(Startling Comics 001, 1940) “Dr Slade is one of those rare and unfortunate villains who are a part of a super-hero’s origin story but who also die as a part of that origin, so that they don’t even have the dignity of actually properly being a part of that hero’s rogues gallery. That’s sad! On the other hand, Slade did develop his resurrection technology in order to build an army of the formerly-dead in aid of a fascist takeover of…
Sax Rohmer has a lot to answer for. the Golden Dragon: We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again – the Golden Dragon is yet another Fu Manchu-style Yellow Peril crimelord bent on bending the world to his will. He messes up by making his campaign of kidnapping and extortion a bit too obvious, which attracts the attention of the Invisible Hood, who in turn rallies various kidnap victims etc into a fighting force to take the Dragon’s organization…
(Startling Comics 001, 1940) Shortly after acquiring his super powers, Andrew “Captain Future” Bryant uses them to sniff out a criminal conspiracy to rob a gold shipment from the nation of Finvania and then use that capital to finance a bid for world domination by someone called the Purple Plague. Exactly the sort of thing that a fledgling super-hero is going to be against! Captain Future spends the bulk of the issue in a back-and-forth tussle with the Purple Plague’s…
A full hand of Better (Nedor/Standard/Pines) Comics characters for ye. Captain Future: When young Dr Andrew Bryant finds himself fired from his job as a… research physicist? electrical engineer?… at the Pacific Electrical Corporation he responds like any rational person would: by working day and night in in a desperate bid to finish his research in the time he has left, until his tired brain thinks its way into an industrial accident. Luckily for Bryant he lives in a super-hero…
Yet again we have a selection of comic book appearances of real-style people for you to enjoy. Adolf Hitler: Warak, dictator of Barbaria is a bit generic as far as pseudo-Hitlers go, but a pseudo-Hitler he is. (Smash Comics 017, 1940) Scraggs, leader of the Green Shirts, is very much a “make the leader look like Hitler as shorthand for These Guys Are Fascists” character, a subspecies that will nearly die out some time in 1941 but survives in small…
A grab bag of old characters I skipped over back in the early days when I thought that this blog wasn’t going to be completely self-indulgent. Mr Clue: He only had one adventure in which he solves the murder of a mayor by a police chief, but Mr Clue is too great a name not to take note of. (Master Comics 001, 1940) the Red Gaucho: A swashbuckling hero in the Zorro mode, the Red Gaucho protects the South American…
(Speed Comics 009, 1940) The Count is a fairly by-the-book pseudo-Nazi spy with a very audacious plan for acquiring US military secrets: kidnap the US Secretary of State (a moderately off-model Cordell Hull) and extract them from him via gear-based torture. Unfortunately for the Count his plans were anticipated by the US Secret Service, who proactively substituted Ted Parrish, aka the Man With 1000 Faces, for Hull. Led to the spies’ farmhouse hideout by a special radium tracking device, the…
(Speed Comics 009, 1940) Comrade Ratski’s first appearance is fairly undistinguished as far as comic book spymasters go. Sent to subvert US war preparations, Ratski targets an airplane factory operating out of Hollywood, California (for some damn reason) and sensibly decides to do so under the guise of a war movie shoot next door, though at the point that you have all of the equipment required for such an attack in place, why bother going through with the “we’re just…
Making his triumphant return to comics, the dome-headed goblin of crime: Baron von Kampf! Baron von Kampf’s initial return in Speed Comics 004 involves him heading a sabotage ring for an unnamed European nation that is probably meant to be Nazi Germany, and it’s possible that this is a relationship that were were meant to understand was behind his actions all along, but frankly it seems to me to be beneath him. The Baron’s schemes on behalf of his fascist…
(Speed Comics 007, 1940) Killraye is the leader of the extremely wild and wonderful looking Jupiter Men (courtesy of writer/artist/wild alien designer Munson Paddock) of an unspecified future, and leads them in an attempt to hijack plans for an advanced ray gun design from inter-planetary mail courier Mars Mason. (whether the Jupiter Men have a caste-based physiology and Killraye represents their ruling form or he is of a different species entirely is unclear. He certainly looks a lot different that…