![](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEiGV9ivlzIpnvZTHVRk4j2rJUJ6HYF86C0lFrTQnCu5gB3ADlk-eCxFe3VvmP4r3YA7OtKUkpxwc3TNTJTjW6LCGXHupFWYbbj257Ttmt2gqR8tnrUgH-VcWu0b8zPVkiMbqKR_6ZQmSaawhX29_dPIKKyosN9vuFCX-Ub_CrWzXb0uXphyphenhyphenB3NKjUdnBNbF\/w640-h460\/press%20guardian%20a%20pep%20001%201940.JPG\" "\\"press")
<\/a><\/div>\nIn the Press Guardian’s first outing he is known as the Falcon, but he has the same core mission as he will throughout his career: to clean up crime in Central City via the free press, even if he must do so in a pretty bad costume. A fair few places online list reporter Flash Calvert as the Falcon’s secret identity but this is one of your classic reading comprehension\/ research tests: it certainly seems<\/i> like Calvert is the Falcon right up to the last third of the story, in which they start appearing in the same panels as one another. Thus, a claim that Calvert is the Falcon means that the claimant either skimmed the story in question or is taking the word of another who did so.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n By Pep Comics<\/i> 002, the Falcon has officially changed his name to the Press Guardian and traded in his Victorian daredevil costume for a classic suit-and-mask combo. His identity is also revealed as Perry Chase, society columnist and universally derided failson of the publisher of the Daily Express. As with a lot of Golden Age heroes the necessity for your secret identity to be the subject of scorn is not really explained – surely the same effect could be achieved by faking a limp or something and then people wouldn’t constantly be insulting you to your face.<\/p>\n But the papes must go through, and the majority of the Press Guardians adventures have a hand in ensuring that they do, if only tangentially. (Pep Comics 001, 1940)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Auro, Lord of Jupiter<\/b>:<\/p>\n Before Auro was lord of anything he was just some kid with the last name Hardwich who was out on a Sunday space drive with his family when all of a sudden things went wrong and the family space car crashed into the solid, non-gaseous, habitable surface of the planet Jupiter. There, the now-orphaned boy is raised by a Jovian tiger, becomes extra beefy in the high gravity environment, and rises to a position of leadership in the nearby tribe of “Jupiter Brutes,” who name him Auro, meaning “Unconquerable”.<\/p>\n All this is pretty standard jungle orphan, white guy exceptionalism stuff and I’m sure that one could make a pretty good case for it being just as unpleasant a series of tropes even when divorced from any real-world peoples etc, but what I must<\/i> focus on is the fact that when you put a jungle guy in space he becomes a space barbarian and is actually pretty entertaining to read. (Planet Comics 001, 1940)<\/p>\n the Red Comet<\/b>:<\/p>\n Speaking of taking character tropes from one comic genre and putting them in another, here’s the Red Comet! Like his fellow Fiction House hero the Red Panther<\/a>, the Red Comet brings super-hero style to a non-super-heroic world, or worlds in this case, as he beetles around the cosmos righting wrongs.<\/p>\n The Red Comet’s main trick involves shrinking and growing at will, but over time he demonstrates a wide range of situationally useful abilities including but not limited to: a crime-in-progress sense, insect communication, invisibility, super strength, the ability to survive in space without PPE, flight and the ability to change the size of others.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Red Comet’s ability to change size is initially attributed to advanced technology (an “intra-atomic space adjuster,” natch), while his expanded ability set is generally described as “magic.” Then, in Planet Comics <\/i>009, he is on a dinner date and explains that he got his size control abilities when he was struck by “some outer space force,” which gives him a more traditional super-hero origin. No word on whether his ability to talk to termites is still magic or as a result of another jolt of cosmic energy. (Planet Comics 001, 1940)<\/p>\n Tiger Hart of Crossbone Castle<\/b>:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\n