(Fantastic Comics 005, 1940) In Fantastic Comics 004 Sir Richard of Warwick, aka the Golden Knight, seeking his Crusading companions, arrives in the small village of Namara and learns that it has been cursed for the past ten years after a young girl fell down a well and her father blamed everyone but himself for it and cursed the village. The Golden Knight of course heads down that well because where the heck did that girl go? After a few…
(Fantastic Comics 005, 1940) I guess I have some initial sympathy for Eelo the Fish Man. It can’t be easy being a whatever-he-is in regular human society, let alone a resort island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. He might even be a sympathetic villain if literally his first act wasn’t to kidnap three women as breeding stock for his proposed new amphibian master race. Eelo’s plans also confound me: are they long or short term? He gasses on…
(Fantastic Comics 004, 1940) Is Prince Pigza a proper super-villain or just a jerk? His major crime as discovered by a newly-amphibious Sub Saunders on an exploratory jaunt under the ocean is in not caring that his process for extracting gold from seawater is (possibly) causing disturbances along the coast of the US. Would it be polite to check? Is it a dick move not to stop? Both yes. If he didn’t lock up Sub Saunders for suggesting that he…
(Fantastic Comics 004, 1940) Pilot/ adventurer/ confusing-name-haver Captain Kidd has heard some disturbing rumours about a cult of beast-men planning an attempt to take over the Sahara region and so he sets out to investigate. After bribing a local man to show him the way (and then carelessly letting the local man get captured by the cult), Kidd finds a weird bunch of things all at once: -the cult is indeed made up of beast-men, hoofed humanoids with pig or…
(Fantastic Comics 004, 1940) After a couple of stories worth of interruptions, Space Smith and Dianna either finished the Brain off between issues or they and/or Fletcher Hanks forgot that he was an immanent threat to life on Earth because this issue finds them following a mysterious radio signal to sight-see a rare gold comet as it passes by the moon. Instead of watching the comet on its flyby, Space and Dianna are hit with a ray that disables their…
(Fantastic Comics 004, 1940) Kilgor is a roboticist with a simple 5-step plan for success and world domination: 1. develop a giant super-robot on an isolated Pacific island. 2. ally with generic fascist dictator Rigo in order to acquire the industrial might required to manufacture your robot en mass. 3. Once Rigo decides that you are surplus to requirements and tries to eliminate you and claim the robot army for himself, turn the tables on him and take the reins…
(Fantastic Comics 003, 1940) The Demon is a pretty straightforward Stardust enemy: he thinks that there are too many people on Earth and so is going to destroy cities until he gets that number under control. Exactly why he thinks that there are too many people (fear of overcrowding? an ahead-of-his-time radical environmentalist? simple misanthropy?) is not explored. This is of course exactly the sort of thing to draw Stardust the Super Wizard like a magnet. Importantly, this happens before…
(Fantastic Comics 003, 1940) An evil African witch doctor with a magical orb, a cool tree house and a real commitment to being Chaotic Evil, Negus meets a swift end once Captain Kidd comes looking for his imprisoned and mind controlled pal Arndt Barrows Colonel Bennet (as with a surprising number of Golden Age comics, the writer seems to have lost track of the name of this secondary character over the course of a 5 page story).
(Fantastic Comics 002, 1940) Captain Kidd and his pal Freddy land on the… Southeast Asian? island of Morgia, known to be rich in gold but critically not to ever export that gold. As the heroes of the piece, Kidd and Freddy are of course there to just look around and seeing the sights, not to scoop up a bunch of gold on the cheap. Certainly not. Instead of free gold tourist hotspots they find dozens of local people dead of…
(Fantastic Comics 002, 1940) As weird as Fletcher Hanks stories are, sometimes the hardest thing to parse are the seem-like-they-should-mean-something names. Take Rip-the-Blood here: is this just a weird way to present a fellow named Rip with the nickname of “the Blood” or does his name mean something more? Is he so tough he’ll “rip the blood” out of you? I never know with this guy. Whatever his name means, Rip-the-Blood is a bad dude: through his influence over US…