(Fantastic Comics 010, 1940) Chong is basically just a pirate, but there are three things worth noting about him. The first is that his name is Chong in a comic book published in 1940 and he is not a horrendous Asian stereotype of one sort or another. It’s a low bar and he cleared it with aplomb. The second thing is Chong’s weapon of choice, an enormous spiked wheel that rises out of the depths to wreck ships. It’s not…
(Fantastic Comics 009, 1940) Sub Saunders is just cruising around in the ocean when his submarine is swept into an underground cave, the home of the fantastic Cave Things! I was very excited when this comic started but sadly this is the most we see of Cave Things slithering and creeping around like this. They still have a lot going for them as far as humanoid creeps go but it’s real sad that we don’t get to see more creeping…
(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940) Like so many Space Smith adventures do, this one begins with Space and his ladyfriend Dianna being waylaid as they make their way around the Solar System. In this case a mysterious gas disables their spaceship and causes them to land on the moon Ganymede. From whence did this gas come? Why, it was the sinister laboratory of Morosio, not just a mad and/or criminal scientist but a mad and/or criminal scientist who has already been…
(Fantastic Comics 006, 1940) Once again the nations of he world of the year 10 000 CE are faced with an oceanic menace. Twenty ships have been sunk – seems like a case for Sub Saunders! Could we be faced with yet another jerk ruler from the population of undersea humans? It seems likely! (aside: gotta give a shoutout to Thog here: having a name like that in a comic from 1940 is absolutely an early indicator that you are…
Incorrigible scamps the lot of them. This unnamed scientist uses fake spirits, death traps and so forth to drive adventurer Ted Crane and his companions away from the jungle temple he is looting. BUT! He has made a classic mistake: they weren’t planning on entering the temple in the first place and based on their action in earlier issues they certainly don’t object to white people hauling off as much ancient African swag as possible. He gets punched out a…
(Fantastic Comics 006, 1940) It happened again. Space Smith and Dianna were just noodling along through space when they found themselves captured and transported to the surface of a strange world by strange aliens. In this case the world is the annoyingly named Vacuum Meteor and the aliens are the extremely cool Vacuumites. Like the Robot Scientists before them, the Vacuumites don’t seem quite sure what to do with their new prisoners – it seems to be an opportunistic kidnapping….
(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 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) 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…
(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…