Aliens Vs. Captain Midnight

Going from Jimmy Allen to Jim Albright, the famed radio drama adventurer Captain Midnight started in 1938 who went on to star in a movie serial, comic strips, and his own comic title by Fawcett Publications. When his Ovaltine-pushing decoder wasn't helping real life American soldiers in the field during WWII, the soaring superhero was rewritten for comics sporting a flying squirrel glider suit that allowed him to glide when he wasn't flying a fighter plane. After the war, writer Otto Van Binder took what at the time was a rare thing and turned a terrestrial-based hero into a guardian of the galaxy. Starting around Issue #48, Midnight perfected his first space rocket to stop crooks from stealing an asteroid made of gold. From this point on, future issues would feature a single story of the title character in space. The Captain went on to have a saga on the moon after his ship gets escaped prisoner Killer Jordan for a stowaway. His main alien nemesis was Jagga the Space Raider, a renegade from Pluto who regularly butted heads with Midnight in his plots to plunder the Solar System. Cap eventually captured Jagga and took him to America to be put on trial for his stellar crimes, which is seriously outside their jurisdiction. Jagga is given the electric chair which only makes him stronger, although Midnight ultimately buried him, only to have the villain literally rise from his grave to have a final duel on Pluto where the Space Raider gets exiled into the cold universe by his own people. Captain Midnight went on to clash with purple space pirates, alien animals, and a flying saucer scandal. While it became fairly common to take characters like Jason Vorhees, Josie And The Pussycats, the Leprechaun, or the Gilligan's Island crew, and tossing them into the inky void after writers ran out of ideas of things for them to do on Earth, Captain Midnight was a trendsetter by just shooting him from the skies to "in space".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bingo The Racist Wonder Boy

Image
"Comics" McCormick could be viewed as being history's first fan fiction writer. Created by Ed Wheelan, the young boy named Comics is a member of the The Little Conquerors Social And Reading Club where they talk about comic book characters. Mr. McCormick would regularly have dreams where he had crossovers with the various fictional superheroes that run in the comics that "Comics" is a fan of. In Terrific Comics #5, "Comics" and his friends are fanboying about the latest character, Bingo, who was a parody of the original Captain Marvel(the Shazam one). In his own story, whenever Jerry Jones Jr. would say "Ka-bang", he changes into Bingo the Wonder Boy, which of course is a name out of a baker's dozen of young comic book characters with a similar moniker, including Batman's old chum. "Comics" tries out the magic word and summons up Yama Lama of Ka-Bang, a racist caricature of a Tibetan guru which here is a wish-granting genie. ...
Read more

All I Need Is A Miracle Man

Image
Mick Anglo was one of the earliest creators of British comic books, mostly known for making the character Marvelman which was later rebooted in the 80s by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. The idea behind Marvelman was after DC Comics had shut down Fawcett's production of Captain Marvel comics blaming it for being a copycat of Superman. That ceased European reprints that Miller's publishing company of L. Miller And Sons was doing, so they created their own version as a young blonde titled Marvelman. This included an entire superhero family with supporting heroes Young and Kid Marvelman making it available to a wide range of readers. Mick Anglo decided to come out with a copy of his own copy of a copycat superhero for Spanish readers billed as Superhombre, that was also the name eventually used for Spanish reprints of Superman. Anglo's Superhomrbe was written by Juan Llarch and drawn by Emilio Giralt Ferrando with black and white interiors in 1958, and was later reprinted for Engl...
Read more

The Super-est American Hero

Image
When you need help defeating the Axis powers, you cut to the chase by building the Chronopticon to travel to the year 2350 and get a mutant super soldier. Lasting for only four issues of Fight Comics in 1941, Super-American was a fusion of Superman and Captain America. Allan Bruce is the world's first timelord and uses his new time machine to get help from Americans in the future where everyone has superpowers. They send back one of their unnamed citizens to assume the role of a stars and stripes sporting superhero. This reverse-Buck Rogers uses his powers of strength, speed, flight, and invulnerability to first take on some pesky fifth columnists assaulting Washington lead by the Nazi stooge Tyrannus. Their initial mission fails, so Tyrannus gets help from his commanding officer, the sneakily named Vultro, while Super-American flies all the way over to Europe to stop their plan to use brand new "air torpedoes" on the Allied Forces. Further installments show the original ...
Read more