MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 768: THE PURPLE PLAGUE

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 768: THE PURPLE PLAGUE

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(Startling Comics 001, 1940) Shortly after acquiring his super powers, Andrew “Captain Future” Bryant uses them to sniff out a criminal conspiracy to rob a gold shipment from the nation of Finvania and then use that capital to finance a bid for world domination by someone called the Purple Plague. Exactly the sort of thing that a fledgling super-hero is going to be against! Captain Future spends the bulk of the issue in a back-and-forth tussle with the Purple Plague’s…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 044

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 044

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A full hand of Better (Nedor/Standard/Pines) Comics characters for ye. Captain Future: When young Dr Andrew Bryant finds himself fired from his job as a… research physicist? electrical engineer?… at the Pacific Electrical Corporation he responds like any rational person would: by working day and night in in a desperate bid to finish his research in the time he has left, until his tired brain thinks its way into an industrial accident. Luckily for Bryant he lives in a super-hero…

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REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 013

REAL PERSON ROUND-UP 013

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Yet again we have a selection of comic book appearances of real-style people for you to enjoy. Adolf Hitler: Warak, dictator of Barbaria is a bit generic as far as pseudo-Hitlers go, but a pseudo-Hitler he is. (Smash Comics 017, 1940) Scraggs, leader of the Green Shirts, is very much a “make the leader look like Hitler as shorthand for These Guys Are Fascists” character, a subspecies that will nearly die out some time in 1941 but survives in small…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 043

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 043

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A grab bag of old characters I skipped over back in the early days when I thought that this blog wasn’t going to be completely self-indulgent.  Mr Clue:  He only had one adventure in which he solves the murder of a mayor by a police chief, but Mr Clue is too great a name not to take note of. (Master Comics 001, 1940) the Red Gaucho:  A swashbuckling hero in the Zorro mode, the Red Gaucho protects the South American…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 767: THE COUNT

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 767: THE COUNT

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(Speed Comics 009, 1940) The Count is a fairly by-the-book pseudo-Nazi spy with a very audacious plan for acquiring US military secrets: kidnap the US Secretary of State (a moderately off-model Cordell Hull) and extract them from him via gear-based torture. Unfortunately for the Count his plans were anticipated by the US Secret Service, who proactively substituted Ted Parrish, aka the Man With 1000 Faces, for Hull. Led to the spies’ farmhouse hideout by a special radium tracking device, the…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 766: COMRADE RATSKI

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 766: COMRADE RATSKI

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(Speed Comics 009, 1940) Comrade Ratski’s first appearance is fairly undistinguished as far as comic book spymasters go. Sent to subvert US war preparations, Ratski targets an airplane factory operating out of Hollywood, California (for some damn reason) and sensibly decides to do so under the guise of a war movie shoot next door, though at the point that you have all of the equipment required for such an attack in place, why bother going through with the “we’re just…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 552 UPDATE: BARON VON KAMPF (1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 552 UPDATE: BARON VON KAMPF (1940)

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Making his triumphant return to comics, the dome-headed goblin of crime: Baron von Kampf! Baron von Kampf’s initial return in Speed Comics 004 involves him heading a sabotage ring for an unnamed European nation that is probably meant to be Nazi Germany, and it’s possible that this is a relationship that were were meant to understand was behind his actions all along, but frankly it seems to me to be beneath him. The Baron’s schemes on behalf of his fascist…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 765: KILLRAYE

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 765: KILLRAYE

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(Speed Comics 007, 1940) Killraye is the leader of the extremely wild and wonderful looking Jupiter Men (courtesy of writer/artist/wild alien designer Munson Paddock) of an unspecified future, and leads them in an attempt to hijack plans for an advanced ray gun design from inter-planetary mail courier Mars Mason. (whether the Jupiter Men have a caste-based physiology and Killraye represents their ruling form or he is of a different species entirely is unclear. He certainly looks a lot different that…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 764: THE BLACK KNIGHTS

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 764: THE BLACK KNIGHTS

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(Speed Comics 008, 1940) Like I said in the Queen Sheba entry, her brand of evil was a bit too depressing and I almost skipped making an entry for her in favour of doing this one but it ended up being mostly about her and her unpunished slaving ways anyway, and that wasn’t fair. The Black Knights are just what it says on the tin: a bunch of knights who dress in black. Presumably they are descended from the same…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 763: QUEEN SHEBA

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 763: QUEEN SHEBA

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(Speed Comics 008, 1940) Shock Gibson has been reading magazines, specifically an expose on slave trading in Africa, and being of a heroic turn of mind he decides to do something about it. Making his way across the Atlantic, Shock engages in various animal-related hijinks before finally ambushing a slave caravan and using some elephant-based enhanced interrogation to learn just what is going on with all the slaving. Turns out to be a pretty classic jungle adventure scenario: a hidden…

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