The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: good henchmen

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 885: THE GHOST

    (Wow Comics 002, 1941) 

    After a particularly fraught meeting of the Orphan Society, at which the charity’s president Henry Suffridge accuses everyone present of potentially being responsible for some recent embezzlement, board member Jones is accosted by some spooky scary ghosts and skeletons while muttering to himself on his way home. They warn him in no uncertain terms to leave town – is he the embezzler, being punished for his misdeeds by the spirits of the dead?

    No he is not, as it turns out, because Mr Scarlet is on hand to demonstrate that these are in fact fully tangible, fully punchable goons in sheets and skeleton costumes with a layer of phosphorescent paint over top (specifically radium paint, in fact. Woof, as if being a costumed henchman wasn’t enough, now there’s an increased cancer risk?)

    The point of the whole charade is to scare Jones into leaving town because he knows who is responsible for the embezzlement. Are ghosts and skeletons better at doing that than a dozen large men with guns? The Ghost is betting that they are!

    And just who is this Ghost? Why, it’s Henry Suffridge, literally the only other named character in the story! Well, I guess there were fellow Orphan Society board members Crane and Petrie but considering that they each showed up for about one and a half panels I think that we can safely say that they were outside of the suspect pool. Ultimately, it’s a lot of grandiose window-dressing for a grubby little crime, done poorly. For shame, Ghost.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 873: SATAN

    (Zip Comics 003, 1940)

    Zambini (the Miracle Man) is on his first vacation in years and Satan, presuming that his guard will be down or that he left his magic amulet at home I guess, decides that this is the perfect time to attack and murder him for being such a thorn in the side of Evil. 

    (Please note the near-identical guy kind of capering behind Satan’s throne up there, as he represents my favourite thing about this adventure, that Satan rules over a nation of devils (the Devil Men) who all look pretty much exactly the same as him. Some of them have red hair or different beard styles, but over all they are the most homogeneous demon army I have ever seen,

    Also, I know that trying to formulate a coherent cosmology out of any comic book company’s output will be a fool’s errand for some time yet, but it’s interesting that Satan and the Devil appear to be two seperate entities in the MLJ/Archie afterlife) 

    In case it wasn’t clear up above: I don’t think that this is a very good plan on Satan’s part. Like, why not attack Zambini while he is tackling another problem instead of while he is having a nice rest? Why attempt to kill him with a tidal wave, the well-known slow and ominous disaster, rather than something quick and sudden that he doesn’t have time to react to by, as in this case, freezing the ocean?  

    Satan’s next move is to send some Devil Men to attack Zambini directly (and looking at them here I must say that there are two faces in the devil nation: the classic devil face of the black haired Devil Men and the more cavemanish look of the red haired ones). They fare no better than the tidal wave and are transformed into a flock of presumably infernal penguins that presumably must be bedevilling the seas to this day.

    Zambini decides to take the battle to Satan, and here’s where I’ll give the ol’ Prince of Lies a little credit: he did plan for this eventuality, in the form of a really horrible cage that takes advantage of Zambini’s weakness to human touch by being made entirely out of human hands. It’s honestly one of the worst things that I have seen in a depiction of comic book Hell!

    Satan of course follows this up with the worst plan ever devised: he has his guys push the cage into a big fire in an attempt to kill Zambini, without reckoning with the fact that the unprotected human hands will probably be destroyed more quickly than the asbestos suit-clad magician. Sure enough: Zambini emerges from the flames unharmed and strikes Satan dead.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 872: TEXA

    (Zip Comics 003, 1940)

    The Scarlet Avenger looks out his window one sunny day and sees “DEATH TO THE SCARLET AVENGER” in skywriting. This, it turns out is a very effective ploy, as when he flies up to check it out he is swarmed and captured by some very off-model pterodactyls.

    The beasts take him to a dirigible, where he is is introduced to Texa, an eight foot tall woman and self-proclaimed “Queen of Crime,” who is looking to rob Fort Knox and wisely set out to eliminate the Scarlet Avenger ahead of time rather than wait and do it on the day.

    The Scarlet Avenger is of course loaded down with little gadgets, and he manages to escape from Texa’s deathtrap by employing, in turn, his personal electric field, smokescreen and capsule parachute, proving once again that super-villains should have better procedures in place for searching captives.

    Please note the companionable arm that Texa has around one of her minions (called variously the Tribe of the Hood and the Hooded Tribe, FYI) in that second-last panel. I like that! It suggests a better-than-average minion work experience.

    Believing that the Scarlet Avenger is dead, Texa proceeds with her admittedly very cool plan to use a big magnet to pick up the entire Fort Knox vault and fly away with it, upon which the very much alive Avenger and his legion of operatives fly up and release the magnet using anti-magnetic rays. Fort Knox is saved, albeit probably very banged up.

    The Scarlet Avenger is shot down by a very cool bubble weapon, leading to a cliffhanger as he is pinned by dirigible fire in the Kentucky desert*. Will he make it out of this overwhelming display of firepower?

    *just why is there a desert landscape in Kentucky? It’s equally likely that:

    a. That wasn’t literally supposed to be Fort Knox but a fictional US Gold Reserve in a more Western state

    b. The air battle ranged a bit farther than depicted on-panel

    c. the artist just kind of drew what they wanted and hang the geography 

    The answer is of course yes, and for the simple reason that as the story in Zip Comics 004 begins, Texa abruptly decides to capture the Scarlet Avenger rather than kill him. Out come the “pterodactyls” once more! Plus the Tribe of the Hood decide to put on shirts.

    Texa employs the mind-bending properties of the Chamber of Disks to render the Scarlet Avenger susceptible to hypnotic mind control so that she can use him and his network in her next plot: to kidnap FDR! 

    Spoiler: the Scarlet Avenger is not really hypnotized and rather than aiding Texa he is working against her.

    A faceless FDR is saved from the now-fully-clothed and jetpack-equipped Tribe of the Hood by the last-minute intervention of the Scarlet Avenger, which is good, but I can’t help but think that he could have mitigated the danger to the president somewhat by turning on Texa before she had him encased in an electric force field.

    Our second cliffhanger! Texas men have the Scarlet Avenger’s operatives under heavy fire, as their boss rides a jetpack man up to the dirigible to help them! Will they make it out of this one alive? 

    Indeed they will! The Scarlet Avenger arrives just in time to prevent Texa from killing his top aide Operative 12, upon which the villain dumps the entire Scarlet Avenger organization out a trap door. Everyone floats down using their personal parachute capsules and presumably feels grateful that the Scarlet Avenger isn’t the kind of boss who keeps all the gadgets for himself.

    Texa’s final ploy involves raising a criminal army by doing a mass jailbreak of Alcatraz, which always seems to me like a way to acquire a pretty motley crew of henchmen with a really wide range of skills and attitudes toward employment as faceless cogs, but who am I to critique a plan like this? I’ve never even broken one guy out of jail to be my minion.

    It’s no surprise that the Scarlet Avengers operatives show up to stop this operation, and since Texa is once again employing her super magnet, they are all kitted out in cool non-ferrous outfits and wielding… copper machine guns I guess. It’s very good look for them!

    Texa’s dirigible ends up on the wrong end of one too many ray gun blasts from the Scarlet Avenger’s rocket plane and goes down in flames, taking the entire Tribe of the Hood with it, but Texa herself escapes in perhaps the coolest possible manner: in a transparent cube carried by pterodactyls. It’s a heck of a way to make an exit and one that stands, as she never appears again. Somewhere an eight foot tall gandma is reminiscing about the glory days, I guess (obviously I reckon that Texa should be BROUGHT BACK in a more modern Archie super-hero comic. People would go nuts for this big tall crime lady!).

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 022

    MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 022

    The Ethic Committee is going to have a field day.  

    Dr Belos is a single-issue mad scientist: he wants to turn men into birds, and to that end he has set up camp in a place called the Valley of Terror and gotten to work creating surgical chimeras called Vulture Men. His downfall comes about because he kidnaps surgeon Dr D’arne to act as his unwilling assistant, thus causing D’Arne’s daughter to bring in the Flame to help rescue him. 

    Please also note that Belos has a single long fang in place of one of his lower incisors. 

    Despite looking more like human-reptile than human-bird hybrids, the Vulture Men are some classic examples of monstrous humanoid henchmen. They also get mercilessly slaughtered by the Flame instead of perhaps being captured and restored to human form, like so many of the monstrously transformed in comics are. I guess next time they shouldn’t be transformed into bird guys against their wills.

    Though the Flame really wrecks up his operation, Dr Belos’ true nemesis turns out to be the pitching arm of Dr D’Arne, when he flings what is presumably a Vulture Man skull with sufficient force to kill the mad scientist outright. Then the Flame destroys Belos’ dam and floods the Valley of Terror for good measure. (Wonderworld Comics 015, 1940)

    Dr Grant was kicked out of the Scientist’s Society for his theories, and while I always have some sympathy for the villains who are reacting to hidebound thinkers and their ways, one must consider that his response to this slight is to start collapsing bridges with his friction-neutralizing ray. If this is the way that Grant typically escalates conflict, maybe it wasn’t his theories but his interpersonal skills that got him kicked out of the Society in the first place. 

    Grant’s comes into conflict with newsreel camerawoman Patty O’Day and eventually gets shot by Patty’s assistant Ham. (Wonderworld Comics 018, 1940)

    Zarhov is what I would call a pretty mad scientist, who has transformed a lady into a huge apelike creature called Zozo and is now looking to do the same to the daughter of his enemy Dr Carr. Luckily for Carr, he is friends with Yarko the Great (comics are full of older scientists with no wife and one beautiful adult daughter, and they seem to make up 100% of Yarko’s social circle), who manages to baffle Zozo long enough for her monster rage to turn on Zahrov. Zozo gets off lightly compared to fellow transformees like the Vulture Men, because Yarko the Great has the means and inclination to turn her back into a human being. (Wonderworld Comics 020, 1940) 

    Godfrey Calkins, described as a “retired millionaire business man” has an interesting idea that he seems to want to employ for normal, non-criminal means: he wants to freeze people so that they can better withstand the rigours of space travel. A noble goal! The problem lies in his experimental methodology: instead of starting out with animal testing and then perhaps moving on to volunteers, Calkins has decided to move straight to human trials on some kidnapped teenagers. And what’s worse is that he acquires those teenagers by derailing an entire train full of football boosters into a river with the expectation that there would probably be a survivor or two. Truly a wretched man! 

    Luckily for the teens in question, they are Dusty Davis and Janey Smart, classmates and pals of Atom Blake, Boy Wizard, and he soon shows up to beat the tar out of Calkins and his goons and to retrieve and thaw out Janey from the Venus-bound rocket she was already setting out on. No word on what subsequently happened to Calkins – perhaps he had to pay a small fine. (Wow Comics 001, 1940) 

  • MAD AND CRIMINAL SCIENTIST ROUND-UP 022

    The Ethic Committee is going to have a field day.  

    Dr Belos is a single-issue mad scientist: he wants to turn men into birds, and to that end he has set up camp in a place called the Valley of Terror and gotten to work creating surgical chimeras called Vulture Men. His downfall comes about because he kidnaps surgeon Dr D’arne to act as his unwilling assistant, thus causing D’Arne’s daughter to bring in the Flame to help rescue him. 

    Please also note that Belos has a single long fang in place of one of his lower incisors. 

    Despite looking more like human-reptile than human-bird hybrids, the Vulture Men are some classic examples of monstrous humanoid henchmen. They also get mercilessly slaughtered by the Flame instead of perhaps being captured and restored to human form, like so many of the monstrously transformed in comics are. I guess next time they shouldn’t be transformed into bird guys against their wills.

    Though the Flame really wrecks up his operation, Dr Belos’ true nemesis turns out to be the pitching arm of Dr D’Arne, when he flings what is presumably a Vulture Man skull with sufficient force to kill the mad scientist outright. Then the Flame destroys Belos’ dam and floods the Valley of Terror for good measure. (Wonderworld Comics 015, 1940)

    Dr Grant was kicked out of the Scientist’s Society for his theories, and while I always have some sympathy for the villains who are reacting to hidebound thinkers and their ways, one must consider that his response to this slight is to start collapsing bridges with his friction-neutralizing ray. If this is the way that Grant typically escalates conflict, maybe it wasn’t his theories but his interpersonal skills that got him kicked out of the Society in the first place. 

    Grant’s comes into conflict with newsreel camerawoman Patty O’Day and eventually gets shot by Patty’s assistant Ham. (Wonderworld Comics 018, 1940)

    Zarhov is what I would call a pretty mad scientist, who has transformed a lady into a huge apelike creature called Zozo and is now looking to do the same to the daughter of his enemy Dr Carr. Luckily for Carr, he is friends with Yarko the Great (comics are full of older scientists with no wife and one beautiful adult daughter, and they seem to make up 100% of Yarko’s social circle), who manages to baffle Zozo long enough for her monster rage to turn on Zahrov. Zozo gets off lightly compared to fellow transformees like the Vulture Men, because Yarko the Great has the means and inclination to turn her back into a human being. (Wonderworld Comics 020, 1940) 

    Godfrey Calkins, described as a “retired millionaire business man” has an interesting idea that he seems to want to employ for normal, non-criminal means: he wants to freeze people so that they can better withstand the rigours of space travel. A noble goal! The problem lies in his experimental methodology: instead of starting out with animal testing and then perhaps moving on to volunteers, Calkins has decided to move straight to human trials on some kidnapped teenagers. And what’s worse is that he acquires those teenagers by derailing an entire train full of football boosters into a river with the expectation that there would probably be a survivor or two. Truly a wretched man! 

    Luckily for the teens in question, they are Dusty Davis and Janey Smart, classmates and pals of Atom Blake, Boy Wizard, and he soon shows up to beat the tar out of Calkins and his goons and to retrieve and thaw out Janey from the Venus-bound rocket she was already setting out on. No word on what subsequently happened to Calkins – perhaps he had to pay a small fine. (Wow Comics 001, 1940) 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 869: THE BLACK KNIGHT

    (Zip Comics 001, 1940)

    Shortly after giving himself super powers, Steel Sterling gets word of a brutal bank robbery in the town of Beeville and sets out to bring the culprits to justice. Determining that the crooks must have been guided by a mastermind of some sort, he trails their plane to a mountaintop fortress.

    The bow-wielding guards outside the Black Knight’s fortress (spoiler: it’s the Black Knight’s fortress, but what were you expecting) are notable for being the one time that he has anything related to his chosen theme around, and even they are supposedly only there to prevent… mountain cops?… from hearing the sound of gunfire. Inside, it’s plain old gangsters.

    Gangsters armed with ordinary machine guns are of course no match for a man with all the properties of steel, and Steel Sterling quickly makes his way to the Black Knight’s throne room, where he is immediately dropped into a deep pit full of rats.

    I’d just like to take a second here to appreciate the fact that the Black Knight’s costume is a) 100% brown and yellow with no black at all and b) a pretty conventional super-person getup aside from what appears to be a leather jerkin or similar. Historical, yes, but not particularly knightly. 

    A pit full of rats is also not enough to stop Steel Sterling, and he makes his way out, causes the Black Knight himself to fall in, and sets out after the fleeing gangsters just in time to avoid a secondary deathtrap as the fortress explodes behind him. The Black Knight is finished, it seems.

    The Black Knight is not, in fact, finished, and is soon (Zip Comics 002) hard at work robbing gold and fur shipments coming out of Alaska. Though he manages to capture Steel Sterling when he infiltrates the villain’s fake iceberg base he does a bad job of coming up with a suitable deathtrap for the hero and ends up in the hands of the US Navy.

    Steel Sterling’s next case brings him to the South American nation of Brazonia, where a man called Dr Yar has taken the famous scientist Walter Cummings in order to force him to develop weapons of war and help conquer the gold-rich country. 

    Dr Yar is of course eventually revealed to be an alias (or possibly the real identity?) of the Black Knight. Just why he has abandoned his old moniker is unstated but perhaps it is as simple as a desire not to attract the attention of Steel Sterling again. His new look is at least still visually interesting – particularly the periscopiscopes, which are of course goggles which allow 360 degree vision.

    Dr Yar really leans into the scientist aspect of his new identity, and deploys gadgets such as: flying tanks, oil bombs, electric rays and various viewscreens and visualizers.

    Plus: he not only has Alligator Men at his disposal but also a swarm of giant mosquitoes straight out of an ad for a pest control company (being big does not help them bate through steel skin, alas). 

    Once again the Black Knight/Dr Yar apparently meets his end, and this time it’s explicitly at the hands of Steel Sterling, who stuffs him into the barrel of his own super-howitzer before it fires. A truly brutal end, even for a dedicated super-villain. (Zip Comics 003, 1940)

    Steel doesn’t have to live with any guilt he might feel for long, however, as the Black Knight returns in the next issue, this time climbing the rungs of the aristocracy from mere knighthood to become the Radium King. His new plan is simple: steal the entire US radium supply and then ransom it back for 30 million dollars.

    The Radium King has appropriately impressive digs: an underwater base in Lake Superior that would probably be pretty hard to find if one of his minions hadn’t blabbed under threat of a beating from Steel Sterling.

    The Radium King costume turns out to borrow heavily from the original Black Knight getup, although without a lot of the yellow elements. I’d say that it’s better than the Dr Yar outfit but not as composed as the original, and that the half-mask/mustache combo is particularly unpleasant. Speaking of Dr Yar, the Radium King reveals that he survived Steel’s attempted cannon execution by simply crawling back out of the cannon.

    Not to be robbed of a kill, Steel Sterling uses the Radium King’s own submarine to blow him and his base to high heaven. Surely he’s dead this time! (Zip Comics 004, 1940)

    Not quite! The Black Knight’s fifth and final appearance (under the original name, this time) is probably his most ignominious, though it does feature his cool underground city headquarters, seen above. In it, he engages in a campaign of sabotage, kidnapping and extortion against his former kidnap victim/current minor member of Steel Sterling’s supporting cast Walter Cummings, who has gone into the munitions manufacturing game and has gotten the contract to produce the mysterious Zeta Ray for the US government. Somehow, if the Black Knight can delay production of the US Zeta Ray for long enough then his own scientists can produce one for him and that will be good, and if that description seems vague to you then I must assure you that it is 100% accurate to the comic. I don’t even know what the Zeta Ray does, for heaven’s sake.

    Though Cummings’ first factory is destroyed and his second collapses due to some sabotaged cement, Steel Sterling steps in and has almost completed a third when the Black Knight decides to take a personal hand and ram a tanker truck full of TNT into it. Now here’s the embarrassing part: not only does Steel Sterling handily prevent the truck from destroying the factory, but the first time that he is even aware that the Black Knight is involved in the plot against Dr Cummings is when he spots him just one fraction of a second before he is atomized in the explosion. It’s not even as dignified an end as being shot out of your own cannon would have been. (Zip Comics 005, 1940) 

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 863: KARNO THE CHESS MAN

    (Wonderworld Comics 009, 1940)

    Detective Dr Fung’s pal Dan Barrister racks up one of the swifter “this information is impossible/ the impossible thing is right behind me” turnarounds in comics history when he and Dr Fung are kidnapped by a Moth Man about 1.5 seconds after he expresses disbelief in the existence of Moth Men who kidnap people. It turns out that the Moth Men in question work for a super-villainous type named Karno the Chess Man (sometimes Chessman) who lives in what I would call an excessively stair-filled cave considering the tiny little wheels on his mobility aid.

    And just why is Karno sending moth-themed henchmen to kidnap people? Why because he doesn’t have a full chess set yet and so he must transform moderately thematically-appropriate people into the pieces he is missing. Yes, Karno is an obsessive criminal of the sort that we usually getting punched out by Batman in the 1960s and he thinks that Dr Fung would make a distinguished king.

    Dr Fung is no slouch, however, and while the Moth Men are subduing Dan Barrister he slips off into the shadows and starts blasting henchmen with their own ray rifles. In short order he, Dan and Irene Jonson (previously destined to be turned into a chess queen) are winging their way home courtesy of the Chess Man’s own ray-powered person launcher, though Karno takes a page from Dr Fung’s playbook and escapes in the commotion.

    Karno returns in Wonderworld Comics 010, as Dan and Dr Fung return to capture him once and for all, and he is not only easy to track down but almost shockingly easy to disarm, as Dr Fung demonstrates using a moist handkerchief.

    The big confrontation between Fung and the Chess Man, as exciting and action-packed as it is, is interrupted by some unfortunate activity in the depths of Karno’s lair, proving once again that the coolness factor of living inside an active volcano always comes at a price.

    Dr Fung, Dan and Karno make their escape just ahead of a wave of flowing lava – no word on whether any of the Moth Men made it out – and Karno is so grateful for their efforts in saving him that he resolves to turn over a new leaf and turn himself in. A surprisingly wholesome end to the tale, for once!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 863: KARNO THE CHESS MAN

    (Wonderworld Comics 009, 1940)

    Detective Dr Fung’s pal Dan Barrister racks up one of the swifter “this information is impossible/ the impossible thing is right behind me” turnarounds in comics history when he and Dr Fung are kidnapped by a Moth Man about 1.5 seconds after he expresses disbelief in the existence of Moth Men who kidnap people. It turns out that the Moth Men in question work for a super-villainous type named Karno the Chess Man (sometimes Chessman) who lives in what I would call an excessively stair-filled cave considering the tiny little wheels on his mobility aid.

    And just why is Karno sending moth-themed henchmen to kidnap people? Why because he doesn’t have a full chess set yet and so he must transform moderately thematically-appropriate people into the pieces he is missing. Yes, Karno is an obsessive criminal of the sort that we usually getting punched out by Batman in the 1960s and he thinks that Dr Fung would make a distinguished king.

    Dr Fung is no slouch, however, and while the Moth Men are subduing Dan Barrister he slips off into the shadows and starts blasting henchmen with their own ray rifles. In short order he, Dan and Irene Jonson (previously destined to be turned into a chess queen) are winging their way home courtesy of the Chess Man’s own ray-powered person launcher, though Karno takes a page from Dr Fung’s playbook and escapes in the commotion.

    Karno returns in Wonderworld Comics 010, as Dan and Dr Fung return to capture him once and for all, and he is not only easy to track down but almost shockingly easy to disarm, as Dr Fung demonstrates using a moist handkerchief.

    The big confrontation between Fung and the Chess Man, as exciting and action-packed as it is, is interrupted by some unfortunate activity in the depths of Karno’s lair, proving once again that the coolness factor of living inside an active volcano always comes at a price.

    Dr Fung, Dan and Karno make their escape just ahead of a wave of flowing lava – no word on whether any of the Moth Men made it out – and Karno is so grateful for their efforts in saving him that he resolves to turn over a new leaf and turn himself in. A surprisingly wholesome end to the tale, for once!

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 044 UPDATE: THE MASK (REVISITED)

    (Whiz Comics 002-011, 1940) 

    I first wrote about the Mask back in the early days when I was trying to keep things short – a laudible goal and one I have not always stuck to, but there’s such a thing as too short, especially when talking about Spy Smasher’s only real enemy for about a year and a half. In the spirit of correcting that, here are some of the more interesting moments from the Mask’s 1940 appearances.

    To start, I had completely forgotten or perhaps never realized that the Mask was set up to possibly be Alan Armstrong, who is of course in actuality Spy Smasher. The only real swing at establishing the ambiguity of Armstrong’s secret identity comes in their collective first appearance in Whiz Comics 002, when they are both established as operating out of estates in Virginia. After that it’s just the Mask’s hairline and the fact that neither of their identities have been revealed that are left to do all of the heavy lifting. 

    In Whiz Comics 003b, the Mask establishes a secret artillery base in the Rockies in order to shoot down US planes on behalf of the Rooskans.

    Whiz 005 features him stealing a pretty nifty heat ray tank. 

    in Whiz Comics 006, the Mask attempts to destroy a new US battleship (and incidentally kill Eve and Admiral Corby) with a cheeky little exploding champagne bottle.

    Whiz 008 features one of my very favourite types of henchmen: the former professional who has turned their skills to crime, in this case a former baseball pitcher-turned assassin named Bean Ball who kills via baseball to the head. The Mask’s forces this issue also include a (tragically unseen) criminal scientist named Doc Greazbl.

    Finally, Whiz Comics 011 features the Mask’s second eccentric artillery emplacement of the year, in a penthouse apartment overlooking New York Harbor. Fun! 

    (this is also the issue in which the Mask is established to be very racist… less fun)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 044 UPDATE: THE MASK (REVISITED)

    (Whiz Comics 002-011, 1940) 

    I first wrote about the Mask back in the early days when I was trying to keep things short – a laudible goal and one I have not always stuck to, but there’s such a thing as too short, especially when talking about Spy Smasher’s only real enemy for about a year and a half. In the spirit of correcting that, here are some of the more interesting moments from the Mask’s 1940 appearances.

    To start, I had completely forgotten or perhaps never realized that the Mask was set up to possibly be Alan Armstrong, who is of course in actuality Spy Smasher. The only real swing at establishing the ambiguity of Armstrong’s secret identity comes in their collective first appearance in Whiz Comics 002, when they are both established as operating out of estates in Virginia. After that it’s just the Mask’s hairline and the fact that neither of their identities have been revealed that are left to do all of the heavy lifting. 

    In Whiz Comics 003b, the Mask establishes a secret artillery base in the Rockies in order to shoot down US planes on behalf of the Rooskans.

    Whiz 005 features him stealing a pretty nifty heat ray tank. 

    in Whiz Comics 006, the Mask attempts to destroy a new US battleship (and incidentally kill Eve and Admiral Corby) with a cheeky little exploding champagne bottle.

    Whiz 008 features one of my very favourite types of henchmen: the former professional who has turned their skills to crime, in this case a former baseball pitcher-turned assassin named Bean Ball who kills via baseball to the head. The Mask’s forces this issue also include a (tragically unseen) criminal scientist named Doc Greazbl.

    Finally, Whiz Comics 011 features the Mask’s second eccentric artillery emplacement of the year, in a penthouse apartment overlooking New York Harbor. Fun! 

    (this is also the issue in which the Mask is established to be very racist… less fun)