Category: Flash Comics

(Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)

I have a lot of fondness for the Faultless Four, the first super-foes of original Flash Jay Garrick. Firstly and most simply, they are a perfect illustration of the power creep that super-heroes introduced to comic books: where this group of criminal scientists armed with mildly-fantastic skills and tactics would have been sufficient to occupy your traditional adventure hero for months if not years, the Flash walks all over them without a care in the world. Crime must adapt to this new reality!

The second reason for my fondness requires a breakdown of the membership, so here we go, from left to right above:

Sieur Satan: The biggest talker of the group and absolutely the one with the best look. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking of him as the leader of the Faultless Four even though the only real indication of this is his big mouth. The only thing he actually accomplishes, in fact, is to kill the other three as part of an attempt to get the Flash.

Serge Orloff: Does absolutely nothing aside from looking cool. He might be suggesting that he is a great enough surgeon that he can bring the dead back to life in the above panel but I wouldn’t believe that he could do it unless I saw the frankenstein in question myself.

Duriel: I always remember Duriel as “the handsome one” but he’s actually a very weird looking dude! In charge of torturing the Flash’s future father in-law Major Williams for information, he also is the group’s resident pilot.

Smythe: Absent from the first panel for a very good reason – Smythe is the guy who seems to do all of the footwork for the group. He’s the one who does a drive-by assassination attempt on Joan Williams and then later the one who goes to steal the (nonexistent) corpse in order to taunt Major Williams with it. He even has a minion of his very own! A little hearse driver guy!

There’s a correlation here: how visually interesting a member of the Faultless Four is is inversely proportional to how useful they are. Thus, the one member of the gang to make a second appearance (in a Roy Thomas-penned All-Srar Squadron annual, natch) is Sieur Satan, the biggest fuckup and coolest-looking of the bunch. And as an indignity for poor Smythe alone, his entire role is taken by Duriel in the Secret Origins retelling of the story, leaving him to just stand around like some sort of Serge Orloff until he gets electrocuted.

In conclusion, Sieur is a semi-archaic French honorific that is a root of the more familiar monsieur.