(Marvel Comics 001, 1939*)
No character in comics history swings more wildly and frequently between super-villain and super-hero than Namor the Sub-Mariner, Prince of Atlantis, and since as established in the case of Spy Smasher and Smasher Spy we treat the villainous and heroic actions of the same individual as different subjects we must start with Namor the villain (Namor the hero here).
Namor’s origin is a relatively simple one, and to my knowledge one that has remained fairly unchanged to this day: in 1920 a scientific expedition to the Antarctic inadvertently blows up large portions of the sunken city of Atlantis while doing some sort of hydrological survey. The Atlanteans send their most human-looking citizen (and please note the all the weird racial stuff here, just like the recent Molemen entry. Why do these sea-swelling blue people care about how white the surface peoples’ skin is? Because they aren’t really being written as underwater near-humans but as any non-white group would be), who just so happens to be the Princess Fen, Beautiful Goddess of Seals.
While posing as a mysterious amnesiac to pass on information about the humans to her people, Fen also falls in love with, marries and conceives a child with the expedition’s Commander Leonard McKenzie This extreme communion between disparate groups does not sway her from her purpose, however, and the only reason the human expedition survives is that they accidentally finish blowing up Atlantis before the counterattack can commence.
Cut to the present day (1939) and dutiful son Namor (with his occasional sidekick and eventual unrequited love interest Dorma in tow) sets out to enact vengeance on humanity white people for their crimes against Atlantis. Namor’s first outing is an absolute bloodbath that sees him wiping out an entire small Naval outpost.
The continuation of this story in Marvel Mystery Comics v1 002 sees the Sub-Mariner make his way to NYC, where he starts to show his more mellow side. Sure he spends much of his time in the city murdering police officers, but he also meets a very flammable woman and saves her life with the seldom-seen ability to barf water out of his pores.
It’s safe to say that Namor the Sub-Mariner is defined by a few different drives and that those drives are the reason for his frequent shifts in alignment on the super-hero/super-villain spectrum. The first of these is his dedication to duty – the campaign against the surface world is much more his mother’s idea than it is Namor’s, but as a dutiful boy he obeys her wishes. The second of these drives is stubbornness – once Namor sets his mind to something he pursues it for longer and with more effort than one might expect, even if it is a bad idea. Next is his temper, which flares up hot and pairs disastrously with his stubbornness to inspire long hot grudges.
The final important drive that Namor is ruled by can be seen above and it is his horniness. Every so often he becomes taken with a woman and it causes him to act like a complete maniac, as here when he attempts to kidnap the severely injured and very much air-breathing Miss Drayson and drag her into the ocean depths.
That’s pretty much it for Namor’s first foray into villainy: for a variety of reasons he barges into the US and then smashes people and things for a while. Tune in later this week to see him try out benevolence for a while.
*yes, okay, Motion Picture Funnies 001 is his real first appearance, but it’s the same story in an unpublished comic that had it been published wouldn’t have been by Marvel/Timely, so I would consider that more of a trivia fact than a fact fact.
