(More Fun Comics 074, 1941) Captain Black Jack is your typical modern pirate, albeit a very charmingly-written one. He took a look at the nautical landscape of the early 40s and saw a niche that he could fill: that of the buccaneer. He raids a yacht and comes into conflict with Aquaman and almost comes out on top but makes the key mistake of trying to drown an amphibious man and ends up blown to Kingdom Come for his efforts….
(More Fun Comics 074, 1941) “The Voice” is such a cool and evocative name that I have a real bias in favour of it but I have to say that this guy leaves me cold. Basically, he’s some sort of science man who has invented a “sound destroyer” capable of dampening all noise in an area the size of Manhattan. His crime-gambit involves employing this device and deploying sign language fluent gangsters to cause mayhem during the resultant confusion, then…
(More Fun Comics 074, 1941) Another day, another Avenger. This Avenger is a disgruntled scientist named Mortimer Crandall who is seeking revenge on his old bosses for firing him because of his wacky scientific theories that, you guessed it, turned out to be correct. He uses his working technology to kidnap the men responsible in preparation for their murders. This Avenger also demonstrates a flair for comic-book style hypnosis sufficient to place the Spectre himself under his power, which is…
(More Fun Comics 073, 1941) Just a Central American general trying to overthrow his government with crypto-fascist backing, foiled by Clip Carson because he and his men were covered with rice from their rice warehouse HQ. Much more interesting is the fact that this is one of the occasional comics set in a real country but with off-the-cuff, made-up information. In this case, it’s the fact that Clip is in Honduras at the behest of its president, who is a…
(More Fun Comics 073, 1941) As our tale begins, a figure in black knight’s armour roams New York City, destroying statuary seemingly at random. Johnny Quick soon gets involved and ferrets out a link between the destroyed pieces: they all once belonged to a man implausibly named Black Knight, who went bankrupt and was forced to sell them. The statues turned out to be worth a great deal more than Knight paid for them and the prevailing theory is that…
(More Fun Comics 073, 1941) This is not a new development but having Johnny Quick and Green Arrow’s debuts so close together made me realize that a minor sea change had happened some time in 1941: whereas the earliest super-heroes would start out collaring regular crooks we’re entering an era in which super-villains are the norm! (that said, Aquaman’s debut is in this issue as well and he just blows up a few Nazis). As for the Masked Man (our…
(More Fun Comics 072, 1941) The Hook is in reality cannery cwner Rand Greer, who has a lucrative sideline in smuggling jewels inside of frozen fish (and a less lucrative hobby of murdering FBI agents). To justify the name, Greer has a hook hand concealed under a fake plastic hand (a pretty good one honestly – I reckon he’s holding a fish with it in the first image). There’s really nothing to this guy and I’d ordinarily banish him to…
(More Fun Comics 072, 1941) The Murder Maestro comes out swinging with a rapid-fire campaign of musical murder. Over the course of two days he delivers five musical warnings followed by song-inspired deathtraps to members of the Tin Pan Alley Club, e.g., “I’m Walking on Air” delivered via singing telegram followed by an attempt to hang the recipient from a light aircraft. This of course leads to one of my favourite setups: a collection of possible suspects. Not as much…
(More Fun Comics 072, 1941) The Dark Vapor (one of my trademark Unofficial Names) is just that: a misty entity that emerges from an old jar of mysterious provenance and possesses simple farmer Hiram Spiezel. The Vapor-driven Hiram immediately heads for the big city of Cliffland NJ and starts wheeling and dealing, becoming a stock marked player and a real estate tycoon almost overnight. And soon after that, he starts evicting tenants, bilking people and falsifying records: capitalism to Mega-Capitalism,…
(More Fun Comics 071, 1941) Adam Igorovich! Your typical scientist unhinged by his treatment by the scientific community, who deemed his theories impractical and/or dangerous and/or insane, so now he is striking back at the world using those selfsame theories to get his back. If we’ve seen it once we’ve seen it a million times. There’s one important difference between the machinations of Adam Igorovich and those of, say, the Master (the last Russian-ish scientist we saw battle Dr Fate):…