Marvel Mystery Comics (1939 series) #3

Aboard the streamliner Comet, Mr. Carson, owner of the Carson Explosive Company, watches a television broadcast showing Martian planes bombarding New York City with electronic rays. A fellow passenger dismisses the image as a hoax, but the scene is interrupted by a stranger who introduces himself as the Human Torch. Before the two men can discuss it further, the same style of Martian planes overtake the Comet and fire electronic rays at the rails, sending the train plunging off the track into an embankment. The Torch, pinned under wreckage, cannot ignite without risking Carson's life. He frees himself, melts the weapons of two Martians threatening Carson at knifepoint, and drives them off. A dying Carson entrusts the Torch with an envelope containing the formula for a new, more powerful TNT — safer than existing explosives but catastrophically dangerous in the wrong hands — and asks him to deliver it to his daughter, Diane, in Galeton, Texas. Carson dies from his injuries moments later.

The Torch rescues a trapped infant from the burning wreckage before flying to Galeton, where he arrives at the Carson Nitro Company offices. There he finds Diane being pressured by Mr. Ritton, an Earth agent of Mars who has been scheming for two years to obtain the formula on behalf of his Martian superiors. The Torch intervenes, delivers the envelope to Diane, and together they test the formula in the company laboratory, confirming its staggering power. On the road to an open testing field, Martians in a trailing car launch a torpedo-shaped false hood at the explosive truck; the Torch leaps clear into a creek, but is captured underwater by the Martians using a glass tube. Imprisoned, he is delivered to Ritton at the roundhouse. Ritton has Diane kidnapped as well and straps the Torch to an electric chair to coerce her into handing over the formula. She refuses. Ritton betrays his Martian partners and boards a locomotive, the Streak, to flee with the formula for himself, planning to become Emperor of the United States. The Torch breaks free when the switch is thrown — the electric current forms a halo around his body, allowing him to ignite — and dives at the speeding train, splitting the rails and stopping it. He confronts Ritton inside the cab; sand from a trackside barrel briefly extinguishes his flame, but the Torch leaps to the mountaintop above the circling track and dives onto the locomotive, crashing his blazing body through its steel walls and reducing them to molten mass. Ritton is taken into custody and delivered to a hospital. Back at the roundhouse, the Martians explain to Diane that their planet's science of explosives died out centuries ago and that they were coerced by their ruler. They regret their actions and depart peacefully in their ship. The Torch, reunited with Diane, sends a flaming message to the departing Martian vessel: "Turn back — we'll help you."

The Voodoo Sacrifice

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Voodoo drums beat a few miles outside New York City as a girl walks home along a dark street. A car mounts the sidewalk and several robed, hooded men seize her, gagging her before she can be heard. Nearby, a blue-caped figure known as the Angel witnesses the kidnapping and leaps into the street to block the car. The driver guns the engine and crashes directly into him, tossing the Angel across the pavement. Dismissing him as finished, the cult members drive north. The Angel recovers, gets in his own car, and follows the sound of the distant drums. He traces the abductors to an old stone mansion, but as he races through the archway after them, the driver triggers a hidden mechanism and a trapdoor opens beneath the road, sending the Angel's car plunging into a pit below.

While the girl is dragged through a chamber filled with wildly dancing worshippers and brought before a grotesquely deformed figure on a throne — the Sacred One — who orders her prepared as a sacrifice to the Fire-God, the Angel clings to the pit's slippery walls, discovers a hidden stone passage, and crawls through a tunnel into the mansion's lower rooms. A hooded guard hurls a hatchet at him; the Angel catches it in mid-air and flings it back, pinning the man to the wall. He forces the guard to reveal the girl is being held in the sacrifice room upstairs. Fighting past a second guard at the top of the stairs, the Angel finds the door locked and climbs the exterior ivy to reach the room's windows. Inside, as the girl is about to be tied to the altar stand, the Angel's shadow falls across the room. The Sacred One turns his hypnotic gaze upward, draining the Angel's strength, but the Angel forces himself through the window, hurls the Sacred One across the altar, and tears the girl's bonds free. The Sacred One pulls a rope, dropping the floor beneath them; the Angel leaps clear, carrying the girl to safety. In a final attempt to escape, the Sacred One runs directly into the open trapdoor gap and falls in.

Characters

Good (or All)

 

Angel
(Tom Halloway)

Antagonists
Sacred One, Voodoo cult.

Enter: Betty Dean

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, is at large in New York Harbor. At Harbor Police headquarters, an officer proposes using a policewoman as bait to lure the aquatic menace back into the open. Inspector Peterson agrees and summons Officer Betty Dean, an expert swimmer, assigning her to go undercover in civilian clothes and keep watch at the Battery. That evening, Betty confides to her roommate Esther that she has been tasked with capturing a half-man, half-fish creature with the strength of a hundred elephants.

After a week of fruitless vigil, Betty finally spots Namor skimming the surface toward Brooklyn Bridge. She dives in and feigns distress; Namor, drawn by her cry for help, streaks through the water to her side. Surfacing, Betty draws her gun and orders him to surrender, but Namor knocks the weapon away, drags her far out to sea, and deposits her on a buoy as bombs suddenly explode nearby — war has come to these waters. Namor dives toward the attack, intercepts a torpedo, physically wrestles it off course, and then enters a German U-boat by crawling through the torpedo tube itself.

Inside, he batters the German crew into submission, forces them to surface, shoots down a Nazi bomber with the deck gun, then twists the periscope to blind the sub before diving off and leaving it to crash helplessly into a rocky shore. He beaches a stricken British freighter by pushing it ashore with his bare hands. On the beach, Betty confronts Namor; he defends his hatred of Americans but, after she argues that Americans are a peaceful people who fight only injustice, he grudgingly admits she may have a point. Betty persuades him to use his power to break an enemy mine blockade southeast of their position. Namor swims into the minefield, repurposes the mines against enemy vessels, sends two battleships sky-high, then sabotages a second U-boat by ripping off its propellers. Deciding to give this new prize to the Allied navies, he flies off on his winged feet to locate their nearest base.

Characters

Good (or All)

 

Sub-Mariner
(Namor)

Plus: Betty Dean (Betty Dean Prentiss).

Antagonists
Nazis.

The Land Grabbers

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Two agents working for a crooked land-grabber arrive at the Mesa Springs ranch of brothers Jeb and Dan Barnes and demand they sell their property. The brothers refuse. The agents discover that the local sheriff, Brace, is an old acquaintance from Pecos with a criminal past they can use as leverage, and report their find to their employer, Jed Sirrah. Sirrah's men then dynamite the hillside streams feeding the ranch, cutting off the water supply to force the brothers' hand.

The explosion draws the attention of the Masked Raider, a mysterious masked horseman on a white horse, who rides to the scene. The Barnes brothers form a posse and give chase, but when the sheriff arrives and recognizes the Raider, the Raider disarms the corrupt lawman and declares he has come to help. After days of fruitless searching, the posse gives up and turns back, finding the ranch already dying from lack of water. Sirrah's agents return with a drastically lowered buy-out offer. The Masked Raider has followed them unseen and bursts in, guns drawn, ordering everyone to hold. He drives the agents off and reveals to the Barnes brothers that their land sits atop valuable oil and gold deposits — which is why Sirrah wants it so badly.

The Raider escorts the two ranchers into town, where Sirrah, tipped off by Brace, orders his men to ambush the group at the sheriff's office. The Masked Raider storms the office and outguns Sirrah's hired hands. Sirrah is exposed and the brothers secure their land. They offer to make the Raider a partner, producing a map of the oil and gold deposits, but by the time they look up he has already slipped away.

Characters

Good (or All)

 

Masked Raider
(Jim Gardley)

Plus: Sheriff Barney.

Antagonists
Jed Sirrah.

Origin of the American Ace, Part 2

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Perry Wade, an American traveling the world in search of minerals beneficial to mankind, wanders the burning streets of a city in the country of Attainia after an enemy air raid. He spots a stone wall about to collapse on a frozen-in-place young woman and rushes to drag her clear. The girl, Jeanie, is distraught — her parents have just been killed in the raid — and worries about breaking the news to her sister Marie, who lives on a farm sixty miles away. Perry offers to fly her there in his plane.

At the farm, Jeanie is reunited with Marie and their grandfather, who welcomes Perry warmly. Over a spare meal, tragic news arrives: Marie's husband John has been killed in the trenches. Meanwhile, in the luxurious chambers of Queen Ursula of the neighboring nation of Castile d'Or, the queen declares her ambition to conquer the world. Her advisor Josef calls it madness and is sharply silenced. Ursula orders agitation posters plastered across the land, whipping her population into a nationalist frenzy.

After a peaceful week at the farm, Perry tells Jeanie he must leave — his research must continue somewhere less consumed by destruction. He bids farewell and takes off eastward, but a Castile d'Or patrol has spotted his small plane and dives on it with guns blazing. Outmatched in his old aircraft against modern fighters, Perry is shot through the body and his plane spins back down to crash near the very farm he just left. The family rushes to the wreck and carries him inside. A doctor tends to him and pronounces that he will recover with rest. Perry, bedridden but resolved, tells Jeanie he has an important job ahead of him.

Third Episode

Synopsis

By J.A.R.V.I.S. 2008
Rating:

Ka-Zar, jungle-raised son of the late John Rand, is awakened one moonlit night by Trajah, the leader of the local elephant herd, who reports that men have taken Tuta, a female of the herd. Ka-Zar deduces that "men" means the Oman — outsiders like De Kraft, whom he calls Fat Face and has sworn to kill for the death of his father. He mounts Trajah and the two travel eastward for two days through jungle and river until they reach a great open plain, where Trajah's trumpet call is answered by Tuta in the distance.

Watching from the trees, Ka-Zar scouts the camp of Steve Hardy, a noted big game hunter and wild animal collector who has erected cages and stockades to hold his captures. Ka-Zar sees Tuta penned inside with her legs roped to the ground. He tells Trajah to wait — Hardy addresses Trajah's impatient trumpeting and reveals he intends to ship Tuta to a zoo, which convinces Ka-Zar that Hardy means the animals no lasting harm. Still, all the caged animals must go free. That night, Ka-Zar creeps into the sleeping camp, silences the caged animals with a call, and systematically opens every cage — freeing monkeys, Quog the wild hog, a stork, and a leopard, which he orders into the jungle before it can reach Hardy's tent. A native sentry, Gwambi, wakes and spots the empty cages; Ka-Zar tackles him from a tree and ties him with vines, then cuts Tuta's ropes and leads her out through the stockade gate.

At dawn Hardy finds his camp emptied and Gwambi bound. The shaken native insists a great white jungle god did this; Hardy dismisses the story but admits the evidence is strange. Refusing to give up, he organizes a new hunting party and sets out following rhino tracks. Ka-Zar, watching from the forest, draws his bow when Hardy's gun boy takes aim to kill a mother rhinoceros in order to capture her calf. Ka-Zar shoots an arrow into the gun boy's back — deep enough to wound but not kill — and the resulting panic, with the natives convinced the jungle god has attacked, triggers a mass mutiny. Hardy's entire party abandons him and he is forced to follow. Ka-Zar watches with satisfaction from the trees, resolving to head home to tell Zar about the Oman. On the way he strips off his weapons for a swim in a great lake, unaware that N'Jaga the leopard — who has long stalked Ka-Zar out of hatred for the man who once shot him away as a cub — has been waiting on an overhanging limb. N'Jaga leaps and drives his claws into Ka-Zar's back. Ka-Zar drags the leopard underwater until N'Jaga, unable to bear the pressure, surfaces and crawls out believing Ka-Zar dead. Ka-Zar recovers hidden behind a rock, vows never again to be caught without his knife, and turns for home — while a closing caption reveals that in Cairo, De Kraft is already planning another trip to the jungle.

Characters

Good (or All)

 

Ka-Zar
(David Rand)

Plus: N'Jaga (leopard), Quog (wild dog), Trajah (elephant), Tuta (elephant).

Antagonists
Paul De Kraft (Fat Face).