Super-goofball Johnny Thunder probably drove some readers up the wall. In All-Star Comics 18 (Fall 1943), he started walking up them himself.
Comic book writers frequently turned to classic science fiction to find formidable challenges for superheroes. In the case of All-Star 18, writer Gardner Fox evoked H.G. Wells’ 1905 Strand Magazine tale The Empire of the Ants.
In the Wells’ story, Captain Gerilleau uses his gunboat, the Benjamin Constant, to assist the Upper Amazon town of Badama, which had been overrun by large black ants. Wells’ story echoes the great nautical writer Joseph Conrad, whom he knew and admired.
Gerilleau finds an abandoned town and loses his second in command to the ants’ poison, discovering that the insects have evolved high intelligence along with tool-making and war-making skills.
Escaping, the captain takes a parting shot at the ant-dominated town, without much hope that his shelling will do anything to stop this new, superior species.
Wells is obliquely referred to in Fox’s opening narration: “Many learned savants have wondered what would happen if insects (which, in proportion to their size, are many, many times stronger than men) challenged man’s supremacy on Earth!”
The Justice Society of America is more effective than Gerilleau in its battle against the super villain King Bee, who throws ant-men, hornet-men, termite-men and others against them.
King Bee’s insect hormones even give Johnny Thunder the powers of a human fly after Thunder eats some “funny-tasting bologna” in a diner.
Thunder and his Thunderbolt, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, the Spectre, Dr. Mid-Nite, the Sandman, Starman, and the Atom finally corner the King Bee, who turns out to be the ugly, shrunken Elmer Pane, an exterminator who was mocked for his humble profession. His revenge was to turn innocent people into insect criminals under his command.
“Haw-haw!” Pane says. “Now they will find in me a person at whom it is dangerous to sneer!”
Super villains are a touchy lot, but they have good grammar.
Michael Fraley wrote: "Funny tasting bologna" is perhaps a most fitting line for Johnny Thunder -who was sort of a proto-Jimmy Olsen, with a magic phrase instead of a signal watch.
ReplyDeleteLisa Childress wrote: "the King Bee, who turns out to be the ugly, shrunken Elmer Pane, an exterminator who was mocked for his humble profession." This is wonderful. You never know who you're dealing with, so it's best to make fun of no one. Never know if your taunt is the proverbial straw that causes someone to turn into something that doesn't exist in nature! :oD (I guess he couldn't be the QUEEN Bee back then, because, you know, macho identity politics.
ReplyDelete