Team-Up Tuesdays: Malevolent Mobsters

While DC Comics pioneered the concept of a superhero team of diverse heroes from various comic books assembling together to tackle a mutual threat, the same could be said for Fawcett Comic's treatment of villains. As Captain Marvel developed quite an extensive gallery of rogues, it was only a matter of time before a certain wicked worm recruited most of them to try defeating their common foe.

However, after several issues throughout a historic comic serial, Cap himself defeated the whole lot of them. They would resurface again decades later, most preserved in their youthful 1940's forms through various means. Yet despite new schemes and modern technology, this assemblage of evil were still unable to wrest control of Earth -S away from the forces of good!

In the next-door neighbor universe of Earth-Four, the supervillains there didn't always play that nice together. In fact, on only one occasion did a significant number of them join together to lock horns with the Sentinels of Justice (although they were lesser lights Banshee, Fiery-Icer, Iron-Arms and the Madmen led by newby the Manipulator).

However, the Mighty Crusaders' enemies on Earth-MLJ dug getting together from time to time as the Riot Squad. Initially only four members, they expanded to Monster Society proportions in latter years when they faced not one but two worlds of heroes (the others being the Archie gang, who were closet heroes and Crusader cheerleaders at this point).

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In 1954, aspiring comic book publisher Charlton purchased the rights to several prominent characters from the expiring Fawcett Comics, such as Ibis, Golden Arrow and Lance O'Casey. In 1980 and 1985, DC Comics purchase Fawcett's Marvel Family then Charlton's Action Heroes, and the two were linked once more, now on parallel Earths, Four and Shazam.Now the MLJ has been added to their stable of characters, we examine the parallels in this series.

Friday Fiends: Greedy Gliding Goons

Ranking high up there on most desired superpowers would have to be defying gravity. Scores of costumed crusaders crowd clouds above their adoring public. Yet heroes aren't alone flying the friendly skies, there are those who would like to make those same skies a bit...fiendish. First up, August 1967's Blue Beetle #2,  Steve Ditko's Banshee debuted. Originally the apprentice of famed acrobat, the Flying Dundo, he saw an opportunity and snatched it to embark on a criminal life away from under the big top.

A similar pair of hovering hoods appeared in March 1985's Mighty Crusaders #11, the Buzzard and an insect man known only as "Sting", were presented.. Recruited by Eraser (whom we considered earlier) to bedevil the assembled heroes as the Riot Squad, there first target was the elder Black Hood from the 1940's which led to his untimely demise...and a drastic personality change in his heir apparent, Kip Burland, Black Hood II:

Immediately gaining the attention of news commentator Vic Sage during the Banshee's Crown City crime spree, Sage's alter ego the Question begins a one-man mission to bring the cruising crook back down to Earth and bring him...not back to the big top...but the big house...to face justice for his felonies and the demise of the fiend's inventive instructor, Dundo.

The Question was not alone in his obsessive drive to use his everyman approach against a seemingly superhuman adversary such as the Banshee, as the Black Hood went after the pair of flying fiends and their leader, despite lacking powers of his own, aided by Fly and the Crusaders:

When he finally had the Banshee in his grasp, the Question's actions led to the former acrobat's exile from the mainland to a deserted island for seven long years! Although reappearing for a rematch against the crusadering crimefighter, Banshee later joined Manipulator's  evil Squad against Question alongside Blue Beetle and the Sentinels of Justice:

 Decades after their seeming demise at the hands of the Comet, Vulture and Sting reappeared alongside a veritable legion of lethal larcenists for a rematch against the dimension traveling Mighty Crusaders, themselves now expanding their own membership to near unmanageable proportions:

Buzzard and Sting as well as Banshee and his mentor Dundo were only a few of the many in comics who made their mark above Terra Firma. Yet for their respective publishers during a handful of appearences, they provided a couple of memorable challenges for their flightless foes.

Friday Fiends: Superhero Assassins for Hire

This week's Friday Fiends were first introduced in Mighty Crusaders #1 (November 1965) and Captain Atom #87 (August 1967). Without further ado, here are a pair of techno-hitmen in their brief silver age debuts..

The Eraser was the explanation behind the disappearance in 1947 of the Original Shield.

The Image (drawn by Jim Aparo) was an adversary of the heroine, Nightshade, when he kidnapped her alter ego, Eve Eden in a gambit to blackmail her father, a U.S. senator.

There was no explanation as to how the Eraser acquired his fantastic technology. Eraser used a metalorion gun to turn his foe into an iron statue, remaining such for decades before his revival. Image apparently acquired his tech from his foreign government, which involved teleportation through mirrors. The Image's gambit was less successful than Eraser's for he was promptly defeated by Eve's "darker side". Eraser himself employed similar dimension traveling technology that allowed him, as had the Image, to cause prey to vanish from sight and from reality.

Nevertheless both baddies ended up in something akin to comic limbo, literally and figuratively, for several decades. While they were pawns sent by powerful organizations (American gangs in the Eraser's case and the aforementioned foreign power in the Image's case) to styme two American patriots to weaken the defenses of the country, it was the Shield and the Senator's heroic offspring that exiled them from Earth. But never fear for they would return in the 1980's.

. The Eraser was the first to reappear, as an adversary of the Fox and a pawn of the Brain Emperor who had freed him from limbo. He then founded the Riot Squad. The Image also found freedom from his own personal purgatory thanks to the other dimensional villain Brainiac. Both hired guns quickly joined entourages of evil which ultimately proved doomed to failure. Although the Eraser appeared again in the 21st Century, the Image apparently got out of the bad biz for good.