(Smash Comics 007, 1940) You’re going to have to trust me because I have gathered no evidence, but I can state with some confidence that the American people of late 1939/early 1940 had a great deal of (perhaps wishful) hope in the effectiveness of the French Maginot Line, right up to the point at which the Nazis did an end run around it and into France. A fair number of war comics of the time (like the adventures of Corporal…
(Smash Comics 003, 1939 – Smash Comics 012, 1940) The Avenger is a cottage-industry villain, which is a term I just made up for particular kind of villain that you saw a fair amount in the Golden Age and then again in 1980s cartoons, wherein battling and thwarting them is the sole focus of a hero’s career – see also Mr H and the Conqueror. The Avenger is also a revenge-focused villain: he is really Jim Rowan, a man who…
(Smash Comics 003, 1939 – Smash Comics 012, 1940) The Avenger is a cottage-industry villain, which is a term I just made up for particular kind of villain that you saw a fair amount in the Golden Age and then again in 1980s cartoons, wherein battling and thwarting them is the sole focus of a hero’s career – see also Mr H and the Conqueror. The Avenger is also a revenge-focused villain: he is really Jim Rowan, a man who…
(Smash Comics 006, 1940) Time for a very obscure character indeed: Kadu-Kan, who put out Black X’s eye in an attempt to induce him to spill some military secrets. Kadu-Kan is therefore a major figure in the history of the character to be mentioned in one panel and never again, and then only to provide a reason for Black X’s ever-present monocle. (Speaking of Black X and setups with no real payoff, the first Black X adventure in Feature Funnies…
Can’t keep ’em down for long, these guys. Look, breeding up a giant amoeba in order to use it to spread terror and conquer the world is one thing, but deliberately going out of your way to feed it “pretty girls” is some real twisted incel shit. It’s a wonder that Dr Jorgen here just ends up in jail and not in the belly vacuoles of his creation. (Science Comics 006, 1940) Dr Borgia is a weird creep who becomes……
Another assortment of guys for your delectation. the Sky Wolf: Just another masked pilot in a souped-up named plane (originally the Silver Bullet, followed by the Golden Bullet), the Sky Wolf loses both his place in Silver Streak Comics and his plane’s name to fellow pilot Cloud Curtis once 1941 rolls around, and to add insult to injury, in 1942 the far more successful character of Skywolf debuts over at Hillman, ensuring that he doesn’t even have good SEO. (Silver…
(Silver Streak Comics 006, 1940) Continuing from the story of the Panther, Ace Powers ventures into the hole he had left the villain and his Panther Men in, seeking to discover the location of the former and presumably the reason for the deaths of the latter. Making his way through a concealed door, Powers finds the Panther about to be executed by a third villain called the Spook, who states that he is doing so because the Panther failed him,…
(Silver Streak Comics 002, 006) As you may or may not recall, when I covered the Claw’s sole 1939 appearance I concluded that taken on its own, it read like one of those stories where a villain holds sway over an area by means of a fake monster and that if the Claw had never appeared again that’s what I would assume he was: just an illusion composed of papier mache and maybe a balloon or an image projected on…
We may have gotten away from the “costumed” and “generic” is debatable but you can take the “villain” from my cold dead hands. This guy is part of a gang who: -broke into Fort Knox via a secret tunnel -smashed up up all of the gold and mixed it into stone in a nearby quarry -transported that gold-bearing stone from the quarry to a mansion -melted down the gold and concealed it inside a series of bronze statues And while…
(Silver Streak Comics 005, 1940) I was just about to type that this was “a simple, straightforward super-hero comic story” and then immediately had to grapple with how to summarize the following: in the previous issue of Silver Streak Comics, adventurer Lance Hale set out to recover a treasure left by his uncle in an old mine in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After helping the immortal Queen of the Underground Empire Aldia and her caveman subjects fight off a lizard man…