In 1938, DC Comics had introduced a spectacularly successful superman whose powers were physical, so MLJ countered a year later with another superman whose powers were mental.
The son of a patriotic American “first family,” Blane Whitney invented a steel-burning super-substance for President Wilson when he was only 14, thereby speeding the end of World War I.
College instructors “marvel at his brilliance.” A clean-cut all-around star athlete, he is also “popular with the young ladies,” we’re assured in Top-Notch Comics 1 (Dec. 1939).
I know, I know, he’s starting to sound insufferable.
But wait, there’s more.
“Starting in early childhood, he worked to develop a ‘Super Brain,’” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “As a result of his rigorous training, he gained clairvoyance, psychokinesis and other powers that appear magical. Naturally, his extreme intelligence told him the best use of these powers would be to join the burgeoning throngs of superheroes.”
“When first seen, the Wizard looked more like Mandrake the Magician (comics’ first successful costumed, super-powered adventure character) than Superman (who is generally held to have kicked off the genre),” Markstein observed.
The Wizard was a pioneer in what might be called the Tom Swift school of superheroics.
“In his earliest battles, against such foreign scourges as the Jatsonian invaders and the equally nasty Borentals, the Wizard used many amazing weapons of his own invention,” wrote comics historian Ron Goulart. “These included Secret Formula F 22 X, the H2-VX-O Ray and his Dynamagno-Saw Ray Projector.”
Hard on the heels of the Batmobile, the prodigious polymath created a massive superhero car that could nip along at 500 miles an hour, and turn invisible.
So did an intellectual superman prove to be as big a draw to America’s boys as an athletic superman?
Need you ask?
He bounced around in comics for five years, sharing a title with the Shield for four of them. In October 1940, he lost his cover spot in Top-Notch to the Black Hood.
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