(More Fun Comics 069, 1941) Ian Karkull – who isn’t even called “Ian” until he returns in the year 200, sheesh – should be categorized as a minor super-hero but the past version of me got overexcited about his teamup with Wotan and gave him the full upgrade. See the link below for the skinny on Karkull’s two Golden Age appearances. UPDATE 1941
Doctor Fate plays his cards very close to his vest in his first year of operation. We don’t get a whole lot more information about him than we started out with: magic guy, cool helmet. We do however learn where he lives: Doctor Fate’s fourth appearance marks the first appearance of his iconic headquarters, the mysterious ancient tower with no doors that stands outside of Salem, Massachusetts (and it is as always pretty gauche to link Salem to actual magical…
(More Fun Comics 055, 1940) Wotan is the poster child for the class of mid-tier super-villain who figure into a super-hero’s early adventures and thus get to keep coming back any time someone wants to get back to basics on them. In this case, as the first and also the first recurring foe of Doctor Fate, he crops up every decade or so and gets few new details added to his backstory. When we first meet Wotan he seems to…
(More Fun Comics 055, 1940) There are several major ways to introduce a super-hero: you can lay out their whole deal right away and make their first adventure an origin story, or have them relate their origin in a quick flashback, or leave their origin mysterious and only sprinkle in the odd clue now and again. Or, as in the case of Doctor Fate, you can just kind of handwave it. “Yeah, yeah, he’s a magic man. He knows a…
Time for some good old-fashioned aliens. Space Men: These aliens, clad in the classic comic book green/purple colour scheme, come to Earth after just wandering around the universe for an unspecified amount of time – the implication being that they are some sort of space explorers. Though the fact that they mention being outside of their galaxy of origin means little given the state of astronomical knowledge among 1940s comic book writers, I am going to count them as our…
What was Wotan up to in 1940? A trip back in time! A year or so ago when I was reading the 1940 issues of More Fun was before I started doing Super-Villain Yearbook posts and so I skipped poor Wotan, an injustice compounded by the fact that he is what I would call a Median Villain: one who has either enough appearances or importance to a hero’s history to be more than a minor villain but without the name…