Novelty Press character round-up, more like.
the Chameleon:
An unnamed master of disguise (throughout his 1940 appearances, at least) who dispenses vigilante justice on an ad hoc basis, the Chameleon’s major distinction is that his name is always written in cursive. Other than that: he’s got a chauffeur/sidekick (Slim) and a bumbling police nemesis (Inspector Parks) and somehow manages to simultaneously be one of those heroes who is wanted by the law and whose identity and address are just kind of common knowledge. (Target Comics v1 006, 1940)
the Blue Zombie:
“Fantastic Feature Films” was a strip that ran in the first couple of years of Target Comics, with the same conceit as Ed Wheelan’s Minute Movies: that the stories being presented were films in which the were being portrayed by a pool of fictional actors – the titular Blue Zombie of this feature, for instance, was played by Orson Black, a Boris Karloff-style Man of a Thousand Faces. This is a fantastic fictional conceit and I am surprised that it hasn’t cropped up more over the years.
In the fictional movie The Blue Zombie, Bolshemanian scientist Igor Zamoisky rebels against his country’s warmongering dictator and heads to the neighbouring country of Coreland in order to put his scientific discoveries to use in thwarting a Bolshemanian invasion. Discovering a lost Bolshemanian battalion that succumbed to the harsh Corelian winter, he attempts to restore one of them, his old friend Nicholas Samousk, to life. Instead of a restored Samousk, his experiment produces a bright blue zombie version of his friend who responds to his mental commands but cannot think for itself. Zamoisky restores the rest of the battalion in a similar fashion and uses them to crush the Bolshemanian invasion of Coreland, then sets off with his zombie army to free his homeland.
Obviously describing a one-off like the Blue Zombie as a super-hero is a bit of a stretch, but a) he’s not that far off of the Purple Zombie in his origin and general deal, b) I wanted an excuse to talk about the fictional-actors-in-fictional-film conceit and c) the Blue Zombie is a really good name. (Target Comics v1 006, 1940)
the Target:
It’s always fun when an old-school anthology comic book gets a character to match its name fairly late in the game and to prove my point here’s the Target, showing up in the tenth issue of Target Comics.
The Target makes his debut with a big advertising push to really get the word out that he is out to crush crime in his version of NYC: full page newspaper ads, messages on the radio, threatening telegrams sent directly to crooks… at one point a lady calls that number that used to tell you the correct time and a recording of the Target tells her to keep her nose clean. It’s really the opposite of the modern Batman as Urban Legend school of superhero mystique.
The Target’s gimmick is also Batman adjacent: like 50s 60s 70s whichever era’s Batman first justified the yellow circle on his chest as a bulletproof target for crooks to aim at, the Target is running around with a literal target painted on his chest (and back) because he has a bulletproof leotard on underneath. Just why the fact that his legs are unprotected is a) necessary and b) emphasized is never really addressed.
Finally, the Target has a thematically appropriate calling card, a dart. We’ll see how long he keeps using it for. (Target Comics v1 010, 1940)
the Targeteers:
The more astute readers among you might have noticed that I didn’t really go into the actual origin of the Target in his own entry, and that’s because it’s tied in with that of his sidekicks the Targeteers and so we’re covering them all at once.
So: Niles Reed is a brilliant but aimless metallurgist whose only relative, brother and New York City District Attorney Bill Reed, is framed for murder and scheduled to be executed at Sing Sing.
Niles dons a domino mask and attempts to bust Bill out during his final prison transfer but the guards manage to hit Bill during their escape. After a heartfelt “why me?” Bill dies and Niles buries him in an unmarked grave, which means that he’s still considered to be at large, an evocative detail that I had hoped would lead to something like Niles hinting that the Target is actually Bill to throw suspicion off of himself and flush out the crooks who framed him, it never really seems to come up again.
This would ordinarily be the point in an origin story in which the costume would come into play, there’s one more step to the Target’s origin and that’s the Targeteers.
See, Niles is wandering the streets at night, trying to figure out just what he can do in the face of an uncaring world in which innocent district attorneys are gunned down in the street for merely trying to break jail, when he runs off some thugs who are attempting to kill or at least maim two teenage boys, Dave and Tommy. It turns out that the kids are both orphans who also hate crime because the crooks had already killed their father (well, one father and one unofficial adopted father, but why get technical).
Having two young wards who love to talk about getting real beefy and wiping out crime is the final catalyst for Niles, who remembers that he has some superscientific bulletproof material and three super-hero costumes just lying around, and since the three were playing darts when they came up with the idea the whole endeavour ends up being dart and target themed (and as this is possibly my favourite style of generic supersuit it’s nice to see three people running around in it at once).
The two lads collectively go by the Targeteers, which is a nice change of pace from teen sidekicks who just go by their own names. Finally, according to some dialogue later in the comic the jailbreak, ad hoc funeral, befriending of the boys, making costumes and the initial Target adventure in the previous issue (including the entire publicity blitz) all take place in about a week, which is very efficient. (Target Comics v1 011, 1940)
