(Blue Ribbon Comics 003, 1940) Red Dugan is a down-on-his-luck gang boss who turns to what will be a classic crime method in the Silver Age particularly: he kidnaps a scientist and forces him to science up a weapon for him to smite his enemies with. In this case, the scientist in question is one Dr Cardo, who seems oddly prepared for the task of making a Seafood Platter Man. Was he kidnapped just before embarking on his own reign…
(Blue Bolt v2 006, 1941) We open on an aircraft factory. Suddenly, a strange vibration fills the air. After an initial moment of surprise, the workers all file out the door and into a cave in a nearby hillside. Inside? THIS MAN! This man is the self-proclaimed High Priest of Thor and before we get into what he’s up to I’d like to commend his commitment to the costume. Your average religious-type villain is not going to these lengths to…
(Blue Bolt v2 004-005, 1941) We open on a bit of… not hubris but it’s often framed as hubris. I’m sure that TV Tropes has a name for it but danged if I’m going to go hunting for it. It’s the phenomenon in which a character in an ongoing fictional setting jokes about how they’re sure glad that *SPECIFIC THING* isn’t real etc and that thing is the focus of the next story. In this case, Sergeant Spook says he’s…
(Blue Bolt v2 004-006, 1941) There are hundreds if not thousands of antagonistic u-boat commanders in comics and very few of them are going to make the jump to super-villain. Commander Sooka, however… I did some cursory searching and it looks like the Axis forces sank around 1100 ships between 1939 and 1941, and the most successful u-boat captain of the entire war sank 47 ships total. What I’m saying is that if Commander Sooka’s count of 735 ships is…
Cops Shooting: I’ve been reading old Dick Tracy strips and while tracking all of the times that Tracy fires on a fleeing suspect would be a fool’s errand I would like to note that so far in the 1933 he has been responsible for the shooting deaths of two non-criminals. Nova Scotia: Speaking of Dick Tracy and filled with home-town pride: this July 1933 strip and the next week or so take place in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Honours: Black X…
(Blue Bolt v2 004, 1941) Community. That’s what the Bull’s all about. Specifically a crime community, one of the top kinds of communities (to read about at least – most of them don’t sound too great to live in). Situated in the Florida Everglades, the Bull’s nameless crime community consists of him, about five other guys and a pet crocodile living in a bunch of ramshackle shacks. It’s not much, but it’s home. There’s not much else to the Bull…
Some real highs and lows in this one. the Twister: The Twister is a quite minor Golden Age super-hero – he managed more than one appearance but not more than seven – who has the distinction of having one of the most well-designed costumes of the era. Not my favourite costume, mind you, but boy oh boy, you can really tell that his creators (Ray Gill and Paul Gustavson as it happens) really sat down for a good think about…
Some real highs and lows in this one. the Twister: The Twister is a quite minor Golden Age super-hero – he managed more than one appearance but not more than seven – who has the distinction of having one of the most well-designed costumes of the era. Not my favourite costume, mind you, but boy oh boy, you can really tell that his creators (Ray Gill and Paul Gustavson as it happens) really sat down for a good think about…
(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…