Lotsa lil guys. Mr Justice: Like the Spectre or the Wraith (or Sergeant Spook or the Gay Ghost or the Ghost Patrol…), Mr Justice is your classic restless spirit who remains on Earth to mete out justice to the wicked. Specifically, Mr Justice is the 200 year old ghost of the fictional English Prince James, cruelly slain by followers of Prince Richard during the Rogers Rebellion of the 1740s. Astute readers and students of history might have noticed a few…
Some say they’re not generic enough but I think they’re trying their best. This fellow is part of a gang looking to hijack a shipment of railway guns from train engineer Runaway Ronson. I really enjoy the look of the padded suit they use to help survive crashing a car into a high-speed train but I really really enjoy the fact that they immediately scramble off into the woods and are never seen again, as if they were completely unrelated…
I have a lot of these in a spreadsheet somewhere but we’ll get to those later. For now it’s as we encounter them: real people and versions of real people and analogs of real people and also the same but famous fictional people in comics. Admiral Dewey, John Paul Jones, Sir Francis Drake: Their ghosts all volunteer to help Sergeant Spook go pirate hunting (Blue Bolt v1 008, 1941) Adolf Hitler: “Gustave Ritter” isn’t really very close to “Adolf Hitler”…
MORE MLJ ACTION Doc Strong: Doc Strong is a famous scientist living in the year 2041, in a world where WWII dragged on for an entire century and a new Mongol Horde has swept in and conquered the battered remnants of civilization. The strangely Doc Savage-like Doc Strong gathers a group of like-minded scientists and starts a new civilization called the Isle of Right from which to strike back at the invaders with such inventions as a ray gun that…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940) There are plenty of Ku Klux Klan- inspired groups in comics and thusfar we’ve encountered a few: the Blue Devils, the Horned Masks, even the Purple‘s gang of idiots. All of those examples share one thing: they’re just gangs that operate in the country using the intimidation tactics of the KKK but without the goals of reinforcing white supremacy – they’re just regular comic book gangs, only in the country. There’s a part of me…
(Blue Bolt v2 006, 1941) We open on an aircraft factory. Suddenly, a strange vibration fills the air. After an initial moment of surprise, the workers all file out the door and into a cave in a nearby hillside. Inside? THIS MAN! This man is the self-proclaimed High Priest of Thor and before we get into what he’s up to I’d like to commend his commitment to the costume. Your average religious-type villain is not going to these lengths to…
(Blue Bolt v2 004-005, 1941) We open on a bit of… not hubris but it’s often framed as hubris. I’m sure that TV Tropes has a name for it but danged if I’m going to go hunting for it. It’s the phenomenon in which a character in an ongoing fictional setting jokes about how they’re sure glad that *SPECIFIC THING* isn’t real etc and that thing is the focus of the next story. In this case, Sergeant Spook says he’s…
(Blue Bolt v2 004-006, 1941) There are hundreds if not thousands of antagonistic u-boat commanders in comics and very few of them are going to make the jump to super-villain. Commander Sooka, however… I did some cursory searching and it looks like the Axis forces sank around 1100 ships between 1939 and 1941, and the most successful u-boat captain of the entire war sank 47 ships total. What I’m saying is that if Commander Sooka’s count of 735 ships is…
(Blue Bolt v2 004, 1941) Community. That’s what the Bull’s all about. Specifically a crime community, one of the top kinds of communities (to read about at least – most of them don’t sound too great to live in). Situated in the Florida Everglades, the Bull’s nameless crime community consists of him, about five other guys and a pet crocodile living in a bunch of ramshackle shacks. It’s not much, but it’s home. There’s not much else to the Bull…
Some real highs and lows in this one. the Twister: The Twister is a quite minor Golden Age super-hero – he managed more than one appearance but not more than seven – who has the distinction of having one of the most well-designed costumes of the era. Not my favourite costume, mind you, but boy oh boy, you can really tell that his creators (Ray Gill and Paul Gustavson as it happens) really sat down for a good think about…