(Blue Bolt v2 002, 1941) Dr Zorka is a probably-mad scientist who gets up to experiments in reanimating the dead on a small island off the coast of Cuba, like Dr Bruno Varoz before him. Unlike Dr Varoz, Dr Zorka has no overt intention of unleashing his creations on an unsuspecting populace. It’s too bad for him, then, that this is a Sergeant Spook comic and in a Sergeant Spook comic the dead are likely to, for example, make a…
(Blue Bolt v2 001, 1941) “Rock” Rook is a gangster with an incredibly annoying name: hard to parse, seems like it should mean something but doesn’t, plus its’ always written as “Rock Rook” and that’s probably just a quirk of early 20th Century English but it makes me think that his last name isn’t even Rook and that makes me think that it means something again but it still doesn’t. Anyway, he is sentenced to and executed in the electric…
(Blue Bolt v2 001, 1941) Twelve issues into the story of Dick Cole, Wonder-Boy, a wrinkle is introduced: another Wonder-Boy! And rather than the usual thing where an evil lab assistant etc. steals Professor Blair’s research for his own use, this story introduces the concept of the double-thought wave. This is a theory that all the times in history that two people have had the same idea at the same time are not as a result of coincidence but rather…
(Blue Bolt v1 012, 1941) There are a lot of dastardly fascist spy chiefs in comics of the 1940s, so it’s nice when one has something to distinguish themself from the monocle-and-dueling-scar heavy pack. Agent 17’s gimmick, as stated by the dying Latonian agent Gonzales, is that he is a “young man with an old face.” How useful is this in the average spy mission? Moderately, I presume. Agent 17’s mission is to prevent the government of the South American…
(Blue Bolt v1 011, 1941) Dr Trask is himself not much to speak of: a scientist who has taken over a village in the South American jungle, forced its inhabitants to pan gold and fight for him and killed anyone from the outside world who got too close, including Dr Martin, a scientist whose colleague Dr Howard has hired Sub-Zero to investigate just what is going on. Like I said, pretty standard comic book villain stuff, but his methods, oh…
(Blue Bolt v1 010, 1941) Fargall is a scientist-cum-criminal operating out of Centro, Sub-Zero’s chosen home (well, it hasn’t actually been identified as Centro for about 7 issues or so and I’m afraid that it’s slowly transmogrifying into NYC like all unnamed comic book cities but until I’m told otherwise it’s Centro to me) who has taken up the challenge of operating out of a super-hero town by inventing heat ray guns that effectively counter Sub-Zero’s whole deal. If that…
(Blue Bolt v1 010, 1941) Some preamble: in Blue Bolt v1 007 the Green Sorceress managed to capture the Blue Bolt and thus in Blue Bolt v1 008 she was able to force Dr Bertoff to surrender to her forces. Her incompetent scientists subsequently triggered a series of devastating explosions while attempting to extract radium from Bertoff’s mineral fields, with the one positive effect of opening a passage to the surface world. The Green Sorceress then travelled to the surface…
(Blue Bolt v1 009-010, 1940) This is a simple one but there are a lot of Lore Implications so I had to use a lot of pictures. To start, Sergeant Spook and his pal Dr Sherlock notice that there are no North African ghosts in Ghost Town (aside from Cleopatra, who was mentioned a few issues earlier) and resolve to go solve that mystery. They get the permissions and passports necessary to enter the mortal realm and head out. Arriving…
(Blue Bolt v1 008, 1941) The Sergeant Spook writers, having exhausted the storytelling possibilities inherent in an ultra-powerful ghost taking on mere mortals and having established that ghost-on-ghost violence is essentially consequence free are now trying a new angle: ghost crooks preying on mortals and Sergeant Spook bringing them to justice. This time, it’s the Ghost of Captain Kidd – like Jesse James before him, Kidd is compelled to return to the patterns of his life, and having obtained a…
(Blue Bolt v1 007, 1940) We have entered the era of Sergeant Spook battling villainous ghosts! It’s not quite as low stakes as Sergeant Spook just manhandling mortal crooks while they have no ability to affect him but since the worst that ghosts can do to each other in this fictional milieu is to knock one another out it’s still missing a bit of something. Still, the setting of Ghost Town is a fun one and we’re still getting lots…