We've talked about the Rangers Of Freedom whose nemesis was the mysterious villain called Super-Brain. The highly domed big-brained boy first hypnotized an army of people to go crazy and cause chaos in the streets of America. The Rangers stopped him, but Mr. Brain got away. After his first caper in Issue #1 of Fiction House's Rangers Comics in 1941 he continued in the following issue, but for some reason the narration says the story takes place in 1948, so whether this was a typo or a hypothetical look into the future is never explained. Super-Brain zips back to his hideout in the Rockies where he contacts none other than Adolf Hitler who the villain refers to as Schickelgruber(which is supposed to be his real name). Over the radio, Super-Brain reveals he's the one who got Hitler in his position of power and that he wants him to invade the United States. The Rangers join the fight against the unstoppable Nazis soldiers who are totally immune to death. The U.S. Army captures one of the Nazis and find out they're treated with a temporary super-soldier serum, so they send the Rangers along with Lt. Gloria Travis(the current Miss America)to Washington DC to infiltrate the German forces. The Rangers discover Super-Brain is the one behind the immortal soldier formula and attack him while he's taking a nap in his wheelchair as the bad guy's head is so big that he can barely walk. Super-Brain uses a "vibrator ray" to temporarily make his Nazi stooges invisible as they capture the Rangers, and then blurts out that he's really an alien planning to conquer the world, as well as having captured Gloria and put her in a typical Slave Leia outfit. The Rangers are brought before a Nazi firing squad, but our heroes took a swig of the immortality juice and deflect all the bullets. Super-Brain levitates himself away, and the Rangers think they've blown him up for good in a gyro at the end of the story. The next issue has Gloria joining the crew full-time as Ranger Girl, and all of the Rangers investigate the mass murder of a band of hobos. The Rangers are get captured again, this time by a scarred thug named Scarface who works for Super-Brain. The not quite-dead villain gets his personal costumed executioner called the Black Axeman to kill the pesky patriots, even though they get rescued by a diminutive detective who hid himself under a bearskin rug. They foil Super-Brain's current scheme with fire as he has pyrophobia, and their dumb enought tho think he's been killed again in an exploding gyro. The final issue in this saga has Super-Brain of course still alive and trying to cover up the existence of his secret island as he launches a preliminary attack on the Rangers and paralyzes them with a ray gun that looks like a flashlight. The Rangers are again freed by a random secondary character as Super-Brain goes to his island hideaway near Hawaii, and the Rangers are caught once again by the Japanese forces who have teamed-up with Brainy. One more time, the good guys are set free by a convenient benefactor who happens to be a topless local girl, and the Rangers stop Super-Brain's plot to destroy the U.S. Navy with his giant laser cannon. Super-Brain apparently gets blown up one last time as his destructive device explodes. After this adventure, the Rangers Of Freedom retire their super-threads for regular commando gear. However, Super-Brain did of course survive, but he wouldn't surface again until three whole years later in the pages of Planet Comics set in the far-off future. To go from invading alien conqueror in an alternate 1940s to a full-blown phantom menace in space, Super-Brain had one of the more irregular runs of a Golden Age supervillain.
Comments
Post a Comment