Pretty diverse bunch this time. the Lone Rider: Another masked cowboy hero dispensing justice from the barrel of the gun in the Old Modern West to throw in the pile. The Lone Rider does have the distinction of having been created by Jack Kirby for a very short-lived comic strip and recycled by Eastern Color for comic book content. Having read through a decent chunk of the Lone Rider’s appearances, I’m pretty sure that Texas never actually put in an…
Another truckload of half-baked mooks for your viewing pleasure. The otherwise-normal gangsters who have gotten ahold of a piece of superscience and are using it for crime are an important part of the super-hero comic ecosystem. Here is a wonderful example of such in the form of a gang who have access to disintegrator ray pistols and are using them like regular guns during a bank robbery. Fantastic stuff. The Invisible Avenger hits them with a train. (Superworld Comics 002,…
(Lightning Comics 004, 1940) Though Cats Romelt is the head of a gang of river pirates who organizes a fake warehouse guard union in order to call a general strike and leave the dock warehouses easy pickings, none of this is the reason for his being here. No, it is his sheer bloody-minded commitment to using starved alley cats with poisoned claws as weapons of terror and mass destruction that tipped him over into the category of super-villain. It’s an…
(Sure-Fire Comics 003a, 1940) The town of Branton, no state specified, has been struck by a mysterious plague, and X, the Phantom Fed, is suspicious. He infiltrates the quarantine zone around the town in the guise of a doctor and starts investigating the various odd facts of the plague, beginning with 1) the fact that is is being spread by a troop of escaped gorillas that were being used in medical testing and are now apparently just wandering the town…
(Sure-Fire Comics 003a, 1940) The Grand Dictator, aka Miko, is on a mission to conquer the US, and he’s doing it from a cool flying fortress. Miko and his men are probably intended to be at least Nazi-adjacent, but they don’t really come off that way, at least as compared with their contemporaries. I mean, sure, they’ve got the uniforms and the attitude, but where are the dimwitted goons named Hans and Franz shouting “Jah, jah!” as they scuttle off…
(Sure-Fire Comics 003b, 1940) The Crimson Circle are a masked gang with a more grandiose than normal name (and led by the Crimson Mask, as can just barely be made out under that rip in the third panel above, a rare instance of the named villain being less prominent than his named henchmen in a story), who have the fortune to rob the same loan company as the Raven, leading to them capturing, unmasking and forcing him to work for…
(Sure-Fire Comics 002, 1940) The Terror Trust is a group with a very simple money-making scheme: demand money from millionaires and then throw acid in the faces of the one who refuse to pay up. X, the Phantom Fed infiltrates this group by breaking captured member Horton out of prison and then impersonating him. X’s scheme falls apart when the Trust’s members realize that Horton was simply not clever enough to effect his own escape, leading him to capture…
(Sure-Fire Comics 002, 1940) The Tiger Man (also referred to as the much snappier Tiger Mask in one panel but I reckon that was just some sort of lettering error or other style of brain glitch) is a fellow in an extremely cool cowl mask who is trying to corner the pearl market in the South Seas using some very crooked tactics, such as sticking pearl bed owner Rita van Dyke on a raft and abandoning her at sea. Only…
(Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940) Flash Lightning’s first stop after getting juiced up with brand-new electric powers is New York City, super-hero capital of the world, and it’s a good career move for him because he immediately gets mixed up in some super shenanigans. An explorer named Parker has gone missing in Central America and the agents of someone named the Phoenix are doing their damnedest to prevent his daughter Mary from looking for him. Lightning and Mary dodge fiery deathtraps,…
(Sure-Fire Comics 001, 1940) The Green Mask is after one thing: world domination, and he’s looking to achieve it by capturing the Shock Ray, a weapon capable of paralyzing hundreds of people at a time, and which has been deemed too terrible to use by the US government (just why this is it unclear – my only idea is that it is either a fatal paralysis or a permanent one). The thing about the Green Mask that is very compelling…