We’ve met a few of them in the past, but here’s another dose of the inhabitants of the Fourth Dimension, as explored by Flip Falcon. Zezo: Zezo works for the Fourth Dimensional villain Lucifer as a guardian. We don’t learn too much about this fellow – is he a one-off or representative of a whole species, for example – but I like his moxie and his big teeth. (Fantastic Comics 015, 1941) Koggo: Koggo is an even more mysterious fellow…
(Fantastic Comics 016, 1941) We all remember the Serpent Lady, who lived in an underwater city with a bunch of weird ghouls and used her pet sea serpent to kidnap people for her minions to eat. And we all remember how Sub Saunders showed up and killed her serpent but let her go free for some reason (the reason is because she is a sexy lady who walks around in a gold bikini top). Well, the Serpent Lady hasn’t just…
I hope you like aliens, because I just can’t stop finding new ones. Kobolians: The Kobolians are from the underwater city of Kobol in the year 10 000 CE, and while we don’t learn too much about how their society functions we can intuit a certain amount of civic pride, given that their leader is named Lobok – did he rise to power on the strength of that name? Did he adopt it? Is the city named after him? Whichever it is,…
Celebrated by none… until now. And then only mildly. Slavin: This masked man is the leader of a gang who have been systematically robbing warehouses and then burning them down. The culprit turns out to be Slavin, the general manager of the warehousing company, and not the red herring suspect Slivers, owner of the company (who is ugly, and therefore more likely to be evil than the handsome Slavin). PI Dan Williams is too enlightened to judge others based on…
Once again I am inviting you to look at some aliens. Martian Sky-Demons: We only really ever see the space fleet belonging to these Martians, who have thrown in with the Axis forces to lend their “long-range, disintegrating super-bombs” to the invasion of North America. What they look like is left as just as much a mystery as what they are getting out this alliance with the Nazis. The Sky-Demons end up wasting their payload of super-bombs on a replica…
(Fantastic Comics 015, 1941) I’ve mentioned this in the past but it bears repeating: some Golden Age comics read like a fever dream, in which barely connected events just kind of float by as you read. This story is one of those, but also has a sort of exquisite corpse quality in that the connections between events almost make sense but when you step back and look at the whole it is astonishing. To whit: – Samson and David are just hanging…
Let’s spare a thought for all the mad lab assistants who do so much for so little credit. Rokula: Rokula’s plan is simple: kidnap inventors and then use his mind control machine to force them to work for him. Hey, it’s a classic for a reason, but it’s also a plan with a high chance of attracting super-heroic attention such as that of Zongar the Miracle Man. Rokula might be a fan of the classics but like so many of…
(Fantastic Comics 014, 1941) We open on a mysterious figure using backwards-talk magic to raise hundreds of spirits from their graves and shunt them into the Fourth Dimension. To what end? We shall learn that soon! Flip Falcon, expert in all things fourth dimensional. is contacted by Dr Thorne of the Institute of Science asking for help with this problem. You might have noticed that Dr Thorne is also the name of Minor Super Villain 965, and that is because…
It’s an all-movies episode of Media in Comics! Movies: London Strikes Back – Hard! is the film follow-up to London Can Take It, with both featuring an actor playing costumed vigilante London and the narration of Marc Holmes, London’s secret identity. As a bonus, please note the wild nasal apparatus that Imperial Studios required to put a toothbrush mustache on the actor playing Hitler. (Daredevil Comics 005, 1941) We don’t too much of the action of Wild Mesa as it is filmed on…
(The Face 001, 1941) “Sparky Watts” was a long-running comic feature in Big Shot Comics and other Columbia publications about the eponymous Sparky Watts, a down-on-his-luck young man whose life turns around when scientist Doc Static gives him super powers using his cosmic ray machine. Having started out as a comic strip, Watts’ adventures tend to hew closer to the comic adventurous rather than the super-heroic. Still, every once in a while he encounters a minor super-villain such as the Shark. The…