(All-Flash 001, 1941)
Category: Flash
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MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 001
Like costumed villains, there are a lot of scientists out there doing crimes involving superscience but just missing the levels of interest, ambition or scale to graduate to true super-villain status. Sometimes this is because of poor planning or lack of vision and others just have the misfortune to run into a protagonist while still in the initial stages of their venture. And don’t they deserve a forum just as much as the generic costumed villains we all love?
Julius Korn:
Our first science fiend is Julius Korn, who takes over a lighthouse with his crew of misfits in order to use his ray machine to sink passing ships. It’s unclear just why he does this – is it a weapons test, a piracy scheme, fifth column activity or plain sadism? – but he is thwarted by sea rover Dusty Dane and his pal Big Mike Cardigan and ends his days like so many other comic book scientists: exploding along with his invention. (Feature Comics 048, 1941)
the Professor:
The Professor here operated a scheme whereby he used a magnetic engine killing ray to bring down mail planes in Arizona’s Painted Desert. As befits a scientist operating in cowboy territory, he was willing to get his hands a bit dirtier than your typical effete science-man, but even that wasn’t enough to save him from the Fargo Kid. (Feature Comics 051, 1941)
Unnamed Scientist:
This unnamed fellow went to the trouble of developing anti-Flash technology – specifically, glasses with rotating lenses that allow him to see fast-moving objects – to protect his kidnap gang rather than, say, moving to another city (or marketing his glasses somewhere, natch) (Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)
(Trophy Room bonus: the Flash keeps the glasses)
Dr Jennings:
This here’s Dr Jennings, who works in a research lab with Jay “the Flash” Garrick and kidnaps a lot of people to live out his dream of establishing a colony on Mars but then is betrayed by his venture capitalist partner Enzil who just wants to establish himself as a Martian tyrant in a story that feels oddly prescient somehow? Anyhow the Flash is more focused on rehabilitation than your average Golden Age hero and so Jennings is allowed to go back to his old life after Enzil is vaporized by spider-aliens. (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)
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NOTES – MARCH 2023
New Powers:
An injured Hawkman is tended to by birds and learns to speak their language. (Flash Comics v1 023, 1941)
Just some of my favourite alien designs ever: the Kriglo AKA Martian Spider-Men (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)
Super Hero Costume Party:
Hawkman attends a costume party with Shiera Sanders as Hawkgirl. Though not the first time she wore the costume, this does mark the start of the two as a crime-fighting duo ongoing, no matter what stinky ol’ Hawkman says. (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)
Rick Raleigh might have intended to attend this party as the Red Bee in that classic cheeky move, but ended up getting mixed up in a murder and attending as a different guy dressed as the Red Bee. (Hit Comics 014, 1941)
Really enjoy the selection of creature that inhabit the inner earth in the year 50029 CE: Mud Men, Rock Men, hot ladies, and down at the very bottom: guys with beards. (Hit Comics 003, 1940)
Quality comics with another entry for the list of increasingly unhinged patriotic heroes: Don Glory, the xenophobic jingoist former boxer (Hit Comics 008, 1941)
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NOTES – MARCH 2023
New Powers:
An injured Hawkman is tended to by birds and learns to speak their language. (Flash Comics v1 023, 1941)
Just some of my favourite alien designs ever: the Kriglo AKA Martian Spider-Men (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)
Super Hero Costume Party:
Hawkman attends a costume party with Shiera Sanders as Hawkgirl. Though not the first time she wore the costume, this does mark the start of the two as a crime-fighting duo ongoing, no matter what stinky ol’ Hawkman says. (Flash Comics v1 024, 1941)
Rick Raleigh might have intended to attend this party as the Red Bee in that classic cheeky move, but ended up getting mixed up in a murder and attending as a different guy dressed as the Red Bee. (Hit Comics 014, 1941)
Really enjoy the selection of creature that inhabit the inner earth in the year 50029 CE: Mud Men, Rock Men, hot ladies, and down at the very bottom: guys with beards. (Hit Comics 003, 1940)
Quality comics with another entry for the list of increasingly unhinged patriotic heroes: Don Glory, the xenophobic jingoist former boxer (Hit Comics 008, 1941)
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A VEXING CONUNDRUM: KEYSTONE CITY
In short: the state of online wiki-based comics scholarship run by people with poor reading comprehension and an adherence to post-hoc continuity decisions makes it very hard to determine when Jay Garrick explicitly starts operating out of Keystone City as the Flash.
Flash Comics v1 001 features his origin at Midwestern University, which has since been located in Keystone, but does not mention the city by name. For the rest of 1940 at least, he is pretty explicitly in NYC. No idea when the move happens, guess I’ll have to keep on reading and see.
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 233: THE VANDAL
(Flash Comics v1 005, 1940)
The Vandal is a wealthy art collector who kills artists to increase the value of their works and has a bunch of hired goons steal art for him. The best thing about him is his name/ concept, that his art collection would be as impactful to the art world as the ancient Vandals supposedly were in antiquity. Since he’s a Golden Age Flash villain, he mostly exists to be trolled at super-speed.
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 229: THE FAULTLESS FOUR
(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.
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NOTES: JANUARY 2023
Names:
Bulldog Teeters. (Feature Comics 044, 1941)
Zero the Ghost Detective getting straight-up punched by a ghost. (Feature Comics 051, 1941)
Dates: Johnny Thunder born 7th July, 1917 (Flash Comics v1 001, 1940)
Calling Cards:
He only ever used ’em a couple of times but the Flash had metal lightning bolt dart calling cards.Costumes:
Absolutely the best Hawkman costume variant is the brief period in which he wore a big hat in the shape of a sassy hawk’s head (Flash Comics v1 003, 1940) -
TROPHY ROOM – FLASH
(All-Star Comics 002, 1940)
Not terribly fantastic as trophies go – a run-of-the-mill political boss tries to kill a newspaper publisher – but if the Flash wants a filthy old bullet, he can have it.
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TROPHY ROOM – FLASH
(All-Star Comics 002, 1940)
Not terribly fantastic as trophies go – a run-of-the-mill political boss tries to kill a newspaper publisher – but if the Flash wants a filthy old bullet, he can have it.
