Red Panther's Mercury Mission

A few years after The Phantom became the purple protector of the jungle, the second issue of Fiction House's Jungle Comics introduced a new masked man in 1940, The Red Panther. Writer Tylor Martin had created a similar character in the previous issue named the White Panther who most fans think of as being the Red Panther's original incarnation, but it turns out they are two totally separate superheroes aside from the fact that they were both costumed men who acted as the "great white protector" of Africa because according to American comics writers of the Golden Age only white people were capable of maintaining peace in the jungle. Since both of these different color-themed heroes were the only characters that Taylor Martin was known to have made, it's more than likely that White Panther was just a prototype for Red Panther. The Red Panther made his outfit from the skin from a rare red panther which apparently gave him the powers of super-strength and teleportation which would've made him an excellent star for a slasher movie. Most of Red Panther's adventures had him crossing paths with mad scientists, big gorillas, and elephant stampede's, but the story done in Issue 10 takes a turn from jungle adventure to sci-fi when he heads off into space. Red Panther had a female cohort named Toni Belton who happened to have an galactic stratoplane that she felt would best be piloted by a mystery man of the jungle which has them crash landing on Mercury. The two of them are accosted by Merurians that send them to their leader Kogh who banishes them down into the subterranean layers of the planet to be fed to the giant bats that dwell there. Luckily, Red Panther had his reliable atomic converter raygun which he normally doesn't have when he's patroling the jungle on Earth, and scares off the big bats while making it back to the surface. Since he took care of his pest problem, Kogh loans Red Panther one of his ships to supposedly return to Earth, although its hinted that he and Toni would continue his interstellar journey in a future caper instead of ending up back in the jungle in the next issue. Leaping from the rain forest to a rocket trip is a stretch for a jungle-based superhero, yet even Tarzan wound up going to Mars a couple of times.

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