Superfolk galore!
the Buzzard:
In an unnamed New-York-alike city, the gadgeteering mayor equips a young man with a suite of devices to help him engage in a vigilante crusade against crime. Chief among these gadgets is a gas that makes whomever it touches resemble a balding, big-nosed man in thick glasses and a tailcoat – the perfect disguise! Armed with this gas, plus some clawed gloves and a heat ray, the Buzzard begins tearing his way through the city’s underworld.
The gas also seems to allow the Buzzard to make his shadow resemble his namesake bird, an ability that is very useful for vexing the city’s Buzzard-hating police chief who, it turns out, is also the father of the Buzzard’s secret identity.
I unironically love the Buzzard and his whole weird setup, and while I find most modern revivals of public domain Golden Age characters to be a pretty mixed bag, I’m pretty bummed that none of them have elevated him out of his single issue obscurity – he’s got a real weirdo charm that the fiftieth version of the Nedor characters can’t approach. (Wham Comics 002, 1940)
the Cyclone:
The Cyclone is really Peter Grant, a young man who has a fairly unique version of the Batman origin, which of course is when a tragedy inspires an obsessive dedication to training and working toward some related goal, i.e., in Batman’s case the murder of his parents inspiring his eternal war against crime. The real twist in the Cyclone’s case seems to be the total absence of a motivation: Grant just woke up one day and decided to turn his body into a living weapon to aim at evil.
The Cyclone is presented as being a regular human and so I had been assuming that the whirlwind patterns around his lower body when he jumps around were a stylistic choice meant to represent his fantastic leaping ability. They really are some enormous jumps, however, so it’s also possible that the Cyclone is meant to have some sort of wind-assisted jumping power. He only had three adventures, alas, so we shall never know. (Whirlwind Comics 001, 1940)
Ibis the Invincible:
Ibis the Invincible, aka Prince Amentep, is a 12th Dynasty Egyptian who just kind of spontaneously comes back to life after 4000 years as a mummy. Why? Well, it’s not spelled out until the 1942 Ibis the Invincible series, but spoilers: his true love had been shot with an arrow that put her to sleep for those four millennia and he put himself in a magical sleep of his own in order to be with her again.
Ibis achieves this state of mystic sleep with the aid of the Ibistick, a magical wand capable of very nearly anything. Much like his fellow Golden Age magical super-heroes, Ibis’ near-omnipotence can occasionally seem plot-obliteratingly powerful.
The key difference between Ibis and his contemporaries, however, is that the Ibistick is a small object that is constantly being lost or stolen. Further, it requires absolutely no special knowledge to be used and can be operated by both children and animals with ease. More than a few of Ibis’ greatest foes (e.g., the Hobo-Millionaire) are simply regular humans armed with his own magic wand. The caveat to all this is the fact that the Ibistick will never harm its true owner, and will in fact inflict any baleful magic cast from it at him back on its wielder. This means that Ibis is able to defeat an evil wielder of the Ibistick by merely being annoying enough that they try to turn him into a toad or gold or ice or on on memorable occasion to mind control Taia into stabbing him to death and then wait for it to backfire on them. (Whiz Comics 002, 1940)
Taia:
Taia is the 4000-year-sleeping love for whom Ibis the Invincible made his way to the future. After a bit of moping around the globe he manages to track down her mummy and revive her, upon which they kind of implicitly are a married couple. While I very much enjoy Taia and the dynamic she has with Ibis, she does get a pretty raw deal – being your own husband’s de facto sidekick is bad enough, but Taia very rarely gets to be anything more than a kidnap victim/bargaining chip. The few modern versions of Ibis the Invincible try to do more with her, but they still don’t do much.
Taia is said to be cousin to “Senwosri III” who is probably meant to be Pharaoh Senusret III, given that Taia and Ibis are said to be from the 12th Dynasty. So that’s something. (Whiz Comics 002, 1940)
