(Fantastic Comics 008, 1940) The Emerald Men of Asperus live on an asteroid (named Asperus, natch), and I’m pretty sure that their plan is to move the Earth to the Asteroid Belt so that they can easily enslave as many Earthlings as they want, but it’s a bit hard to grok because the way the Emerald Men talk makes it plausible that they don’t know how the Solar System works. Like, it’s possible that they don’t know that Earth and…
(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940) The Great White Chief is a chubby scientist who wears stirrup pants with no shoes or socks and lives in a dormant volcano (that he makes look non-dormant using special effects) where he makes animal-headed monstrosities like Cinu the Unicorn Man here. This is all very good classic villain stuff. The name is pretty annoying. It implies a lot about his relationship with the native peoples of wherever his volcano is located (probably Africa as he…
(Fantastic Comics 007, 1940) We rejoin the European version of the Golden Knight as he and his ladyfriend Alice are having a bad time in Blackamoor Forest: both Alice and Sir Richard’s horse Whitey have broken their legs in a fall and so Richard and Alice are forced to hole up in a cave for the night (Whitey, sadly, did not make it). But who is this ominous form? It’s the Hag of Blackamoor and she isn’t messing around! In…
(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 006, 1940) ‘bdula Khan is the capricious ruler of a mysterious oasis city in North Africa who offers the Golden Knight hospitality and then turns around and makes him battle monsters in an arena for his amusement. He’s not particularly notable and I’d likely have passed him over but for three things: 1. The Name. ‘bdula is presumably short for Abdula and might be a unique name? Abdula is such an uncommon variant of Abdullah already, and 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 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…