(Super-Mystery Comics 001, 1940) The Terror is really Scar (or Scar-Face) Pontois, a gang boss who is expending a lot of effort in order to drive people away from a rich gold claim that he has hijacked but has perhaps gone a bit too far, as Corporal Flint of the RCMP, the hero of our story, is only nosing around Scar’s locale because of the strange rumours he and/or his superiors have heard. Please note his giant hat. In addition…
(Super Comics 027, 1940) Pirate Captain Death comes into conflict with Jim Ellis and his brother Bud when the former, a dead ringer for Death, is shanghaied by the slightly less villainous Captain “Iron” Shard in an attempt to bluff his way onto Death’s Forbidden Island headquarters and steal his treasure. This “identical hero/villain duo” situation is hardly unprecedented in fiction, and there are broadly two ways that it plays out. In the first, the villain is not so bad…
(Super Comics 027, 1940) Monocle-wearing crypto-Nazi spy and major recurring foe of war correspondent Jack Wander, the Baron is one duelling scar away from being the quintessential Axis agent. Also he looks like he was designed by Paul Grist – just look at that little sneer.
(Super Comics 027, 1940) A tough-talking femme fatale pirate captain is a pretty good foil for super magic jungle guy Magic Morro – he might be able to walk through fire and juggle three grown men like rubber balls but one thing that he definitely can’t do is hit a lady, not even a pirate lady. And speaking of her being a lady, that sure is an interesting name for a 1940s lady pirate, I wonder where she got it?…
Ah the super-hero. Ace Buckley: Ace Buckley is a time traveller, a subgenre of comic book hero mostly notable for the fact that they have no one to blame for their troubles but themselves. Like most of his peers, Buckley (along with his intriguingly-named companion Toni Stark, whose role in the stories is to get captured and then swan around in minimal clothing while waiting for Buckley to rescue her) flings himself willy-nilly into the hotspots of human history and…
(Startling Comics 004, 1940) We open on a world in turmoil! The tides are going crazy! New York City is trashed! The world’s leaders turn to the mysterious Dr X for help, and he immediately recognizes that the problem must be Moon-based, and further that the solution will require his niece’s fiance Bob to go beat someone up. This is the second and final Dr X story of the Golden Age, and I really wish that there were more. Wizened…
The last couple of 1940 issues of Startling Comics featured the adventures of time traveller Ace Buckley, something that has heavily flavoured this edition of Real Person Round-Up. Alonso de Molina: Spanish conquistador who stayed behind after one of Pizarro’s excursions to the Americas and met a mysterious fate. Time traveller Ace Buckley finds his armour and impersonates him to a presumably face blind Pizarro. (Startling Comics 003, 1940) Atahualpa: Last of the Inca Emperors. Time Traveller Ace Buckley gives…
(Startling Comics 001, 1940) “Dr Slade is one of those rare and unfortunate villains who are a part of a super-hero’s origin story but who also die as a part of that origin, so that they don’t even have the dignity of actually properly being a part of that hero’s rogues gallery. That’s sad! On the other hand, Slade did develop his resurrection technology in order to build an army of the formerly-dead in aid of a fascist takeover of…
Sax Rohmer has a lot to answer for. the Golden Dragon: We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again – the Golden Dragon is yet another Fu Manchu-style Yellow Peril crimelord bent on bending the world to his will. He messes up by making his campaign of kidnapping and extortion a bit too obvious, which attracts the attention of the Invisible Hood, who in turn rallies various kidnap victims etc into a fighting force to take the Dragon’s organization…
(Startling Comics 001, 1940) Shortly after acquiring his super powers, Andrew “Captain Future” Bryant uses them to sniff out a criminal conspiracy to rob a gold shipment from the nation of Finvania and then use that capital to finance a bid for world domination by someone called the Purple Plague. Exactly the sort of thing that a fledgling super-hero is going to be against! Captain Future spends the bulk of the issue in a back-and-forth tussle with the Purple Plague’s…