How did these real people come to be trapped in the 2D realm? We may never know Adolf Hitler: This one is more tenuous but Blitz Krieg here is Fuehrer of the pseudo-Nazi Bundonian forces in America. He’s not not a Hitler analog. (Blue Ribbon Comics 006, 1940) This is Boris Thorax, first foe of Rex Dexter of Mars, who collaborates with the Moon People in order to take over the Earth of 2000 AD. Look at that hair: that’s…
Lotsa lil guys. Mr Justice: Like the Spectre or the Wraith (or Sergeant Spook or the Gay Ghost or the Ghost Patrol…), Mr Justice is your classic restless spirit who remains on Earth to mete out justice to the wicked. Specifically, Mr Justice is the 200 year old ghost of the fictional English Prince James, cruelly slain by followers of Prince Richard during the Rogers Rebellion of the 1740s. Astute readers and students of history might have noticed a few…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 012, 1941) Here’s a story about my powers of observation: I immediately noticed that our friend Rialb here had a backward name and spent a good half hour trying to figure out which Blair he might be named in reference to (a 1940s spiritualist? a famous skeptic?) before my eyes drifted slightly to the left and I took in the fact that the story was written by Joe Blair. I still have no idea why Joe Blair…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 011, 1941) We open not on the King of the Vampires but on a different vampire, one with a monocle. This is Carlos Hubbello, a diplomatic envoy from South America who has been sent to discuss a trade deal with the US that would leave the Nazis in the cold. The two gentlemen with him are no gentlemen at all but rather Nazi spies who are controlling Hubbello by the simple expedient of having turned him into…
Some say they’re not generic enough but I think they’re trying their best. This fellow is part of a gang looking to hijack a shipment of railway guns from train engineer Runaway Ronson. I really enjoy the look of the padded suit they use to help survive crashing a car into a high-speed train but I really really enjoy the fact that they immediately scramble off into the woods and are never seen again, as if they were completely unrelated…
I have a lot of these in a spreadsheet somewhere but we’ll get to those later. For now it’s as we encounter them: real people and versions of real people and analogs of real people and also the same but famous fictional people in comics. Admiral Dewey, John Paul Jones, Sir Francis Drake: Their ghosts all volunteer to help Sergeant Spook go pirate hunting (Blue Bolt v1 008, 1941) Adolf Hitler: “Gustave Ritter” isn’t really very close to “Adolf Hitler”…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 008, 1941) Technically, Natcha is just another costumed gang boss, but she has a lot more style than you usually get with those. This being MLJ’s Hercules, Natcha is thematically linked to one of his iconic Twelve Labours, in this case the theft of the Girdle of Hippolyta. Of course, this version of Hercules was ridding the ancient world of evil rather than atoning for his own crimes via arbitrarily hard tasks, so the girdle doesn’t come…
MORE MLJ ACTION Doc Strong: Doc Strong is a famous scientist living in the year 2041, in a world where WWII dragged on for an entire century and a new Mongol Horde has swept in and conquered the battered remnants of civilization. The strangely Doc Savage-like Doc Strong gathers a group of like-minded scientists and starts a new civilization called the Isle of Right from which to strike back at the invaders with such inventions as a ray gun that…
(Blue Ribbon Comics 004, 1940) There are plenty of Ku Klux Klan- inspired groups in comics and thusfar we’ve encountered a few: the Blue Devils, the Horned Masks, even the Purple‘s gang of idiots. All of those examples share one thing: they’re just gangs that operate in the country using the intimidation tactics of the KKK but without the goals of reinforcing white supremacy – they’re just regular comic book gangs, only in the country. There’s a part of me…
All Archie/MLJ edition! Rang-a-Tang the Wonder Dog: The Wonder Dog is an uncommon but distinct type of comic book hero and Rang-a-Tang here is typical of the breed: essentially a dog with human intelligence. Rang-a-Tang escaped from a cruel but evidently very talented circus dog trainer and almost immediately teamed up with police Detective Hy Speed, who was perhaps lashing out at the world for his own moniker when he gave his new dog one of the all-time worst names….