(Colossus Comics 001, 1940) I included this cover here in order to indulge in a little personal nostalgia but instead I feel like I am going a bit mad. See, I know this cover very well, from somewhere. I thought it was from Jeff Rovin’s Encyclopedia of Supervillains, which I read through about one million times as a youth, but when I decided to check out the entry on Colossus in that book I could not find one. Ditto for…
(Champion Comics 010, 1940) Have you ever wondered what happened to the Chaldeans, the ancient Mesopotamian people whose height was from the 9th to 6th centuries BCE, who were mentioned frequently in the Bible and whose name was lent to a Babylonian dynasty? Well wonder no longer! They were merely tucked away in a little hidden city less than a day’s travel via horse from Jerusalem! At least until 1940, that is, because that’s when the city’s leader, a fellow…
Look at all these dang guys Lobo, the Flying Sleuth: Lobo, the Flying Sleuth, aka the Lobo, had a pretty short run. But! He’s a cowboy and a pilot and a detective. That’s a lot of things! (Champion Comics 006, 1940) Doctor Miracle: We’ve seen guys like Dr Miracle before: the nigh-omnipotent magician with so much power at his fingertips that his only real challenge is in finding a foe tough enough that he doesn’t defeat them instantly. He’s even…
(Champion Comics 010, 1940) It’s a small consolation but this guy isn’t actually a lama! Unlike the Mad Lama or the Four Lamas before him (and more than a few to come), this fellow is merely a bandit chief presumably called the Black Lama because he is Tibetan! It this better than a whole class of holy men being portrayed as evil scheming villains? A little! I also want to say that it’s because his headquarters are a former lamasery…
(Champion Comics 010, 1940) There are a few things to like about Grundo the Great: his mustache, his name which sounds like it’s what Miss Grundy would be called in a 1960s Archie Comics fantasy series about the heroic students battling the teachers as evil warlords, the fact that he has a “crew of mad chemists and technicians” in his mountaintop castle somewhere in the Midwestern US… Lot of good stuff. His ultimate aim, to take over America, is a…
(Champion Comics 009, 1940) Nad Neurod is a gang boss with an ambitious and not-uncommon-in-comics scheme: knock out the power and other utilities so that you can take advantage of the resultant confusion and loot an entire city (NYC in this case) at once! Even more importantly, he and his gang provide the perfect test/demonstration of the Human Meteor’s powers in his first foray into the outside world. (Nad Neurod is also exactly the kind of moniker that makes my…
(Champion Comics 007, 1940) Someone is kidnapping foreign dignitaries and then hanging their skeletons in public spaces! Weird! Sinister! Diplomatically complicated! The culprit turns out to be gang boss Duke Daroldi, who is killing the diplomats as part of an attempt to involve the US in WWII and then step in and take over once the combatants are all sufficiently weakened. This is a stunningly hubristic plan, especially considering the maybe five other guys in Daroldi’s gang. I assume that…
More of these guys and their antics. Johnny Fox: Johnny Fox is a guy* from the Florida Everglades who visits his grandfather one day to find him the victim of a treacherous murder. And what’s worse, the murderer, one Peter Pokane, did so in order to steal a supply of “sun-shots”, i.e., invisibility pills. *and by “guy” I mean “Native American guy of the Seminole Tribe of Florida” but it’s a tricky thing to work into a concise sentence. Also…
(Champion Comics 005, 1940) Journalist Penny Wright is on the trail of a notorious spy named the Owl! While I am of course broadly anti-spoilers I will give you a hint to the Owl’s identity: there are four named characters in this comic and poor Hafiz Bey is murdered on the first page. Setting aside the compelling and difficult mystery of the Owl’s identity for a moment, we must consider the very concept of the notorious spy known for their…
(Champion Comics 005, 1940) “Revenge of the Zombies” is a feature that ran in Champion Comics from issues 003-005 and reads kind like it was written in a free-jazz fugue state, like once the 10-12 characters were introduced by issue 003, page 2, events just proceeded on their own with no real input from the writer. A huge cast gathers at the home of Dr Karl Hartmann in Haiti for no reason that is ever given. Various people are kidnapped….