(Master Comics 004, 1940)
The Firehawk is an extortionist of the particular kind that you get in comic book stories that have to clock in at under 5 pages: a dumb one. See, he has a pretty good threat to hold over the heads of his victims in that he can seemingly set them on fire at will. Since he’s operating on a movie set, he does so by mixing up batches of thermite-impregnated makeup that presumably self ignites after a set time. Like I said, a good threat. The problem lies with his timing: he dopes all of the makeup at once so that the actors are just igniting one after the other – there isn’t even enough time for them to consider paying up. Plus there’s the matter of his secret identity, the fourth lead in a film in which numbers 1 through 3 were set to be destroyed, which is at least a bit suspect.
For all that, I love this guy for his costume if nothing else. “Green anthropomorphic cartoon bird” is an underrepresented theme in super-villainy.
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While thinking about this guy I suddenly had a revelation: in any given super-hero universe there would be a podcast about the super-villains of Old Hollywood. Without question! The only real question is just how many episodes would each villain generate. Sadly for the Firehawk, even though he is the genesis for the idea of the Super-Villains of Hollywood Podcast (an idea so powerful that it has propagated backward through the blog) he probably wasn’t fodder for more than one episode – neither Zarrow/ the Firehawk nor any of his victims seemed especially noteworthy in a “lurid true crime podcast” sense so I’ afraid that for the inaugural
Number of episodes of the “Super-Villains of Hollywood” podcast: segment, the answer must be one.
