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 fabled monastery. Baby Thun-Dohr (and I can no longer think of new ways to ask why these people brought their baby along on this super dangerous expedition) was found and brought to safety by the monks, who acclaimed him as some sort of prophesied kid.
Thanks to his training in “the arts of the Gom-Pa,” Thun-Dohr has a wide variety of mystic powers, including invisibility, teleportation, invulnerability to a variety of environmental conditions, the ability to see the last moments of a person’s life in their corpse’s eyes, astral projection and so on and so forth. He also has a mystical bracelet that allows him to remain in mental contact with the 300+ year-old Dalai Lama (not the one you’re thinking of) who raised him as he goes out into the world to battle evil (i.e., the other guy from the same monastery who is attempting to end the world – could’ve used a prophecy telling them not to let him in, amirite?). (Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941)
Categorized in: Day Jobs (Lamas), Elements (Thunder), Origin (Mystic Traditions)
Undercover Man:
Police Detective Phil Barrows is unpopular at the Centre Street Homicide Department due to his habit of working alone (I think? Nobody seems to like him and this is the only stated reason why) so what does he do? Create a secondary identity called the Undercover Man so that he can work even more alone while adopting a variety of disguises. During his one published adventure he takes down corrupt politician Eduardo Donati and while I’m not normally one to critique someone’s decision to adopt a costumed identity I think he probably could have done it as a regular cop if he’d tried to. (Captain Battle Comics 001, 1941)
Categorized in: Day Jobs (Police Detective), Powers (Master of Disguise), Professions (Law Enforcement)
Blackout:
Blackout is the new name adopted by Dr Basil Brusiloff after he is mutated by chemicals randomly mixed together during a Nazi air raid on the hospital in which he is working. Unlike many other super-heroes who undergo physical transformations, Brusiloff’s new, jet-black form appears to be a permanent change and not something that he can switch on and off.
Blackout is able to fly at speed comparable to a fighter plane, but his main power is the ability to emit a thick black smoke from his pores, the specificity of which somehow makes it seem more gross than a smoke power usually does.
In addition to being opaque, this smoke is thick enough to suffocate someone in an unventilated environment (this is also gross. Huff my gas, miscreants!). Blackout is able to direct this smoke and even shape it to some degree (such as when he forms a long tunnel out of it to shield fleeing civilians from Nazi eyes), but most remarkably is able to emit it in large enough quantities that at one point he escapes a sealed room by bursting the walls through sheer air pressure.
Aside from his powers, there are two remarkable things about Blackout: firstly, his origin takes place in Belgrade, which makes him the first in what is sure to be a pretty short list of Yugoslavian superhumans. Secondly, Blackout is the subject of some very minor debate vis-a-vis just how hairy/furry he is, with the two sides boiling down to “the text never says he’s hairy so it must just be something else” versus “he looks very hairy.” I am inclined to side with the latter side. He looks very hairy!
Related to the hairiness question is a third interesting thing about Blackout: it is quite possible that he is completely nude, aside from that stylish green mask. (Captain Battle Comics 001, 1941)
Categorized in: Activities (Blackouts), Colours (Black), Origin (Chemical Mutates)
Nightro:
Nightro is Hugh Goddard, a scientist who was betrayed and left to die by his associates after they found a rich radium deposit in Alaska and Goddard expressed his desire to donate it to medical research, and though I do have some sympathy for his partners’ position that as the expedition’s financial backers they should see some profit from the mine they resort to murder a bit too quickly for my tatse. Surely this is a case for the courts!
If you look Nightro up online, odds are that you will be told that he is blinded by the ambient radiation from the deposit. This is not true! What actually happens is that he wanders around in the snow until he is found by some helpful Inuit fellows and ends up with an extreme case of snow-blindness. Radiation doesn’t even come up.
Goddard eventually makes his way back to the US, where a Dr Frank Miller (!) discovers that polarized lenses will allow him to see. Unlike his blind super-hero contemporaries the Mask and Dr Mid-Nite, Nightro does not appear to have any kind of enhanced dark vision. Instead, his stated reason for adopting a costumed alias is that his goggles are too ugly for him to be accepted in polite society.
Goddard continues to live as a blind man as part of maintaining his secret identity as Nightro, meaning that from his second appearance onward he has a seeing eye dog companion named Blackie. He is called the “Streamlined Robinhood,” supposedly because he takes money from crooks and redistributed it to the needy – I reckon that it’s just a way to attach a buzzword to the character – if he had debuted tenyears later he might’ve been “the Jet Age Robinhood.” (Daredevil Comics 002, 1941)
Categorized in: Accessories (Dogs), Locations (Temporal), Origins (Blind Characters)
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