Cops Shooting Fleeing Suspects: The NYPD do their level best to gun down the Challenger for wearing a mask near the scene of a crime. (Daring Mystery Comics 007, 1941) Some probably-also-NYPD officers try to do the same to the Black Cobra. (Dynamic Comics 001, 1941) Some definitely-NYPD officers try to gun down a fleeing Mask. (Exciting Comics 010, 1941) Honours: Heroic dog K-9 is given a medal and made an official officer in what is also likely supposed to…
Lev Gleason characters filling every available ecological niche over here. Thun-Dohr: We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again: Thun-Dohr (Thun-dohr?) is a white guy brought up in the traditions of a Tibetan monastery and he’s just the best dang mystic anyone’s ever seen, much better than all those Tibetan monks could ever be. Like Iron Fist, the 1970s version of this character archetype, Thun-Dohr was orphaned when his parents succumbed to the elements while attempting to reach the…
(Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941) Dickie Dean, Boy Inventor has a new invention: the Photo-Lightning Machine, with which he can cause a bolt of lightning to crash down on anyplace he pleases, like the deserted house across the road from him that nobody was planning on using, hopefully. The only catch is that he hasn’t yet figured out how to get the lightning to strike a target that is in water. Dickie and his pal Zip Todd take the plans…
Criminals! Unnamed Gambler: Not much is revealed about this fellow, but what we do know for sure is that he has access to a super strength drink and that he has been using it to clean up on gambling by slipping it to boxers and race horses with long odds. He also relies on the potion to help him escape from the cops, which backfires on him because Presto Martin, having taken the place of one of the boxers, is…
(Silver Streak Comics 012, 1941) The Lady Killer makes his debut at the glamorous Crane Club, in which he attacks and nearly kills rising stage star Betty Crawford and takes a moment to grandstand a bit before making his escape. The name is a somewhat presumptuous one here, given the fact that he has yet to kill a lady. He makes up for this over the next few days as he murders a whopping fourteen women and injures a similar…
I wonder if we’ll ever synthesize a unified theory of comic book religion out of this stuff. Isis: While attempting to thwart the magical con man Ahman-Ka-Lukor, Doctor Miracle calls upon the power of the Egyptian goddess Isis, who aids him by summoning the shade of the man whose reincarnated soul is now Ka-Lukor’s, and all so that Doctor Miracle can compare the two and make sure that he has the right man – it’s the most elaborate alternative to…
(Silver Streak Comics 011, 1941) For the third issue in a row, a souped up super-plane takes to the skies of probably-California to menace law-abiding aviators. The Ripper, like the Heater before it, is a vehicle with a singular name being run by a group, which is a mildly interesting taxonomic trend that unfortunately does not continue to occur. Where the Wingers and the Heater were armed with sci-fi ray cannons, the Ripper relies on a comparatively low-tech blade that…
I’ve often mentioned how comics as a medium has a grand tradition of not using the real names for people (see about half the entries in our collection of Real Folk in comics) places (see the grand list of fictional countries on every continent of our list of Locations) and things, so I hope that it won’t surprise you when I say that they make up all the media, too. And since I have a big list of all the…
I’ve often mentioned how comics as a medium has a grand tradition of not using the real names for people (see about half the entries in our collection of Real Folk in comics) places (see the grand list of fictional countries on every continent of our list of Locations) and things, so I hope that it won’t surprise you when I say that they make up all the media, too. And since I have a big list of all the…
(Silver Streak Comics 011, 1941) The Domino is dead! All those murders he did and more importantly admitted to when he was trying to extort the NYPD have caught up to him via the electric chair, and all of New York breathes easier. Not for long, however, as the various witnesses at the Domino’s trial, and particularly the members of his own gang who turned state’s evidence, begin turning up dead with a domino – that has the Domino’s fingerprints…