MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 795: GROVAK

(Target Comics v1 005, 1940) 

We meet Grovak the Martian space pirate as he and his crew are about to sacrifice a beautiful human babe in order to capture a portion of the protoplasmic Neptunian Creeping Death. Not only does this highlight Grovak's ruthlessness but it shows what a bad boss he is - bullying, abusive, refusing to own up to his mistakes - Martian space pirates take note and seek employment elsewhere.

Luckily for that never-named young woman, Spacehawk chooses this moment to show up and make his presence known with a blast from his flame ray pistol. Both the Creeping Death and Grovak get spooked and flee the scene.

But a little mortal fear isn't going to be enough to dissuade Grovak, not by a long shot. He moves forward with his plan, having already collected a portion of the Creeping Death by means of a less fortunate captive, and is ready to unleash it on unsuspecting space freighter crews in order to take their lives, their ships and their cargo, in order.

Once again Spacehawk is compelled to step in, and while Grovak's crew sensibly flees into the Neptunian hills, the villain himself attempts to destroy Spacehawk using the Creeping Death, only to end up on the receiving end of a protoplasmic devouring himself. It's just like the old adage: you live by the horrible alien blob; you die by the horrible alien blob.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 794: THE GHOST OF ROCKY STONE

(Target Comics v1 005, 1940)

If there's one type of character that the people at Novelty Press liked, it was a young man getting an American-style military education, and Lucky Byrd was one of those very men. A flying cadet at Randolph Field, Texas, Byrd managed to ferret out a variety of espionage and criminal plots as a sideline to his studies, the first of which involved fellow cadet Rocky Stone, a bully turned murderer turned reluctant saboteur who ended up dead at the hands of his unseen handler when he tried to confess all.

Now, some months later, the ghost of Byrd's old rival has seemingly returned for revenge as a glowing spectre piloting an eerie ghost plane that looks just sick as hell.

As is so often the case with unexpected ghosts, it turns out that Rocky Stone had an identical twin brother, Bob, who has been seeking revenge on Lucky Byrd due to some unreliable information supplied to him by his nogoodnik sibling. And Lucky, good guy that he is, refuses to press charges once everything comes out in the open, so Bob Stone comes out of the whole thing with nothing more than an amazing icebreaker to bust out at parties. Assuming that he also was not prosecuted for stealing that plane from the US Army.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 793: BIG SHOT

(Target Comics v1 002, 1940)

Big Shot, a New York gang boss with a European spy named Drusella as his companion (a slight speculation as some imprecise speech balloon tails make it hard to be entirely sure just who is talking about what, but the details seem to fit), is after the technological advances that the Skipper has made in Boystate, with an eye toward using them to take over the world. His initial plan - drive up to the front gates and wing it from there - doesn't bear fruit, so he is forced to improvise a real plan on the spot. Also please note that the Skipper is on to Big Shot from the very start thanks to mind-reading technology that one of the Boystate Rangers tells Big Shot about. This whole three-part story functions mostly as a demonstration of Boystate's power for the reader.

Since the Skipper's stated mission is to take lost and abandoned boys and turn them into upstanding American men, Big Shot's new plan involves recruiting a suitably wayward youth to infiltrate Boystate and do a little espionage. His chosen agent is the unnervingly-named Pretty Boy, a would-be gangster with a world-weary attitude.

Pretty Boy is delivered from the harsh streets of NYC, where a boy might get beaten up by a grown man and forced into a life of crime, to the nice streets of Boyville, where boys are beaten up by their fellow boys in order to impart solid moral lessons. The nuance is unfortunately lost on him, and Pretty Boy sets out to fulfill his mission in the most direct manner possible.

There's some shenanigans involving a brief accidental foray into space as Pretty Boy steals an aircraft that he has no idea how to fly, but the end result is his delivering to Big Shot a bug-o-plane, a cosmic ray gun and the Skipper's chief aide the Captain, at which point Big Shot tosses both the Captain and Pretty Boy into the skeleton-filled dungeon pit that he has had installed in his NYC penthouse apartment.

At this point, Pretty Boy begins to see the error of his ways, and after some weeks of imprisonment and privation manages to make his escape and head back to Boystate for help.

Once the Skipper and his personal child army are on the case, it's all over for Big Shot. He doesn't even get the satisfaction of executing his prisoner thanks to the repentant Pretty Boy.

And speaking of Pretty Boy, he reforms and sheds his former, weird-to-type-this-many-times-in-short-succession name for the impersonal M-4 as he joins the Boystate Rangers and trades in his former rough and tumble lifestyle for one of blissful militarized conformity.

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 792: THE OCTOPUS

(Target Comics v1 003, 1940)

I'm going to start out by saying that I have no idea why this story is called "Return of the Octopus!" as this is as far as I can tell both the first and last appearance of the character. Both the title and the Octopus' costume seem to be dramatic flourishes that don't really play out in the text of the story.

I do really like the Octopus' costume, though. It's got a lot of low-effort charm, though now that I think of it I have no idea how easy it would be to source a green sweater with a large octopus decal on it c. 1940.

Sadly, the Octopus shucks his disguise after one panel when he has to answer an inquiry from Treasury Agent Chick Farrell at his funeral home front, and this is where the other part of his character design comes into play, as physically he embodies a whole set of characteristics that were associated with undertakers in the early 20th Century and beyond: cadaverous face, unnerving stare, unnatural posture, old-fashioned clothing - general creep vibes. This is of course a slander against the hard-working undertakers of the world, but what can you do?

The extant copy of this comic is unfortunately missing the one or two pages that close this story. At the end of the part that is available, the Octopus has just murdered his accomplice (his kidnap victim's crooked uncle) and is about to get away on a boat, so based on my long experience in reading comic books I'd say that there's a 70/30 split on the odds of whether he eventually drowns or is arrested.

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 049

Pretty diverse bunch this time.

the Lone Rider: 

Another masked cowboy hero dispensing justice from the barrel of the gun in the Old Modern West to throw in the pile. The Lone Rider does have the distinction of having been created by Jack Kirby for a very short-lived comic strip and recycled by Eastern Color for comic book content. 

Having read through a decent chunk of the Lone Rider's appearances, I'm pretty sure that Texas never actually put in an appearance, and that Pepito had maybe one panel to shine in - those are the risks you run when you start off with a cast of characters entry, I suppose. (Famous Funnies 062, 1939)

the White Streak: 

Discovered by archaeologist Simms and his guide Ramon in a temple that is inside of a small mountain that has risen out of a dead volcano (which is in turn in the fictional country of Payan, in  actual South America), the White Streak is an android built by the ancient dead civilization of Utopia, which perished in war and gifted their creation to the future as a way to prevent war from destroying any more civilizations. And by "the White Streak" I mean "Manowar," which was clearly intended to be his super-hero name but was changed  for some reason - he's barely even referred to as the White Streak for the first issue. Whatever his name, he took his mission very seriously: if you were in the business of promoting or profiting from war you could expect a very violent visit from the White Streak.

At first, Manowar's powers were limited to his electric vision and a bit of enhanced agility, but over time they expanded to include super strength, an electrical force field that still sometimes unnervingly came out of his eyes, and electrical constructs (most frequently a ladder, for some reason). (Target Comics v1 001, 1940)

UPDATES: 1940 

Boystate: 

Okay, so Boystate is an indeterminably large chunk of land somewhere in the US within a few hours drive from NYC, containing a city (Boyville, natch) and founded and run by a fellow known as the Skipper (the Confederate officer-looking fellow, above) and his aide the Captain (the other guy). Boystate is unsurprisingly populated by boys, and has as its charter a dedication to bringing those often troubled boys up to be fine upstanding men.

Of course this is all taking place in a comic that is written and set in 1940, so the comic's views on how boys might be guided into that upstanding manhood involve a lot of homemade militia activity and discipline through violence, as seen here as new recruit Speck is smacked down by Boystate Ranger V.Y.

The other hallmarks of the Boystate comics are 1) a deep love of pointless callsigns - everyone is V.Y. or X-1 and travel from Point 6-A to Tower 2-R and on and on in a way that makes your eyes glaze over, and 2) an absurd variety of cosmic ray-powered sci-fi technology, courtesy of the Skipper's genius.

In addition to the identity-stripping numerical designations, Boystate is simply chockablock with pseudo-military ranks and divisions for the boys to aspire to join so that they can spend their time patrolling Boystate airspace and riding her borders and chasing down passing cars to check if they're stolen... frankly, if they weren't collectively the protagonists of a comic book series in which they are described a good and true and aspirational Americans I would be tempted to call Boystate a nightmarish authoritarian police state/cult. Did I mention that the Skipper not only has a machine that can take video of anywhere in Boystate but also one that can read minds? (Target Comics v1 001, 1940)

Spacehawk:

As a big fan of Basil Wolverton, I wish that he'd had more opportunities to create science fiction comics during the time that he was interested in doing so, but in the absence of that, Spacehawk is pretty great. A mind-reading physical titan of unknown origin who metes out justice to the scum of the Solar System, Spacehawk is much more of a space-based super-hero than his contemporaries, and his alien foes are appropriately Wolvertonian grotesques who reflect their evil nature in their outward appearances.

Sadly, Novelty Press was The Company Where Whimsy Was Not Welcome, and in 1941 Spacehawk was relocated to Earth to battle the Axis instead of all of those unrealistic aliens. Don't get me wrong: Basil Wolverton comics about Spacehawk beating up Nazis are still pretty great, just not as great as ones about him beating up aliens. The move to 1940s Earth does introduce the as-far-as-I-know never answered question of just where all of the humans in the earlier Spacehawk comics were from, which is a fun if brief diversion.

Finally, there's a very minor bit of suspense in the first few Spacehawk stories over just what he is under that mask of his - an alien? a robot? something weirder? - but it turns out that he's a hunk. Spoilers, I guess. (Target Comics v1 005, 1940)

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 021

Another truckload of half-baked mooks for your viewing pleasure.

The otherwise-normal gangsters who have gotten ahold of a piece of superscience and are using it for crime are an important part of the super-hero comic ecosystem. Here is a wonderful example of such in the form of a gang who have access to disintegrator ray pistols and are using them like regular guns during a bank robbery. Fantastic stuff. The Invisible Avenger hits them with a train. (Superworld Comics 002, 1940)

He may be a mere hold-up man in a bandit mask (surely the lowest tier of costumed villainy until the invention of putting a nylon stocking on your head) but I am very pleased to tell you that this fellow's real name is Solo Mogart. Also that he eventually gets beaten up by the Raven. (Sure-Fire Comics 002, 1940)

This fairly nondescript gang of generically foreign spies have access to an invisible fighter plane and the best thing they could think to use it for was smuggling people into the US. Baffling! They make the mistake of tangling with flying cadet Lucky Byrd and end up in the slammer. (Target Comics v1 003, 1940)

This fellow is pretending to be Rip van Winkle or an analogous long-term sleeper for some reason related to moonshining. Maybe the full plot is interesting enough to be an entry on its own but sadly the extant copy of this comic is missing the first few pages of this story and so I have very little idea what is going on. He gets beat up and tossed in the clink thanks to crusading reporter Phil Manners. (Target Comics v1 003, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 791: CATS ROMELT

(Lightning Comics 004, 1940)

Though Cats Romelt is the head of a gang of river pirates who organizes a fake warehouse guard union in order to call a general strike and leave the dock warehouses easy pickings, none of this is the reason for his being here. No, it is his sheer bloody-minded commitment to using starved alley cats with poisoned claws as weapons of terror and mass destruction that tipped him over into the category of super-villain. It's an idea that certainly works better on paper than in practice, but the real question is: is he constantly doing it because his nickname is "Cats" or is that his nickname because he breaks out a poison-clawed alley cat as the solution to any problem?