MINOR SUPER-HERO 021: THE BLACK CONDOR

(Crack Comics 001-031, 1940-1943)

There are a lot of elements to the Black Condor's origin so I shall be presenting them in a bulleted list:

-His father, archaeologist Richard Grey, brought his wife and newborn baby along on an expedition to Mongolia. This did not pay off, as their caravan was massacred by bandits and the only survivor was the baby, Richard Jr, who was carried off by a mother condor.

-Experiencing cross-species maternal instincts, the condor chose to raise the child instead of eating it. Grey eventually not only learned to communicate with condors but through imitation managed to teach himself to fly (later on this explanation of his power was considered far too ridiculous. Instead, he was exposed to a radioactive meteorite while living with the condors, which makes a lot more sense).

-Teen Richard then has a run-in with some eagles that leaves him seriously injured. He is found by kindly hermit/ missionary Father Pierre, who nurses him back to health and teaches him English. And names him Black Condor - because of his black hair, oddly enough. All is well until bandits kill Father Pierre while Black Condor is out and about. This puts him at 3/4 parental figures lost to crime, giving him the motivation of 1.5 Batmans.

-Black Condor becomes a foe of crime across Eurasia, with enough success that it's reported on globally. The narrative culmination of this effort comics in Hindustan, where he confronts and kills Gali Kan, the bandit chief who had killed Father Pierre (later retellings of the origin make him explicitly the one who killed Condor's parents too, because that's very narratively satisfying)

For the first year of Black Condor adventures he bummed around the world defeating various tyrants using his black-ray gun (never explained) but then! He encounters young US Senator Tom Wright! Who is his double! And who is then killed! And Black Condor, a man who was raised by birds and has known how to speak for maybe five years max, assumes the man's identity, position in the US government and fiancé. With the fiancé's father's blessing. 

Anyhow, real good comics. It's a shame that a character with such a lot of wild stuff going on doesn't really show up any more. He has successors but other than being able to fly they're pretty separate character concepts, to be covered in about 50 subjective years, I guess.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 185: THE SAPPHIRE KING

(Crack Comics 005, 1940) 

What makes them a super-villain? As his name suggests, the Sapphire king is motivated by his desire for and love of sapphires - he seems to love them for themselves and also for the wealth and by extension power they grant him. And he gets sapphires by using giant eagles to kidnap ships' crews and take them to his island in the Indian Ocean, there to labour in his underwater sapphire mines (?) until giant octopus or some other death claims them. So: ruthless pursuit of an obsession using extreme methods over practical ones (kidnapping an endless stream of sailors vs draining the sapphire pool): that's a super-villain.

But even an eagle-rich island sapphire colony is not immune to interference from meddling super-heroes: the Black Condor shows up and slays both the birds and the Sapphire King himself, sending the former mine slaves on their way with some compensatory gemstones.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 184: THE ASP

(Crack Comics 004, 1940)

What makes them a super-villain? Any number of things! The Asp is a jewel thief who taunts his victims/ the police ahead of time and then arranges for seemingly impossible murders using time-delayed poisons. He's a weird creep who hisses all the time and almost manages to kill the Clock. And yet... it's all a little perfunctory. I saw someone on the DC wikia editorialize about how the Asp's MO was similar to the Joker's first appearance, and they aren't wrong, but where the Joker had a little room to breathe and establish himself over the course of 3 or 4 crimes, the poor Asp is dead and gone after just one.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 020: THE RED TORPEDO

(Crack Comics 001-020, 1940-1942)

The Red Torpedo is Jim Lockhart, a guy who came up with a design for the ultimate one-man submarine and turned that into his whole personality. This is a not-uncommon Golden-Age comics trope that kind of petered out once the world was no longer awash with mechanized combat - Silver Age super-vehicles tended more toward the exploration side of things.

So: Jim Lockhart, young US Navy officer resigns his commission after being told that his submarine design was unworkable. He builds it anyway, with the help of his fiancé, Meg, then seemingly leaves her behind as well - a "Peggy" show up as his assistant a few issues later but after that he's a strictly one-man operation. 

Lockhart shows up here and there in the extended DCU - most notably in a Roy Thomas engineered cull of the old Quality Comics characters in All-Star Squadron back in the day. Like most of the others killed off in that ish, Red Torpedo got better and shows up whenever someone needs a really good submarine for something.

Good luck finding it but the thing that really cemented my love for this guy is the Crack Comics installment of the Next Issue Project. A really lovely, simple, melancholy story about a submarine man.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 183: X-1

(Crack Comics 003, 1940)

What makes them a super-villain? While X-1 is concerned with that most banal of crimes, insurance fraud, he does it at scale, employing a fleet of pirates in souped-up submarines to steal his own goods and sink his own ships for the sweet cash payout.

What is interesting about them? Well first off, his real name is Wilhelm Wotan, a true banger of a moniker the likes of which we have seldom seen so far. A real villain's name that is frankly wasted on this capitalist pigdog.

The real draw, though, is those submarine pirates! Check out those dreamy mantled masks, that skull-and-crossboned conning tower! It's hard to go wrong with submarine pirates but by Jove I've seldom seen any done more right.

NOTES: OCTOBER 2022

The Clock flatlines himself in order to solve a murder by speaking to the victim in the afterlife. (Crack Comics 010, 1941) 

Decoration:

Jaspar Crow's got a monogrammed wastecan! (Crack Comics 016, 1941)

Dr Foster's got a monogrammed lampshade! (Crack Comics 017, 1941)

Names: Tor the Magic Master encounters a counterfeiter with the unlikely name Phrogg Zaarn.

One of the victims of Clock foe the Werewolf is named A.B. Ceedee.

MINOR SUPER-HERO 019: THE CLOCK

(Funny Picture Stories/ Funny Pages/ Feature Comics/ Crack Comics, 1936-1944)

The Clock has the distinction of probably being the earliest masked crimefighter and definitely that of being the earliest one to stick around, which would make him the earliest super-hero if Dr Occult hadn't made his debut in 1935. A lot of the details about him are fairly cliché, both because they were cribbed from existing pulp clichés and because the Clock helped define the clichés of the genre.

So: Brian O'Brien is a wealthy playboy who puts on a tuxedo and mask and fights crime at night. He leaves calling cards for his foes, is often thought to be a criminal himself and is friends with police Captain Kane in his civilian identity while enjoying a somewhat fraught relationship with him while masked.

Over the years the Clock has a few different associates - above find Pug Brady, a down-on-his-luck guy who happens to look just like Brian O'Brien. They team up for a couple of years until Pug is unceremoniously chucked for a tough orphan girl named Butch about whom I know almost nothing, so it's a bit of a qualified statement when I say that by far my favourite member of the Clock family is the Orchid:

The Orchid appears a handful of times and her gimmick is that she is also a crimefighter, and one who is slightly more on-the ball than the Clock: she may know his secret identity, she can always get a message to him and most of the time she disappears at the end of a case, with the exception of the time she was distracted by her own kidnap-victim father. The Orchid only makes a handful of appearances but she's a winner in my books: bring her back, I say - fold her into the backstory of the Black Orchid!

So: the Clock is a solid Golden Age strip. Sadly, he will likely never see the light of day again. DC owns roughly seven dozen masked adventurers in suits and included in that number is Midnight, who would be a straight palette-swap of the Spirit if they had bothered to give him a different-coloured suit. Thusfar, he's the one they pull out in the rare cases that a suited crimefighter who isn't early Sandman is required, while the Clock and the Mouthpiece and Destiny and Just n' Right and Devil's Dagger and Diamond Jack and Cosmo, Phantom of Disguise all twiddle their thumbs in purgatory.