(Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941) Whiz Wilson and his Futuroscope are once again engaging in the Doctor Who style of time travel, in which you just kind of pop into a random time and place and ask a bystander how things are going. In this case he has ended up in Florida in the year 3000, and the vest-wearing Florida Man he speaks to is pretty smug about how great things have been for the past thousand years. Perhaps he…
Number 1000!!* (Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941) The Old Man of the Pyramids summons (F)lash Lightning to his thundercloud lair to warn him about trouble at Midton College, and he is right, as can only be expected of a wise old oracular father figure. This particular trouble is called Professor Vatz and is a professor of chemistry who is ready to give up academia for the heady world of supercrime. Vatz’s new career is founded on two inventions: his “Hotlight,”…
(Lightning Comics v1 005, 1941) We meet Fang Ryan after he grabs a payroll from the recently-deceased messenger who was in the process of delivering it. He then escapes despite the fact that Police Detective Danny “the Raven” Dartin is on the scene to engage him in thrilling gunplay, but drops his signature weapon, a stick with a couple of snake fangs on one end. It’s a neat gimmick: the stick has a reservoir full of poison inside of it,…
(Liberty Scouts Comics 002, 1941) The Chief is one of two things, either a not-very-specific Hitler stand-in who is leading his forces from the front in an attempted invasion of the US, or the representative of such a figure in such an invasion. Either way, he is clearly a pseudo-Nazi. When we meet the Chief he is preoccupied with discovering the identities of the mysterious figures (who we know to be the Liberty Scouts) who have been thwarting his attempts…
(Jungle Comics 024, 1941) The Zombie Witch (aka the Queen of the Zombies, aka Celie) is, as the name suggests, a witch with a penchant for raising the dead – often while they are still actively being mourned. She demonstrates a few other magic powers (e.g., scrying in a bowl of water, crocodile charming) but the zombie thing is her bread and butter. So what, specifically, does she want a bunch of reanimated corpses for? Well! I won’t say that…
(Jungle Comics 022, 1941) Zuko, aka the Bird King, is in a lot of ways a very classic minor super-villain. He has an obsession with birds and has both a flock of trained vultures and a set of working bird wings for personal flight that he uses in the pursuit of crime. He also has an obsession with diamonds that makes him jealously guard the ones that he has collected, and stop at nothing, including kidnapping and murder, to acquire more. The…
(Jungle Comics 015, 1941) Org is a fellow with a gift – the power to play the drums hypnotically – and also the knowledge of the location of a hidden valley full of giant spiders. He combines these two factors as a part of his scheme to conquer “all of Jungleland,” which probably means Africa and possibly means India but in my heart will always mean a humid pocket dimension summoned into being by Fletcher Hanks and his fellow Jungle writers’ lack…
(Jungle Comics 014, 1941) Zomax, the “demonized marine scientist,” has a very over-the-top, Fletcher Hanks villain goal: to kill every animal in the jungle. And he isn’t afraid to say it. I won’t say that Zomax has a good reason for wanting to destroy all jungle life, but he does have some justification, stemming from a big game hunt he went on that involved, in order: 1. being mauled by a fatally wounded lion. Once the lion died, Zomax wandered away, only…
(Jungle Comics 013, 1941) The Vahines, aka the Tiger-Women of Wildmoon Mountain, have a plan: kill every other woman in the world, which will then give them ultimate power over all men. Some thoughts on this setup: 1. The logistics of this plan are trash. There are maybe 15 to 20 Vahines total and estimates put world population at around 2.3 billion in 1940, so murdering half of those people will be a full-time job that will probably take the…
(Jungle Comics 013, 1941) While searching for her champion Sir Champion (annoying thing to have to write and the main reason I’m happy that he eventually fades into obscurity), who has failed to return from a hunt, Camilla, Queen of the Lost Empire is confronted by the ghostly vision of a blonde lady who rules an ancient lost castle. This is just a kind of person you get in the undefined part of Africa that houses the Lost Empire. The…