(Blue Ribbon Comics 016, 1941) There’s a quality that some comic book characters have and some do not and I never knew about it until I started writing this blog. That quality is called Standing in Clear View So That I Can Get a Screengrab of Them, and buddy, the Black Hand does not have it. This is about as good of a full look as you get of the guy in his first appearance. Enough complaining! The Black Hand…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 016, 1941) The Green Ghoul is a demonic creature either summoned or created by the demon known as the Dictator as a very successful method of getting Mr Justice to leave him alone. He appears on a US beach and lays waste to an unfortunate couple before heading to the unnamed New York City-alike that Mr Justice calls home. Like I said, the Green Ghoul is a distraction, so it’s understandable that its plans lack nuance. To…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 013, 1941) I had two surprises coming to me when I read the first appearance of this fellow: 1) though there are a fair few Golden and Silver Age comics that posit some sort of supernatural element to the evils of the Axis power – deals with the Devil, influence by one or another god of war, etc – but this is the earliest example I’ve seen of one of their leaders actually being a supernatural evil….
How did these real people come to be trapped in the 2D realm? We may never know Adolf Hitler: This one is more tenuous but Blitz Krieg here is Fuehrer of the pseudo-Nazi Bundonian forces in America. He’s not not a Hitler analog. (Blue Ribbon Comics 006, 1940) This is Boris Thorax, first foe of Rex Dexter of Mars, who collaborates with the Moon People in order to take over the Earth of 2000 AD. Look at that hair: that’s…
Lotsa lil guys. Mr Justice: Like the Spectre or the Wraith (or Sergeant Spook or the Gay Ghost or the Ghost Patrol…), Mr Justice is your classic restless spirit who remains on Earth to mete out justice to the wicked. Specifically, Mr Justice is the 200 year old ghost of the fictional English Prince James, cruelly slain by followers of Prince Richard during the Rogers Rebellion of the 1740s. Astute readers and students of history might have noticed a few…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 012, 1941) Here’s a story about my powers of observation: I immediately noticed that our friend Rialb here had a backward name and spent a good half hour trying to figure out which Blair he might be named in reference to (a 1940s spiritualist? a famous skeptic?) before my eyes drifted slightly to the left and I took in the fact that the story was written by Joe Blair. I still have no idea why Joe Blair…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 011, 1941) We open not on the King of the Vampires but on a different vampire, one with a monocle. This is Carlos Hubbello, a diplomatic envoy from South America who has been sent to discuss a trade deal with the US that would leave the Nazis in the cold. The two gentlemen with him are no gentlemen at all but rather Nazi spies who are controlling Hubbello by the simple expedient of having turned him into…
Some say they’re not generic enough but I think they’re trying their best. This fellow is part of a gang looking to hijack a shipment of railway guns from train engineer Runaway Ronson. I really enjoy the look of the padded suit they use to help survive crashing a car into a high-speed train but I really really enjoy the fact that they immediately scramble off into the woods and are never seen again, as if they were completely unrelated…
I have a lot of these in a spreadsheet somewhere but we’ll get to those later. For now it’s as we encounter them: real people and versions of real people and analogs of real people and also the same but famous fictional people in comics. Admiral Dewey, John Paul Jones, Sir Francis Drake: Their ghosts all volunteer to help Sergeant Spook go pirate hunting (Blue Bolt v1 008, 1941) Adolf Hitler: “Gustave Ritter” isn’t really very close to “Adolf Hitler”…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 008, 1941) Technically, Natcha is just another costumed gang boss, but she has a lot more style than you usually get with those. This being MLJ’s Hercules, Natcha is thematically linked to one of his iconic Twelve Labours, in this case the theft of the Girdle of Hippolyta. Of course, this version of Hercules was ridding the ancient world of evil rather than atoning for his own crimes via arbitrarily hard tasks, so the girdle doesn’t come…