(Master Comics 015, 1941) Mr Murder is your “pay or die” style of extortionist and a) has a pretty great name and b) is presumably in an early stage of his career as there is a lot more “die” going on than “pay”. Mr Murder also has a great understated costume: tunic, hat, cape, scarf, gloves. Just a bit off of what you might see someone actually wearing – nice and menacing in a Shadow sort of way. And of…
(Master Comics 015, 1941) This really illustrates how the life of a mysterious adventurer is different from that of the rest of us: while driving through Florida, Zoro the Mystery Man stops at a random mansion, is rebuffed when he seeks admittance, and decides to snoop around. While you or I might discover, say, a private birthday party or merely a normal family who don’t particularly want to entertain every stranger who knocks on their door, Zoro instead finds a…
(Master Comics 015, 1941) Minute-Man receives the “highest award for valor” from the South American nation of Rinaldo for stopping a load of Nazi stand-ins from blowing up their Washington embassy. (Master Comics 016, 1941) The Companions Three receive the Decoration for Valor of the European nation of Cabarro for facilitating and then stopping the theft of their crown jewels.
(Master Comics 013-014, 1941) I’m not going to lie: when I started reading this story I got excited for one of the more niche reasons I ever have. See, the prior Buck Jones story – the one with the Ghost Killer gang – was still wrapping up and I had a moment where I thought there would be some very exciting gang continuity if any of the former Ghost Killers, already relict of the White Arrow gang, had joined up…
(Whiz Comics 015/ Master Comics 014, 1941) Basics first: the Crystal is nothing particularly special. He’s a businessman or something named Mr James who has a wealthy ward named Ronnie Keller and covets the money that he is charged with administering. It’s a pretty common turn of events in comics and Mr James is part of the significant minority of greedy guardians who decide to skip the simple embezzlement and advance straight to costumed thuggery. He’s got goons and everything!…
(Master Comics 013, 1941) The long and the short of it is that the Choker is an old-fashioned escaped homicidal maniac of the sort who indiscriminately kills everyone who crosses his path – more akin to a rampaging monster than a villain, plot-wise. He gets into a couple of scrapes with Zoro the Mystery Man (who, by the way, proves susceptible to the worst little old lady disguise in comics history) before meeting a rare Death by Cheetah. Also: a…
Ripped from the headlines: The acclimation of a new Dalai Lama must have been big headlines in 1941 because not only did Zoro the Mystery Man save him from being kidnapped for ransom… (Master Comics 014, 1941) … but over on Earth-Two, the Three Aces did the same! (Action Comics 032, 1941) Great Folk: Wizzar, Father of All Magic, teacher and mentor of El Carim, dead and returned as a spirit who appears “when some great crime against the dead…
(Master Comics 012, 1941) At first I was fairly unimpressed with the Terror – I regarded him as yet another low-ambition super-crook, a guy with the wherewithal to invent a hypnotic ray belt and mount the output in the villain-standard rubberoid mask but with no greater ambition than to murder his uncle and half sister to get his mitts on the family fortune. But… is there another, non-crime way to get rich off of a hypnotic ray projector? I imagine…
(Master Comics 012, 1941) Maybe someday I’ll wish that I had started out putting all of the various gangs of masked Western outlaws in group posts like the generic villains or mad scientists. But maybe not, because the major difference between those three groups is that the other two are par for the course in a super-hero comic while masked outlaws are frequently the only interesting thing about a Western comic. Anyway: the Ghost Killers (unofficial name – they are…
(Master Comics 012, 1941) The Seven Masters are just your regular drug smuggling/ opium dealing gang operating out of San Francisco’s Chinatown. They don’t get up to anything too spectacular – El Carim gets in on the action because the head of the gang is using his criminal might to try to get a woman to marry him instead of her boyfriend – and they trade on some pulp-era Yellow Peril tropes, but despite all of that I must admit…