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Month: May 2026

MEDIA IN COMICS 005

MEDIA IN COMICS 005

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This is the stuff that my counterpart in a comic book universe is writing his little blogs about. Movies: Not only does this theatre feature an appearance by Lady Luck (an impostor, alas), but it has screenings of Boris Scarloff in Mummy Blood and Myrna Powell and William Loy in Thinner than the Thin Man! (Lady Luck, the Spirit Section 1940) The villainous Comrade Ratski might have founded Ratski Productions and filmed his opus The Great War as a cover for his espionage activities,…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 093

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 093

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Fox Features, you burned hot and bright and brought us so many minor super-heroes. the Black Fury: The Black Fury, like Bob Phantom before him, is a newspaper gossip columnist who moonlights as a costumed vigilante. What are the chances that we would have two of those? I enjoy his costume even if it is somewhat generic even for 1941, though I am a bit upset that the glowing gemstone on his and his sidekick’s foreheads is never addressed. For…

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ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 044

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 044

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Aliens! Mostly Martians! Treemen: Richard of Warwick, aka the Golden Knight, having gone to the Crusades, won the Crusades and returned home from the Crusades, now enters a fourth period of adventuring that is all about family. First, he rescues his little brother from the evil Black Baron, he now sets out to explore his father’s gold mines including the boarded-up one where his mother disappeared twenty years earlier. Inside, in addition to a variety of hostile reptile life, Richard…

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MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 092

MINOR SUPER-HERO ROUND-UP 092

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Who ever thunk that there could be quite so many minor super-heroes? Invisible Scarlet O’Neil: Young Scarlet O’Neil, being the kind of person who will touch an arc of mysterious energy in her scientist father’s lab, finds herself rendered invisible, a condition that she eventually learns is reversed by touching a certain nerve in her wrist.* She uses this power to fight mid-tier injustice eventually (I am assured) parleys it into a career as a newspaper reporter. Before that, she…

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ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 043

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 043

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We’ve met a few of them in the past, but here’s another dose of the inhabitants of the Fourth Dimension, as explored by Flip Falcon. Zezo: Zezo works for the Fourth Dimensional villain Lucifer as a guardian. We don’t learn too much about this fellow – is he a one-off or representative of a whole species, for example – but I like his moxie and his big teeth. (Fantastic Comics 015, 1941) Koggo: Koggo is an even more mysterious fellow…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 636 UPDATE: THE SERPENT LADY

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 636 UPDATE: THE SERPENT LADY

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(Fantastic Comics 016, 1941) We all remember the Serpent Lady, who lived in an underwater city with a bunch of weird ghouls and used her pet sea serpent to kidnap people for her minions to eat. And we all remember how Sub Saunders showed up and killed her serpent but let her go free for some reason (the reason is because she is a sexy lady who walks around in a gold bikini top). Well, the Serpent Lady hasn’t just…

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ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 042

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 042

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I hope you like aliens, because I just can’t stop finding new ones.  Kobolians: The Kobolians are from the underwater city of Kobol in the year 10 000 CE, and while we don’t learn too much about how their society functions we can intuit a certain amount of civic pride, given that their leader is named Lobok – did he rise to power on the strength of that name? Did he adopt it? Is the city named after him? Whichever it is,…

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GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 042

GENERIC COSTUMED VILLAIN ROUND-UP 042

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Celebrated by none… until now. And then only mildly. Slavin: This masked man is the leader of a gang who have been systematically robbing warehouses and then burning them down. The culprit turns out to be Slavin, the general manager of the warehousing company, and not the red herring suspect Slivers, owner of the company (who is ugly, and therefore more likely to be evil than the handsome Slavin). PI Dan Williams is too enlightened to judge others based on…

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ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 041

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 041

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Once again I am inviting you to look at some aliens. Martian Sky-Demons: We only really ever see the space fleet belonging to these Martians, who have thrown in with the Axis forces to lend their “long-range, disintegrating super-bombs” to the invasion of North America. What they look like is left as just as much a mystery as what they are getting out this alliance with the Nazis. The Sky-Demons end up wasting their payload of super-bombs on a replica…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 966: ARPOR, HIGH PRIEST OF EVIL

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 966: ARPOR, HIGH PRIEST OF EVIL

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(Fantastic Comics 015, 1941) I’ve mentioned this in the past but it bears repeating: some Golden Age comics read like a fever dream, in which barely connected events just kind of float by as you read. This story is one of those, but also has a sort of exquisite corpse quality in that the connections between events almost make sense but when you step back and look at the whole it is astonishing. To whit: – Samson and David are just hanging…

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