ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 038

Where are we going to put all of these aliens? 

Undergrounders: 

I want to call these guys mole men who invade the surface world in the year 3050 CE, but looking at the battle scene and the remainder of this adventure I reckon that Abovegrounders of that particular future also look all bald and gangly. It's a whole world of mole men! Science adventurer Captain Daring kills the Undergrounders' underground Fuehrer and installs his own ladyfriend as the new Queen of the Underground, which has to be an improvement. (Daring Mystery Comics 007, 1941)

Juno Men:

These fellows hail from the planet Juno and are invading the Earth of the far future of the year 3000. We don't really learn any more than this because we are seeing these events play out from the persepctive of a time-travelling Minimidget and Ritty, and so not only are they without context but they are too small to ask a passerby to explain just what the heck is happening. They are driven off with what I would call embarrassing ease. (Amazing-Man Comics 014, 1940)

Followers of Elo: 

Underwater adventurer the Shark is possibly my favourite Centaur Comics character, because he spends a lot of his time palling around with his dad, Father Neptune. A little-explored aspect of this father-son relationship is that it is part of a Phantom-like generational super-hero legacy, with each Shark serving for 500 years before becoming Father Neptune and passing his legacy on to his son. One of the few times that this arrangement is explored is in Amazing-Man Comics 014, when Father Neptune tells the story of how he served on a pirate crew for a while back when he was the Shark, and how in 1664 his crewmates were all slaughtered in the name of the Great God Elo by some lumpy-headed green guys on an island off South America.

Cut to 1940, and the Shark and Father Neptune decide that a trip to that same island would be a perfect father-son outing. They find that the Great God Elo has only two followers left, and that one of them is a capable enough scientist that he has developed super-hero strength sleep gas grenades. Father and son are swiftly taken prisoner.

The unnamed scientist has also created an interplanetary teleportation device, which he employs to teleport in some...

Martians: 

Specifically, a pretty lucky first teleport brings him Prince Zog, son of Diggo, King of Mars. But just why bring Martians to Earth? We will never know, because Zog is a very rude warmonger and he has electric eyes. The tribe of Elo is down to its very last member and he has sensibly vacated the area.

No aliens are going to invade the Earth on the Shark's watch, and he KOs on after another as they pour out of the teleport beam, until a lucky punch sends one crashing into the equipment, wrecking it.

Though the teleporter is no longer spewing out Martians, there are still a pile of knocked-out ones lying around. How to tie up this loose end? Why, have Father Neptune, who missed the fight due to still being knocked out, throw a bucket of water on them so that they will wake up and engage him in the manly art of fisticuffs, of course! And then make it so that Martians are water soluble! Gruesome! (Amazing-Man Comics 015, 1940)

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 012

You won't believe these guys. 

the Mermen: 

Some undersea jerks who capture explorer Typhon and his crew. Their leader is a real creep named Neptune who has a nigh-fetishistic plan to freeze the crew - and particularly sole female crewmember Cecelia - into blocks of ice and then breathe fire on them. Luckily for all who might venture beneath the waves, he drowns (?) during Typhon's escape. (Weird Comics 002, 1940)

the Beaked Men:

The Beaked Men of Mercury's mountains operate as an extortion racket on the solar trade routes, raiding and capturing ships from their mobile "space island" ships. Such a threat to the interplanetary commerce of the year 25 000 will not stand, and Spurt Hammond, Planet Flyer successfully manages to explode the whole operation thanks to a handy prisoner revolt. (Planet Comics 004, 1940)

the Big-Eared Tribe of Saturn: 

I'm not sure if the implication is that all of the people of Saturn are big-eared or if it's just a subgroup, but the fact that they seem to be generally feared and that the leader (and father) of this particular bunch of Big-Eared men, Varg Emmos, is a respected scientist who is presumably using his futuristic heardpiece to disguise his own big-eared status points toward the former. 

Varg and his boys have a plot to take over Earth using an ultrasonic ray that affects only humans but are foiled when Rex Dexter in turn discovers a musical note that kills them and that is seemingly featured heavily in symphonic music. Sucks to be a Big-Eared music lover I guess. (Mystery Men Comics 020, 1941)

the Coal People:

The Coal People (also referred to as the Blackmen) reside in an underground kingdom below Colorado and are descended from ancient people who got themselves trapped there and were forced to subsist of coal to survive. Rather than dying of starvation and/or stomach cancer, they instead became humanoid creatures composed of living coal. The problem comes when mining activities bring the Coal People into contact with contemporary surface humans - fairly harmless when they decide to worship the above old man as a kind of captive god, but increasingly menacing after the discovery of a miner's corpse reveals to them that there are more interesting things to eat than coal.

Luckily for the surface world (or for Coloradans, at least) the next person to enter the mines and get captured is the super-strong giant Mighty Man, who discovers the in-retrospect-fairly-obvious secret of the Coal People: that they fear fire. He and the erstwhile god escape and seal the mine behind them. Colorado is saved! (Amazing-Man Comics 011, 1940)

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 010

Oh those rascally aliens.

the Grey Hordes from the Center of the Earth: 

The Grey Hordes from the Center of the Earth, aka the Grey Men, have been bombing London for unclear reasons using hard-to-see transparent planes. War correspondent Danny Dash and his associate Shamrock "Mac" McGlynn (!) stumble upon a group of them in the English countryside after their car is wrecked by a mysterious bomb-throwing glowing limousine, but since the "Danny Dash" feature never concluded we never really learn the answers to the reasons behind any of this, including why they are making war on the British or why they have corkscrews on top of their hats. (War Comics 001, 1940)

the Jovian Mountain People:

The Jovian Mountain People live a simple life that revolves around the harvesting and processing of native jurta berries into a potent drug. They call in the heroic Space Patrol after a rash of murder and robberies (sixty!) point to an organized jurta drug ring in the area.

Basil Wolverton's knack for alien design was remarkable not just for its inventiveness but for the fact that he could make such sympathetic alien characters who weren't just humans with blue skin, and the Jovian Mountain Folk might just be the greatest example of this, with their little round bodies and concerned expressions. The above image of the jurta harvester carefully processing his crop is one of my favourite in all of comics, and it's a shame that the poor guy is about to be tossed off of a mountain by one of...

the Balloon Men: 

The Balloon Men showcase another of Wolverton's strengths: creating aliens that are simultaneously goofy yet believably threatening. A big orb-shaped dude with little fluttering wings is undeniably a silly-looking fellow, but just scroll back up to that image of the attack on the jurta-man and picture one of these guys silently descending on you with murderous intent. Eerie. Plus I really appreciate the clear distinction between the inflated and deflated states of the Balloon Men, 

The Balloon Men are not, however, the ultimate architects of the jurta thefts. No, it turns out that they are working for...

the Haggur: 

The Haggur are identified as a "cruel and crafty tribe of South Jupiter" and if this is an accurate description then this otherwise-unnamed Haggur is an exemplar of his kind. He and his imported Balloon Men intend on plundering the entire season's jurta drug harvest no matter how many Mountain People they have to kill to do so. It's only being totally exploded by the Space Patrol that stops this dastardly plan. 

Design-wise, the Haggur is a pretty standard big alien bruiser, though I do really like the huge bands of muscle attached to the jaw and of course welcome the single central Basil Wolverton nostril whenever it makes an appearance.

The comic ends with a little gag about how unattractive the Jovian Mountain Ladies are, in case you were worrying that it had no flaws. I personally think that they're cute. (Amazing Mystery Funnies v3 005, 1940)

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 009

When deep-sea diving off of the Marquesas Islands, explorers/lovers Chuck Hardy and Jerry Peterson are caught in a volcanic upheaval and sucked through a rift in the ocean floor. They find themselves in one of the many underground lands that dot any comic book version of the Earth - this one being lit and heated by an enormous volcano called Roara.

Chuck and Jerry's time in the underground land (never actually named as a whole, so I have been calling it Aquatania even though properly that refers to the one named kingdom in the underground area) is made easier by the fact that something in the atmosphere has given them both enormous strength. Which is good, because Aquatania is a rough-and-tumble place full of reptilian monsters and hostile humanoids. And speaking of those:

the Frog-Men:

Though the first Frog-Man that Cuck and Jerry meet, Mogba here, is a friendly guy, the Frog-Men as a whole are pretty aggro. They fill the role of the general antagonist for a couple of the other intelligent species in Aquatania and thus spend a lot of time getting beat up (and worse) by Chuck Hardy.

Please note also the long lobster antennae sprouting from between Mogba's eyebrows. These are features shared by several of Aquatania's different humanoid species and frankly I love this kind of thing. Suggesting a common ancestry between your multiple intelligent species that all live within walking distance of one another? Yes please. (Amazing-Man Comics 005, 1939)

The Frog-Men return to vex Chuck and Jerry in Amazing-Man Comics 011, and in issue 012, Chuck meets the Frog-Man leader, the two-headed Toga (who I can only assume is not green because the colourist forgot about the 'frog' part), in battle and kills him by heaving him off of a cliff. Hopefully the absence of Toga's influence will usher in a new era of peace for the Frog-Men. 

Aquatanians: 

The Aquatanians are the default white-guy species that you get in a lot of these many-lands-full-of-many-peoples adventures, thought the fact that they too have little lobster antennae suggests that they're descended from the same kind of ocean bugs as the Frog-Men, which is fun.

The Aquatanians have a sort of generically advanced and peaceful society mixed with a certain amount of medieval ignorance - they have high-speed air vehicles, for example, but no means of making fire other than sending Chuck to that big volcano I mentioned earlier to get some. They're also the ones who take the time to teach Cuck and Jerry the local language so that they don't have to spend most of their adventures doing charades. (Amazing-Man Comics 006, 1939)

the Quadropel Men: 

The Quadropel Men are our first Aquatanian race not to have antennae, suggesting that they may have evolved from an entirely different kind of ocean bug. They live in a hole in the ground (making them an under-underground race, yes) and do human intelligent being sacrifice to their deity, the Sacred Steam God. (Amazing-Man Comics 009, 1940)

the Swamp-Men:

Chuck and Jerry encounter the Swamp-Men after an unexpected flood washes them, along with their Aquatanian companion Oxan and Aquatanian antagonist Princess Irina out to sea on a raft improvised from a palace door. As can be seen above, the best thing about the Swamp-Men is the fact that they have domesticated these amazing giant turtles and insist on standing like they're zooming around on them even though the turtles are consistently described as being very slow. It's great!

Otherwise, the Swamp-Men are kind of jerks. They capture Chuck, Jerry and Irina (Oxan sneaks away in order to effect a dramatic turtleback rescue later) and intend to use them as food for their mounts - I mean, say what you will about human sacrifice, but at least the Quadropel Men had a reason for being murderous assholes. Princess Irina successfully ransoms herself with some spare gold, but even then her two escorts decide to rob and murder her rather than take her all the way home. Definitely the worst bunch in the entire underground world, even with the turtles taken into account. (Amazing-Man Comics 010, 1940)

the Lobstermen:

The final species encountered by Chuck, Jerry and Oxan before their series is phased out are the Lobstermen (aka the Pigmy Lobstermen) a bunch of friendly little pink guys ruled by Queen Irena. The Lobstermen are another antennaed species, and their lobster claw hands might just be a hint as to the ancestry of the various related races.

If Queen Irena's skin tone is anything to go by, the Lobstermen also seem to be another one of those races with the kind of sexual dimorphism whereby the males are all wizened little weirdos of some description and the females are essentially conventionally attractive human women, right down to not having lobster claws. It amazing how often that happens! (Amazing-Man Comics 011, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 502: THE GREEN SORCERESS

(Blue Bolt v1 001, 1940) 

The Green Sorceress! Possibly named Norzimo, absolutely the ruler of the underground kingdom of Voltor aka the Hidden Empire aka the Green Empire. Locked in a cold war with Dr Bertoff, leader of Deltos aka the Scientific City, as she wants the Deltosan radium fields in order to power her war machines and invade the surface while he wants to destroy her kingdom and everyone in it.

According to Bertoff, the Green Sorceress is descended from a long line of black magic practicioners. Appropriately, she demonstrates some magical skill herself, mostly related to teleportation via a green mist, though she does summon at least one demon.

There's a Batman/ Catwoman aspect to the relationship between Blue Bolt and the Green Sorceress, in that they are absolutely horny for one another and keep infuriating their allies by letting the other get away rather than taking victory at the cost of the other's life. The Green Sorceress even reforms a couple of times (well, sh'e brainwashed by Bertoff once and reforms another) but just can't quit her evil ways.

(Professor Bertoff would absolutely be a super-villain if a) his main opponent weren't a bigger one and b) his main ally weren't a super-hero)

The greatest change to the status quo of the underground kingdoms comes in Blue Bolt v1 007 when the Green Sorceress manages to force a surrender of Scientific City by capturing Blue Bolt (note the incredible power play of calling from bed). Her hamfisted scientists set off an series of enormous explosions in the radium fields and open a passage to the surface. This is the point at which a captured surface man calls the inhabitants of the Green Kingdom "scientific barbarians" and it's a really terrific characterization that has to have been a Kirby contribution if only because of how prominent a theme it would be in his later work.

In Blue Bolt v1 009 the Green Sorceress hits the surface in a new identity: the Masked Princess! Supposedly European royalty travelling incognito, the Masked Princess was actually a highly efficient one woman espionage unit who vamped intelligence agents and other important men and then hypnotized them into revealing their secrets. Unfortunately for her, the very instant she left her minions managed to let Blue Bolt get away and he ends up following her to the surface to bust up the Masked Princess' operation.

Simon and Kirby leave Blue Bolt after issue 10, at which point the Green Sorceress has reformed again, this time after being saved by Blue Bolt from a terrible end that will be detailed soonish. We will eventually see her again but it's not the triumphant return that she deserves - I reckon that in the right hands and with a slightly more interesting foe the Green Sorceress could be a real classic super-villain - the hot-headed wizard-queen of a nation of Kirbyesque scientific barbarians striking from a land beneath those we know, plus there's a different, slightly less evil guy trying to kill her at the same time? this is fertile storytelling ground! BRING her BACK, someone!