MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 860: MUSKOG

(Whirlwind Comics 002, 1940)

This is Muskog, ruler of the Earth's core in the far-future year of 1980 CE and total dick. Muskog has been blasting the surface of the planet with a static electricity ray for seemingly no reason whatsoever, or at least no reason that he cares to state. This of course attracts the attention of crack science adventurer Bruce Barlow, who ventures into the molten depths on behalf of his people to ask "how come?"

There are precisely three things I want to note about Muskog's sole appearance. The first is simply to note that his name is infuriatingly close to muskeg, the Arctic/subarctic bog biome. Is this a coincidence, or did Bruce Barlow's unknown creator(s) know and love the word as much as I do?

Secondly, we must mention Barlow's method of getting to the centre of the Earth: via a capsule that is shot out of a big gun into a volcanic crater. Never has any idea so neatly conveyed how simultaneously wonderful and dumb comic books can be. And how is he going to get back, you ask? Why by means of an "upward space helmet" that will simply float him back through the fiery mantle.

Finally, as always, I must take note of any time that an alien or otherwise nonhuman species crops up in which the males are, e.g., bug-eyed green weirdos but the females are conventionally attractive human women, as seen here in the person of Muskog's rebellious daughter Eda. Ah, the wonders of evolution.

Eda frees Barlow, allowing him to destroy the irreplaceable explosion machines,  but unfortunately is unable to join him on his voyage through thousands of kilometres of molten rock because she is wounded. Barlow promises to return and is later seen trying to spin this return voyage not as a sex thing but as being in the interests of science, heh heh.

Bruce Barlow is of course honoured by the surface world for his efforts, and this gives us the opportunity to see that the US flag of 1980 has only 28 stars - what great calamity has caused 20 whole states to succeed/ be kicked out/ other? Worldbuilding!

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World leaders and others. 

Adolf Hitler: 

I'm pretty sure that the "Navy Jones" strip is set in an undefined near-future time, which makes the Dictator of Europe here a future analog of Adolf Hitler rather than a stand-in for him. I'm almost certain that that's the case. Anyway, he tries to invade the US with a fleet of amphibious tanks and gets his ass handed to him by Navy Jones and his fish men. (Weird Comics 008, 1940)

Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling: 

Styled as Madame and Generalissimo "Kang Shy-check," the former comes to adventurer Shanghai Sheridan for aid after the latter is captured by Japanese collaborator Wu Fang. (Top-Notch Comics 005, 1940)

Clyde Beatty: 

Famous animal trainer and circus mogul Clyde Beatty had a long-running strip across several Dell Comics titles, though given that the supporting cast and premise tended to reset to zero every time the strip changed hands it might be more accurate to say that he had a sequential series of features linked only by his presence. (Crackajack Funnies 001, 1938)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

A fairly off-model FDR chairs an emergency meeting to discuss what to do about an alien invasion. (War Comics 002, 1940)

J Edgar Hoover: 

The Sparkler accepts an assignment from "head G-Man"/his old college roommate's dad M.L. Roover. (Wham Comics 002, 1940)

Sténio Vincent: 

I don't necessarily trust the creators of the "Voodoo Man" feature to even remember that it is set in Haiti, let alone go to the trouble to accurately represent Haiti's president on-panel, so I have to give it to them: this is an okay drawing of Sténio Vincent, the President of Haiti c. 1940. Was it done on purpose? Nobody can say. (Weird Comics 004, 1940) 

Gaius Marius & Sulla: 

It's impossible to be certain if Marius and Sulla, the Roman figures associated with the origin of super-hero the Dart, are in fact meant to be Gaius Marius and Sulla, the political figures from the late Roman Republic, but the timeline almost matches up. Plus, there really weren't that many Sullas running around Rome. (Weird Comics 005, 1940) 

Mata Hari: 

Just a notorious spy named Hattie Mary in the comedy melodrama comic strip "Hairbreadth Harry". (Famous Funnies 074, 1940) 

Winston Churchill: 

Inspector Blake of Scotland Yard is called to 10 Downing Street to talk to the Prime Minister, and it sure doesn't look like he's Winston Churchill. I do like to roast comics for not getting the appearances of world leaders right, but when it's somewhere like Madagascar you might at least have the excuse that finding a picture of the current leader of that country might be difficult in the US in 1940, but surely this not so for the Prime Minister of the UK.

The other possible defense for this, of course, is that this comic came out in June 1940 and Churchill took power in April so Neville Chamberlain might still have been PM when this was drawn, but this is hampered somewhat by the fact that it doesn't really look like him either. (Whirlwind Comics 001, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 859: TOKO THE TERRIBLE

(Whirlwind Comics 001, 1940)

In the far future of 1980 CE, Earth is under threat of conquest from space. A mysterious ray has dissolved the nation of Slovania, and now a being called Toko the Terrible, Emperor of Saturn has issued an ultimatum: surrender to him or the entire Earth will suffer the same fate.

This of course will not stand, and Earth sends their best guy (Bruce Barlow), to deal with the threat of Toko.

Barlow, being a man of action, immediately attacks Toko and calls him insane, getting himself thrown into the very cool-sounding Prison of Invisible Bars for his trouble. This proves not to be a terrible, species-ending blunder by a real meathead as it might have originally appeared but instead a masterstroke of strategy, as while stewing behind (invisible) bars, he meets Professor Jenkins, first human on Saturn and the original inventor of the Ultra-Dissolvo-Raygun, bane of Slovania. Together, they bust Bruce out of jail, prevent the dissolving of Earth and turn the ray on Toko himself, which has the knockon effect of freeing the citizens of Saturn from his vile influence. Plus he had already conquered the rest of the Solar System, so they all get freed too!

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A wretched and motley crew for ye this day. 

Mikal, leader of the undersea pirates, is an evocative figure who exists only to pad out the Typhon story that he appears in by a couple of pages. In an attempt to aid his ally, the king of the Sea Demons, he gets off one good hydro-jet blast at Typhon's submarine before he and his entire undersea fortress are annihilated by the sub's hydro-ray. (Weird Comics 005, 1940)

Friends, I am 100% sure that "the War Maniac" is just being used as a standard 1939-1941 paper-thin obfuscation of the fact that they're talking about Hitler, and yet it's such an excellent villain name that I am compelled to make note of it as if it were describing an armoured giant from a 60s Jack Kirby comic. (Weird Comics 007, 1940)

The Boss, leader of a gang that targets the members of a private club that the Eagle belongs to in his secret identity of Bill Powers, turns out to be Rider, the club secretary, who might have been a great gang boss but really should have thought to keep his huge and distinctive wrist scar covered up in at least one of his identities. (Weird Comics 008, 1940)

Queen Marie is a gang boss who styles herself as royalty, which just barely lines up with her diamond-smuggling concerns. I would call it a 100% charming affectation if her definition of queendom didn't include having a throne room dotted with African slaves. Queen or not, her gang beat up by the Sparkler and she gets shipped off the the hoosegow. (Wham Comics 002, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 858: THE FROST

(Wham Comics 002, 1940)

Just after Blue Fire gets his powers and vows to use them to beat up "criminals, racketeers and foreign spies" he is served a chance to do so on a silver platter when his local newspaper carries an account of a ship at sea being sabotaged by a very cold man who just stood around in the engine room until everything broke. 

Making his way to the ship in question, Blue Fire uses his intangibility power to invade the passengers' privacy by searching every stateroom until he finds some orders written in "a foreign language" that prove the saboteur's identity, just in time for the man himself to make an appearance. One hastily-gulped-down pill later, the man is revealed to be the Frost, which is a very good name for a cold guy. More importantly, the Frost might just be the best look for a cold-based character that I have ever seen - the heavy shading combined with the thick coat of clear ice is dynamite.

Since Blue Fire is not actually a fire guy but an intangibility guy, he and the Frost are purely thematic and not elemental opposites, and it in fact turns out that thanks to the always-on nature of Blue Fire's powers they are hilariously unable to do any harm to one another (though thanks to the Frost's motor mouth we do learn his precise weight, a bit of a rare occurrence in the days before the likes of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe). 

Blue Fire ends up retreating after the fight drags on long enough that he is at risk of becoming tangible again, and the Frost is able to make a getaway while his foe is rounding up the ship's crew to deal with him. And since Blue Fire never makes another appearance, the Frost is yet another super-crook left at large by default. Damn you, whims of the early comics industry!

(someone should absolutely steal the Frost's look for another cold cguy. It's dynamite, I tell you!

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Some of those reeeeal obscure guys today. 

Craig Carter:

Archaeologist Craig Carter wants to give up all the stuffy academia and become a crime fighter, and since he lives in a comic book universe, the very day he tells his girlfriend about this objectively bad decision he receives a magical ring in the mail from an old colleague whose life he had saved. This ring grants its wearer the ability to summon the gods of antiquity to aid them - in Carter's two adventures he summons Zeus, Mercury, Thor and Pluto, plus he gets Zeus to summon Pegasus for him, so presumably a whole world of magical beasts was also at his fingertips. Carter's second adventure ends with Pluto deciding not to return to the ring, which presumably would have set him up as a long-term antagonist. Alas this was not to be, as his second appearance was also his final appearance.

The ring is also hilariously sensitive with regards to its touch-activation, as seen here when a simple hand-pat causes Zeus to blow up the club. (Wham Comics 001, 1940)

Detecto:

Jack Strand is a radio scientist who has invented Detecto, a "wonder beam" that has "four unlimited powers": the ability to send and receive short wave radio, an engine killing effect, a force field and the ability to paralyze living things. As in a few other cases that we have encountered, the line between Detecto as a beam and Detecto as a kind of ambient energy field is a bit blurry, but whatever it is, Strand installs a transmitter in his car, making it into what is essentially a magical object. Would he be better off with a more portable version of Detecto, particularly as at least one of the powers, the radio, is commonly possessed by many cars already? Maybe. Am I sad that this was the only story about Detecto? Certainly, particularly as this was very much a tale of highway-based crime and I would love to see Detecto go up against someone in an airplane or maybe a building. (Wham Comics 001, 1940)

Blue Fire:

Blue Fire is actually scientist Jack Knapp, who acquired his powers through the ever-popular method of an unexpected explosion in his chemistry laboratory. Please note also that he was about to drink an unspecified formula just before this explosion occurred - is it the same as the explosive chemical that gave him his powers or was he about to unlock an entirely different suite of abilities?

Blue Fire takes his name from the halo of blue flames that surrounds him when his powers are active, Contrary to this external signifier, however, he does not have any kind of heat or flame based abilities but rather is an intangibility guy. This is by far the best thing about Blue Fire, by the way, and not just because of the name/power fakeout but because Blue Fire creator Louis Glanzman has effortlessly answered all of the nitpicky questions about intangibility (why can they still breathe? why don't they fall through the floor? why can they pick things up?) by establishing that Jack Knapp is effectively the opposite of ooblek: he functions as if tangible until enough force is exerted by or on his body, so that he can pick up a book but that same book will pass right through him if thrown. It's very neat and tidy!* 

Blue Fire has to drink some of the chemical created in the initial explosion to activate his powers, after which he has them for two whole hours. This is an interesting twist to the whole question of a secret identity, lying somewhere between the Hulk's "uncontrollable change for an indeterminate amount of time and the usual Archie Andrews-style running around in different hats that Superman and co. get up to. I'm surprised that I can't think of another character with this kind of life-complicating power setup. (Wham Comics 002, 1940)

*I am of course immediately imagining horror scenarios in which Blue Fire cannot breathe in a high wind or a high pressure atmosphere, where he jumps down from a small platform and then falls to the centre of the Earth, etc 

Solarman: 

Solarman and his mentor, the bat-eared Quino, are aliens from the enlightened planet Saturn who have been observing Earth for some time. Quino is so depressed over the crime and evil that is rampant on our planet that he almost heat-rays the entire thing before his Saturnian enlightenment kicks in and he reconsiders. Instead, the two hit upon a plan wherein Solarman will be blasted to Earth to fight crimes that the two have spotted via their viscopes and x-rayscopes.

Though Solarman is said to have "many powers" by Quino, the only one he displays while on his sole recorded mission to Earth is some moderate super strength. Still, this is more than enough to beat up gangster Al Ravoni's entire suite of henchmen and bring the fugitive himself to justice. Hopefully this kind of thing is enough to satisfy Quino's righteous bloodlust. (Wham Comics 002, 1940)

NOTES - SEPTEMBER 2025 PART 2

Once again there are too many different kinds of minutia for my tagging system's character limit.

Trophy Room - the Parachute Patrol:

British Boy Scout troop the Parachute Patrol capture a German Stuka and mount its propeller like a boar's head. (Wings Comics 004, 1940)