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Month: September 2024

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 610: ‘BDULA KHAN

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 610: ‘BDULA KHAN

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 609: LUCIFER

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 609: LUCIFER

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(Fantastic Comics 006, 1940) Scientist-adventurer Flip Falcon has a machine that allows him to enter the Fourth Dimension and come out, effectively, anywhere. He’s used it to visit various other planets and will use it to travel through time – it’s an adventure machine, basically. The fact that it can detect something as vague as “a disturbance somewhere” is both on point and completely meaningless – when you can go anywhere and anywhen, you can always find a disturbance (he…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 608: KING KELPA

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 608: KING KELPA

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(Fantastic Comics 005, 1940) Sub Saunders needs to investigate a series of sunken ships, so he has his fiance Peg given the same treatment as he got from the great “oceantalogist” Professor Foama so that they are both amphibious and can go on missions together. This is wildly progressive for a Golden (or Silver, or a lot of Bronze) Age comic book hero! They’re usually more likely to toe the “this is too dangerous for a woman” line – it’s…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 607: THE MIRACLE MEN

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 607: THE MIRACLE MEN

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 606: THE BLACK DEATH

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 606: THE BLACK DEATH

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 605: EELO THE FISH MAN

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 605: EELO THE FISH MAN

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(Fantastic Comics 005, 1940) I guess I have some initial sympathy for Eelo the Fish Man. It can’t be easy being a whatever-he-is in regular human society, let alone a resort island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. He might even be a sympathetic villain if literally his first act wasn’t to kidnap three women as breeding stock for his proposed new amphibian master race. Eelo’s plans also confound me: are they long or short term? He gasses on…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 604: PRINCE PIGZA

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 604: PRINCE PIGZA

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(Fantastic Comics 004, 1940)  Is Prince Pigza a proper super-villain or just a jerk? His major crime as discovered by a newly-amphibious Sub Saunders on an exploratory jaunt under the ocean is in not caring that his process for extracting gold from seawater is (possibly) causing disturbances along the coast of the US. Would it be polite to check? Is it a dick move not to stop? Both yes. If he didn’t lock up Sub Saunders for suggesting that he…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 603: THE MAD GIANT

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 603: THE MAD GIANT

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 602: THE TALKING APE

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 602: THE TALKING APE

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 601: THE THINKER

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 601: THE THINKER

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(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…

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