(Fantastic Comics 005, 1940) Sub Saunders needs to investigate a series of sunken ships, so he has his fiance Peg given the same treatment as he got from the great “oceantalogist” Professor Foama so that they are both amphibious and can go on missions together. This is wildly progressive for a Golden (or Silver, or a lot of Bronze) Age comic book hero! They’re usually more likely to toe the “this is too dangerous for a woman” line – it’s…
(Fantastic Comics 005, 1940) Like a fair few Fletcher Hanks villains, the Miracle Men take a regular crime and amp it up to the nth degree. In this case, thanks to the technological marvel that is the Invisible Vacuum Tube, they have industrialized kidnapping. And if the ransom is not paid an appropriately oversized response can be delivered via their tornado making machines! This is modern, industrialized crime! Under the direction of leader Wolf-Eye, the Miracle Men perform hundreds of…
(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) The Mad Giant is another Fletcher Hanks villain with a straightforward motivation: civilization has ruined his domination of a slave group (presumably a tribal society as he refers to them by the formerly much-used and now depricated term “savage”) and so he is simply going to end civilization. And given the method that he has chosen – pumping the Earth full of a chemical that will raise its temperature and cause widespread geologic upheaval – 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…
Honours: Yank Wilson gets the Distinguished Service Medal for his efforts in preventing the the nation of Hondu (a Japan analog) from pulling a sneak attack on the US naval bases in Hawaii. I reckon that this is where Yank Wilson stops plausibly being in the near future and becomes a contemporary series – note the 3/4s perspective FDR. (Fantastic Comics 009, 1940) Samson’s sidekick David: lariat champion of his Boy Scout troop three years running. There’s a reason he…
(Fantastic Comics 004, 1940) Scientist Flip (formerly Flick) Falcon, along with gal pal Adele, usually find themselves contending with problems on the planet Mars thanks to Flip’s discovery of interplanetary teleportation based on transit through the Fourth Dimension. In this particular adventure, Flip and Adele flee Mars through a similar device created by Mars’ three-armed alien overlords and find themselves not back on the bucolic Earth of 1940 but… THE FUTURISTIC HELLSCAPE OF 1 001 939 CE! And not only…