Some real niche characters this time. the Lone Star Rider: An Old West hero so generic he only appeared once and never even got to track down the owlhoots who killed his parents in order to steal their land. Good gloves. (Smash Comics 002, 1939) Shock Gibson: Like Barry Allen after him, Charles (later Robert) Gibson is a young scientist working late into a stormy night when he is simultaneously struck by lightning and bathed in chemicals. Though he is…
(Smash Comics 004, 1939) It’s a classic set-up: squat in some out-of the-way location – an isolated island, a desert, or as in this case the mountains of Alaska – bring down planes or draw in ships using a big magnet or fake monster or as here an engine-killing ray, and bingo bango bongo you have your own fleet. You can supply your own crew or save even more money like the Mad Professor by subjecting the existing crew to…
(Smash Comics 004, 1939) The real heyday of the capital-a Anarchist as societal boogeyman was in the 1920s by my reckoning and so you don’t get them in anything like the numbers of pseudo-Nazis and Yellow Perils in the comics of the 1930s, and then of course in the 1940s you get your Axis villains, followed by your dastardly Commies and this is all to say that I enjoy these fellows for their novelty if nothing else. As for their…
(Smash Comics 004, 1939) The Green Lizard is a Floridian crook who specializes in extorting wealthy men and then kidnapping them when they fail to pay. This is the sort of thing I’ve spoken of before and will again: it absolutely makes sense to adopt a colourful identity like this if you’re a criminal in a super-hero universe, even in the not-exactly-a-rich-and-interconnected-tapestry Quality universe of 1939, with stories of the Clock or Bozo the Iron Man trickling out of New…
(Smash Comics 004, 1939) We will be seeing more of Madame Doom, as she is Black X’s only real recurring foe (I think), but as far as 1939 goes she made one appearance and this is it. Madame Doom, a freelance spy, is working for “the dictators” in an attempt to steal US defense plans and prevent the signing of a pretty vague treaty that acts as a deus ex machina reason for war not to have broken out yet…
(Smash Comics 003, 1939) It’s a good name but I’m afraid that the Hooded Terror is just a stock crypto-fascist European saboteur attempting to destroy the Panama Canal and trap the US fleet in the Pacific in order to set up an invasion of the East Coast. It’s no great loss to fiction when he gets cold-cocked by G-2 agent Wings Wendall and left behind in a sinking submarine to drown. Other than some degree of admiration for his ability…
(Smash Comics 003, 1939) When a mysterious monster-man robs a London apartment by ripping a safe clean out of the wall, Captain Cook of Scotland Yard somehow intuits that this may be the work of disgraced London University scientist Professor Dwyer and manages to track him down to an abandoned castle on the moors outside the city (I take no responsibility for checking if there are moors just outside London. Or castles). His intuition is of course correct and he…
(Smash Comics 002, 1939) An art thief, but an audacious art thief. “?” is so-named because he sends a message signed thus to the Paris Prefect of Police warning that he would steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and then actually does it from under the noses of the Prefect, the police and Captain Cook of Scotland Yard. Like, while in the same room as them – he just hits the lights and grabs the painting. Then, a couple…
Once more they ride: the REAL PEOPLE OF COMICS Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln’s shadow is used to symbolize the power of the US exerting a calming effect on the European belligerents. (Smash Comics 005, 1939) Adolf Hitler: Chancellor Rudolf of Wurtberg here is a more dynamic than usual Hitler analog (Smash Comics 004, 1939) Misc minor appearances: Getting some bad news about Nazi operations in Yugoslavia (Blue Ribbon Comics 015, 1941) Captain Kidd: For no particular reason this aviator/ adventurer is…
(Smash Comics 001, 1939) We open on a city (later established as almost certainly NYC) in the grip of terror. A robot known as the Iron Monster is wantonly robbing and murdering and also stealing one or more babies for reasons that are never made clear. Seriously, we never find out what the deal was with those babies. The Iron Monster is the creation of Dr von Thorp, your classic scientist rejected from society for his outre beliefs, though considering…