(Crackajack Funnies 010-017, 1939) The Piranha is a mysterious gang boss operating out of New York City and known for the gruesome way he dealt with his enemies, of which we will return to in a second. The Piranha is actually the wealthy Senõr Romez, a society luminary known for his fabulous parties and the many unsolved murders that happen at his fabulous parties. He also dresses exactly like the Piranha but with hair and a mask – a lot…
(Blue Beetle Comics 009-010, 1941) The Gorilla is actually Jack Castle, a drunken lout who happens to be the lab assistant to the unhinged Dr Brock. Castle pushes his employer a bit too far and ends up on the wrong end of an ape brain transplant. Dr Brock meanwhile has forgotten one of the major things about brains and so ends up like so many other mad scientists do after transplanting an unwilling one: murdered by his own creation. Castle…
(Amazing Man Comics 008, 1939) The worst thing about Minimidget is obviously his name. The best thing about him and his partner Ritty is the fact that unlike your Doll Mans or Atoms or Ants Men they are a) permanently six inches tall and b) proportionally as strong as a six-inch human being – they’re just lil’ guys wearing jodhpurs. A lot of their adventures are not so much about going out and finding excitement as dealing with the problems…
(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 012, 1939) The Ten Knights of Doom! Like the Brain of the Robot, more an excuse to talk about their foe than anything else! But here we have to front-load it because you can’t get into these guys without setting things up by talking about Speed Centaur. Speed Centaur is great because he’s one of the very first super-heroes and yet he’s still also one of the weirdest super-hero concepts that isn’t some sort of psychedelic…
(Amazing Mystery Funnies v2 011, 1939) I’ve started reading Mystery Men Comics, as seen at the top of the Sphinx entry, and the thing about Mystery Men Comics is that although it features the Blue Beetle, who by a circuitous chain of publication rights changing hands is now a DC Comics character, it also has a lot of other characters that aren’t currently owned by a media conglomerate! And although I mostly write about DC and Marvel characters because I…
(Mystery Men Comics 018, 1941) The Sphinx is (somewhat appropriately) a bit convoluted? Or maybe disjointed? It’s hard to put into words but there is a weird dreamlike quality to some Golden Age comic books and the Blue Beetle stories from Fox Features often have it. To begin: the Sphinx is a mysterious figure who causes subway accidents and then utters threats and pronouncements in a booming voice, seemingly from nowhere. The Blue Beetle swiftly discovers that one of the…
(More Fun Comics 074, 1941) “The Voice” is such a cool and evocative name that I have a real bias in favour of it but I have to say that this guy leaves me cold. Basically, he’s some sort of science man who has invented a “sound destroyer” capable of dampening all noise in an area the size of Manhattan. His crime-gambit involves employing this device and deploying sign language fluent gangsters to cause mayhem during the resultant confusion, then…
(More Fun Comics 074, 1941) Another day, another Avenger. This Avenger is a disgruntled scientist named Mortimer Crandall who is seeking revenge on his old bosses for firing him because of his wacky scientific theories that, you guessed it, turned out to be correct. He uses his working technology to kidnap the men responsible in preparation for their murders. This Avenger also demonstrates a flair for comic-book style hypnosis sufficient to place the Spectre himself under his power, which is…
(More Fun Comics 073, 1941) Just a Central American general trying to overthrow his government with crypto-fascist backing, foiled by Clip Carson because he and his men were covered with rice from their rice warehouse HQ. Much more interesting is the fact that this is one of the occasional comics set in a real country but with off-the-cuff, made-up information. In this case, it’s the fact that Clip is in Honduras at the behest of its president, who is a…