(Marvel Mystery Comics 003, 1940)
Though Namor started his comics journey as an outright villain, by his third appearance, the world was ready to see a softer side of him. This journey to redemption begins when the police notice just how horny he was in his last outing and assign NYPD officer Betty Dean to capture him. On her own with no backup, of course.
Despite the fact that her boss is seemingly trying to commit murder by super-villain on her, Betty is very good at her job and puts a plan into place that theoretically has the Sub-Mariner at her mercy: she lurks around the waterfront with a swimsuit under her clothes until someone spots Namor in the vicinity and then pretends to be drowning. Once he has answered the siren call of an attractive woman in trouble, Betty employs Sherlock Holmes’ favourite means of capturing someone: get close to them and then put a gun to their head.
Alas for Betty, while this plan would have worked if Namor had been an ordinary swimming murderer, he is in fact a bulletproof fish man and she ends up stranded on a buoy far out at sea. It is at this point, however that Namor performs his very first super-heroic act: when confronted with a sea battle between a British convoy and some German sea raiders, he instinctively comes to the aid of the underdog and sinks the Nazis.
Betty takes this as an opportunity to explain that Americans are, like, totally peaceful and would never blow up Atlantis on purpose, and actually manages to sway his opinion! No more will he war on the USA, unless another attractive woman takes the time to point out that maybe they would have if they thought it was a good idea or profitable enough or might have inconvenienced the English/French/Spanish depending on historical era.
Namor returns to Atlantis’ cool-ass iceberg palace in Marvel Mystery Comics v1 004 and convinces the Emperor and never-before-seen Council of Three to change their minds about the US in about five minutes, then sets out with a fleet of Atlantis’ finest steam-powered (I’m sorry: artificial steam-powered) aerial submarines to wage war on the Axis. I’m not going to cover a lot of it because it’s pretty repetitive, but a large part of Namor’s Golden Age super-heroic career consists of sallying forth with the Atlantean Aerial Navy and blowing up huge chunks of the German and Japanese Navies. Like he possibly blows up more ships than the Axis actually possessed.
Don’t think that we have seen the last of the villainous Namor, by the way, because that guy is always lurking in the (small, ankle-mounted) wings.
