(Amazing-Man Comics 011, 1940) On the surface Drago seems to merely be a guy who looks like an evil cat and shoots his henchmen rather than paying them (not only a nightmare for HR but a bad financial decision as you’ll be spending more in headhunting and training new goons than you will save in salaries), and that’s just what he is. There are no hidden depths. He kidnaps world-class scientists and sells them to the Axis-equivalent belligerent governments of…
(Amazing-Man Comics 010-011, 1940) The Magician from Mars’ final foe is a two-issue affair, but the first one is a bit of a nothing story: a mysterious terror attack at an airport turns out to be the work of a villain named the Hood who has found a way to… play a loud sound into a glass ball and then use it as a grenade. It’s a weird contrivance even by sci-fi super-hero comic standards. In any case, the Magician…
(Amazing-Man Comics 009, 1940) The Elemental! An extradimensional intruder who insinuates itself into the unspecified future world of hero the Magician from Mars via the music of unwitting dupe Bill Wend. Is this a future with wildly relaxed standards for professional music performance or has the musical director of Concert Hall also being influenced by the Elemental? This question will go unanswered, alas. Having achieved its goal of entering our reality, the Elemental feeds not only on the crowd’s fear…
(Mystic Comics v1 002, 1940) Scourge of the year 2300, the Black Hawk and his Mercurian space pirates loot the spaceways of radioactive plinium in a bid to take over the entire Solar System. He’s also a pretty bad father, a fact that comes back to bite him (fatally) when his daughter Alyse teams up with the Space Rangers to take him down. Kids, amirite?
(Mystery Men Comics 022-023, 1941) The Ugly Queen is our first real foray into the heady world of societal beauty standards as motivation for evil (though there’s an element of that sort of thing in Setap’s first appearance and we’ve certainly encountered a fair few characters rejected by society for ugliness and deformity). Her status as a royal is called into question by the end of her appearances but she does cut a powerful figure, with an undersea castle full…
(Mystery Men Comics 016, 1940) As our story opens, huge diamonds are raining down on Earth. Upon contact with a human, they expand to engulf and imprison them. Earth authorities sensibly contact space hero Rex Dexter of Mars who has once again been sidetracked in his seemingly straightforward quest to travel from Earth to his home planet. In a nice change of pace from most Rex Dexter adventures, Rex and his pal Cynde have not stopped due to some mortal…
(Mystery Men Comics 004, 1939) Here we see Lord Marvel, a weird little creep who lives on the planet Ursis (as with many planets in the Rex Dexter comics, Ursis is ambiguously placed: Dexter and his companion/ lover Cynde are constantly sidetracked on the comparatively short voyage from Earth to Mars and always seem to end up on extra-solar planets. The writers of Golden Age sci-fi comics often seem to have a fairly fuzzy grasp of the positions and distances…
(Amazing Man Comics 008, 1939) Dr Magno is your classic elemental evil opposite: a man with magnetic hands pitted against a man with an iron skeleton. He’s a wild-card ex-foe of the Iron Skull freshly broken out of the asylum to loot Chicago of its jewels and get revenge on his traitorous ex-cronies. He’s also, weirdly, an evil equivalent, as both he and the Iron Skull owe their powers to debilitating injuries suffered in the Great War of 1950, but…
(Amazing Mystery Funnies v2 011, 1939) We’ve all read a comic in which a scientist is rejected for his wild-but-true theories and goes a bit bonkers and criminal, but Satan Rex really went for it. Originally Eric von Hochwalt, who developed the Theory of Relativity ten years before Einstein and dealt with his subsequent rejection by disappearing into the Himalayas, founding a city full of people who worship him as a god, conquering the aging process and eventually taking a…
(Daring Mystery Comics 008, 1942) Hitler is going to show up more than a few times as you go through the history of comics, even if you set aside all the times he or a pastiche of him show up as the antagonist of a WWII comic you have reams of They Saved Hitler’s Brain or I Recruited the Worst Men of History stories. This here is possibly the first of those and there’s not a lot to it. So:…