(Fight Comics 003, 1940) This Skull is a smuggler notable only for his name and for being the first foe of Rip Regan, the Power-Man. I do appreciate the fact that these three panels are his only actual appearance in the story and they are exclusively concerned with him attempting to run away like a filthy coward. SKULL SCORE: A generous 1/5 for a somewhat cadaverous face.
(Fight Comics 003, 1940) Kinks Mason is back on the case! And just what sub-oceanic mystery is he attempting to solve by just wandering around underwater? Why, it’s Just Where is All the Salt Going? And somewhat astonishingly, he figures it out almost immediately: it’s going into this building. The building turns out to belong to a race of ocean-dwelling humanoids referred to only as the Amphibians, though I can’t imagine that that’s what they call themselves. I kind of…
(Fantastic Comics 013, 1940) Yank Wilson, Super Spy Q-4 (who started out as a near-future character and maybe isn’t any more but until I see a clear sign otherwise still is to me) is after Prusslandic spies Karl Wolff and the Black Hood down in Florida and is going about his search with all the subtlety of a character in a point-and-click adventure game. It’s his bad luck that the first person he asked was an agent of Prussland Intelligence…
(Fantastic Comics 012, 1940) We open on Mephisto, the Dreaded Poison Serpent, attacking a small boat and making off with its inhabitants. For a split second I am excited – maybe this is our long-sought criminal animal! – but then I remember the lessons I learned from Cephalopoda the Octopus and rein myself in. And it’s a good thing I did, for Mephisto is a mere tool of the mysterious Serpent Lady, who lives in a golden city in an…
(Fantastic Comics 012, 1940) King Raton is a fellow met by the Golden Knight and his companion/ lover Alice after the earth near a pool of water gives way and they are dropped into a cavern. He demands that they fetch a potion for him from Kataka, Witch of the Volcano, under threat of death – this is a source of conflict not only because of the threats but because he wants the potion in order to conquer Blackamoor Forest,…
(Fantastic Comics 012, 1940) The Boss is actually Roulf, editor of the Daily Standard newspaper in NYC. He pulls the classic villain mistake of acting as a concerned citizen recruiting the protagonists – in this case Samson and David – to investigate his own villainous alter ego. It’s the kind of error that you can emphasize with to a certain extent: how better to ensure that a super-powered busybody doesn’t unexpectedly show up and wreck your plans then by controlling…
(Fantastic Comics 011, 1940) THIS. IS. GREAT. We open on the trial of Dablo, Last of the Ray Men, and immediately we must ask: who are the Ray Men? And let me tell you that there is no answer beyond “guys who could shoot rays.” Dablo here shoots rays out of a big hole in his forehead but did they all do that? No clue! This is the kind of worldbuilding that people like Alan Moore will eventually get up…
(Fantastic Comics 011, 1940) We begin with the old comic book trope of Ignoring Bad Feelings When a Woman Has Them, as Alice senses something in the wind and Sir Richard tells her to shut up just before a giant bird gets them both. They are flown to Soulless Isle and meet its ruler Queen Sulia, along with her coterie of beastly subjects. She wants a sword fight and Sir Richard of Warwick is who she wants it from. If…
(Fantastic Comics 010, 1940) The Super Fiend (aka the Super Fiend of the Lost Planet) is, if not the archetypal Fletcher Hanks villain then certainly representative of one of the major Hanks villain types, the civilization hater. He’s got no stated motivation but the Super Fiend hates civilization so much that he’s out to destroy it on a planetary scale, starting with Mars and moving on to Earth as an encore. The Super Fiend’s Thermal Ray Spore does the job…
(Fantastic Comics 009, 1940) Captain Kidd is once again back in Africa, this time in search of a lost explorer named Perez, and has once again bribed a local into taking him somewhere dangerous only to get that local killed (this happens about a third of the time with Kidd – not quite often enough to make a very depressing supercut). Kidd and his unfortunate hireling Wango track Perez to the Lost Valley, where they discover and are captured by…