(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940)
Mr Clipp here is our first villain with “Gyp” or “Gypsy” as a part of their name, and there are going to be a lot of them. On the one hand you have to cut the old-time creators a bit of slack, as the World Romani Congress didn’t officially vote to reject the term and all of its derivatives until 1971, but on the other hand they knew. “Gyp” is in the Top 50 in my spreadsheet of all the nicknames I come across (yes of course I have one of those) and unlike Red, Doc, Slim or Happy it is only ever given to crooks.
It therefore both makes sense and is very annoying that a Fletcher Hanks villain would be named such, because this is possibly the Platonic ideal of a Hanks story. Clipp and his pals here have an over-the-top plan to amass wealth: stop the rotation of the Earth, thus flinging all other humans off into space so that they can have all of the good stuff for themselves. And don’t worry about the good stuff also flying off into the endless void because they’ve used rays to stick everything that isn’t humans down.
Then we have one of those iconic Fletcher Hanks panels of all humans flying off into the lemon void. This is the kind of thing that Roy Lichtenstein would have been stealing if he wasn’t a coward.
After successfully ejecting all other humans from the planet, Clipp makes the amazing choiceto kill his two accomplices so as not to have to split the take, and while I was initially going to make a big deal about what a wild decision this is, it is in fact extremely consistent with his other actions in the story. You don’t get to the point that Clipp is at without something very wrong with the way you look at the world, but does he not realize that having unlimited wealth on an empty planet is a meaningless thing or does he simply not care and is content to sit on a pile of gold by himself until the canned goods run out, like a horrible little dragon?
We will never know the answer, because, deus ex machina, Stardust the Super Wizard shows up before anyone even has time to asphyxiate and uses one of his highly specific rays to restore everyone to their starting location!
Stardust of course does not waste time: Clipp is crumpled up in a big fist and tossed into space. This is the kind of Direct Action Irony we have come to expect and love from the big man.
The last few Stardust stories have featured crooks being taken to prison instead of messily killed and I kept thinking that that was unusually merciful for a character I had thought of as very harsh in his punishments, but if they’re all being shipped off to the Floating Prison of Eternal Space to be frozen yet aware for all eternity… that’s in character.
