(Flash Comics v1 021, 1941) This one’s got a lot of setup. First, Hawkman sees a spaceship crash, as you do. Venturing inside, he finds a deceased Neptunian couple, their egg son and a Rosetta Stone of a ship’s log. He makes off with the egg and the journal and just leaves the ship and its former crew to rot. Next night is the Scientist Society Ball, where monocled botanist and creep Noel Ratchford makes a play for Shiera Sanders…
(Flash Comics v1 017, 1941) It’s the Golden Mummy! As I have previously stated, I love fake mummies and had read this issue before, so I was anticipating this fellow’s appearance with some joy, and it is with great sadness that I must announce that he’s a complete disappointment. My threshold for fake mummy appreciation is quite low – usually they just steal a few antiquities before getting tripped up by Archie and Jughead or the Scooby Gang, after all…
(Flash Comics v1 015, 1941) It’s old hat by now: like former Hawkman foe Czar the Unkillable Man and his ilk, the Hand is a henchbeing who is far more interesting to read and talk about than their creator. This is the risk you run when you set out to create an autonomous crime-servant via… I’m guessing magical means? It’s unclear in the text but magic seems more likely than science. In this case, the creator is a guy named…
(Flash Comics v1 013, 1941) Like Crime & Corruption Inc before him, I almost skipped over the Great Arturo or banished him to the ranks of the generic villains, because a) the Great Arturo is a terrible villain name and b) he appears in a Les Watts comic. But the more I looked at this guy, the more it became clear that he was like a savoury stew made up of all the things I love about comic book creepos….
(Flash Comics v1 009, 1940) King Jupo is the leader of the Kogats, a race of water-breathing caveman types who live beneath New York Harbor and have a fun mix of technologies, being armed with either stone axes or laser pistols. They’ve decided to invade the surface world, for no substantial reason other than that it seems like a good idea, and immediately run afoul of Hawkman. Needless to say, this does not end well, and the entire Kogats race,…
(Flash Comics v1 010, 1940) I’ve alluded now and then to the colonialist assumptions that comics worked off of and that seemingly were endemic to the mindset of the American people. The White Renegade offers an example of the two major prongs of these assumptions, which boil down to the idea that the world is divided into White People and Everyone Else, and that: 1. All offenses committed by Everyone Else against White people shall be repaid with great vengeance. …
(Flash Comics v1 008) Professor Kitzoff makes me sad because he is categorically not the Sunspot Wizard. Oh sure, someone at DC or in the fan community went back and assigned titles to all the untitled Golden Age stories and they called this one “the Sunspot Wizard”, but that’s nothing. I love an unofficial name as much as (probably more than) the next guy, but they have to a) come from the text of the story itself and b) can’t…
(Flash Comics v1 007, 1940) Like Echo or Hugo Strange’s Monster Men before him, Czar the Unkillable Man is arguably less a super-villain than a tool created by a super-villain, but where’s the fun in listing a buncha guys named Dr Samuels and Professor Tompkins or in this case Boris Nickaloff? Nickaloff is a bit of a mystery – he creates Czar by sculpting a complete human body – inside and out – out of “plasm-clay” and then shocking it to…
What was Hath-Set up to in 1940? That’s actually a tricky question, because Hath-Set is a tricky character! Technically, he did absolutely nothing in 1940, because he died somewhere in the 1200s BC. Because, yes, Hath Set is mixed up in the unholy mess that is Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s origin story. Of course, it didn’t start out complicated: Hath-Set was an evil priest of Anubis who murdered Prince Khufu and his lover Shiera and then they all got reincarnated some…
(Flash Comics v1 001, 1940) I have a lot of fondness for the Faultless Four, the first super-foes of original Flash Jay Garrick. Firstly and most simply, they are a perfect illustration of the power creep that super-heroes introduced to comic books: where this group of criminal scientists armed with mildly-fantastic skills and tactics would have been sufficient to occupy your traditional adventure hero for months if not years, the Flash walks all over them without a care in the…