Here’s an early issue of Wow Comics from the days when it’s publisher Fawcett was apparently of the opinion that Batman and Robin analogs Mr. Scarlet and Pinky were going to be break out stars, as evidenced by the fact the first couple of issues had three stories featuring the characters.

Unlike some other second tier Fawcett heroes I’ve never had a problem with Mr. Scarlet; he was a perfectly adequate Batman clone, During the early part of his career he fought an assortment of memorable villains, and in the later half (when his hood turned blue and his cape two-toned) he became one of the few Golden Age characters to have serious money problems. But I actually prefer the original version of his costume, the all red number with the yellow cape and whatever the hell you call that cock’s comb thing on the top of his food. Seriously, what is that supposed to be? A plume, a reservoir tip, what?

Although there were three stories I chose this one, “Mr Scarlet and the Moon Torchman” drawn (maybe) by Jack Binder which had a particularly WTF “supervillain” who uses a diabolical flashlight that uses concentrated moon rays to make people (and animals) wacky. For no particular reason it mentally reduces Mr. Scarlet to a baby.

Then we have an understandably little known Fawcett hero, The Hunchback, secretly wealthy playboy Alan Lanier who (somehow) was inspired to fight crime dressed in what he apparently thinks Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame dressed like; a green jumpsuit with a yellow belt. Below is what he looked like in Wow Comics #2.

When it comes to inexplicably choosing a literary character to base a crime fighting career around the only one who had The Hunchback beat was The Mad Hatter. Happily later The Hunchback ditched the hat with the yellow feather and the totally unnecessary and inexplicable chest insignia and was, as you can read in this nicely drawn story, a fairly effective crime fighter. It’s just a pity he’s really a handsome rich guy playing up instead of, you know, an actual hunchback; as a chunky ugly guy with bad posture there was something about him that I could really relate to.

Though I wish he had a better crimefighting name. I mean, he doesn’t even got the definitive article; he’s not even The Hunchback, just a hunchback.

While not actually interesting enough to post here I do have mention this issue featured an adventure of Jim Dolan, which may well be the first and only comic book detective who’s day job was that of an magazine editor.

And finally here’s another oddball character that I’ve always been curious about, Atom Blake the Boy Wizard. But he’s not actually a teen-ager magician; ‘wizard’ is meant in the ‘mechanical wizard’ sense of the word, i.e., an genius inventor. But he wasn’t just a standard Golden Age comic book boy inventor either, he was more of a mental and physical marvel type who had incredible, ill-defined abilities which he initially used to fight crime on earth. Until he decided to literally take a walk across the universe to try and find his missing parents which he did in the previous issue. Along with being fairly original this story is also plenty of odd.