism.

There is a big battle, with ghost camels and ghost horses and ghost siege engines throwing ghost boulders. Sergeant Spook lays about him with a flail which is always upsetting to me because it looks so cool and I am against arming living police officers with flails.

Ultimately, the fact that everyone involved is a ghost and thus none of the fighting can have lasting consequence means that Sergeant Spook must solve things by bopping King Tut on the schnozz, thus showing his subjects that he is fallible and not worthy of the thousands of years of torment that they endured/ inflicted in his name. Everyone except for King Tut goes home happy.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 507: THE GHOST OF CAPTAIN KIDD

(Blue Bolt v1 008, 1941)

The Sergeant Spook writers, having exhausted the storytelling possibilities inherent in an ultra-powerful ghost taking on mere mortals and having established that ghost-on-ghost violence is essentially consequence free are now trying a new angle: ghost crooks preying on mortals and Sergeant Spook bringing them to justice.

This time, it's the Ghost of Captain Kidd - like Jesse James before him, Kidd is compelled to return to the patterns of his life, and having obtained a ghost ship from somewhere he sets to looting mortal cargoes. Sergeant Spook of course does not stand for this and pursues in a ghost battleship crewed by John Paul Jones, Admiral Dewey and Sir Francis Drake, plus a lot of no-names.

Captain Kid has a moment of triumph when it is revealed that he has somehow obtained and installed a ghost motor on his ghost ship (and it is here that I will note that I have absolutely no idea how any of these large objects become ghosts in the first place - are they all ghost ships in the traditional sense or are there different rules for ghost vehicles?) followed by the more entertaining revelation that none of his crew have any idea how to work an internal combustion engine and thus the ship ends up sailing in a circle. The forces of ghost law thus are able to catch up, Captain Kidd gets socked in the kisser and everyone goes home.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 506: THE GHOST OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

(Blue Bolt v1 007, 1940)

We have entered the era of Sergeant Spook battling villainous ghosts! It's not quite as low stakes as Sergeant Spook just manhandling mortal crooks while they have no ability to affect him but since the worst that ghosts can do to each other in this fictional milieu is to knock one another out it's still missing a bit of something.

Still, the setting of Ghost Town is a fun one and we're still getting lots of details about how it works and who exactly lives there. Firstly it seems that there is a suburb called Spirit Town and secondly Napoleon Bonaparte lives there and is attempting to conquer the entire ghostly realm for his own.

Any time something happens in Ghost Town, famous dead people crawl out of the woodwork to lend a hand. In this case, Sergeant Spook's army is first bolstered by the addition of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and then the Duke of Wellington himself decides to offer his expertise in beating up Napoleons.

Like I said, it's a bit low stakes since everyone's already dead and Sergeant Spook for example was only mildly inconveniencing his enemies rather than slaying them while he was laying about with a mace from ghost horseback (as always the rules of the Sergeant Spook afterlife elude me. Are these horses with unfinished business? Do all horses have restless spirits? Are they just accessories to human ghosts like clothing?). Napoleon himself is very chill about the whole thing and everyone is good friends by the end.

Still, for all that this battle had all the consequence of a Civil War reenactment at its heart this comic was about the ghost of Napoleon Bonaparte raising up an army of the dead in an attempt to conquer the afterlife and that's in fact a very sinister elevator pitch.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 503: THE GHOST OF JESSE JAMES

(Blue Bolt v1 005, 1940) 

Sergeant Spook, while a fun concept, had a problem as a super-hero: as an intangible, invisible ghost able to interact with the physical world he was possibly the most overpowered foe that a regular-style gangster or even your average super-villain could encounter. He was running the risk of becoming a bit boring just a few issues in, when the obvious solution presented itself: ghost crooks!

Yes, Jesse James and his gang are back at it again, in ghost form! To be fair, Sergeant Spook doesn't have much trouble rounding them up but at least it's more of a fair fight - of note is the fact that James' ghostly gun is able to stun but not kill other ghosts.

Also of note is this interaction between Sergeant Spook and Robert Ford - Spook seems to hold to the popular notion that though James was a multiple murderer Ford was somehow worse because he had betrayed his pal. Even more interesting is the undercurrent of an idea that ghosts are condemned to act out the behaviours that they established in life, which is presumably why Jesse James is robbing trains of money he has no way to spend.

And to answer any questions about how you punish a ghost: you haul him in front of Judge the Ghost of King Solomon,who mandates that he be placed in stocks presumably lined with the ghost-proof steel invented by the Ghost of Benjamin Franklin. Simplicity itself!

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.