by Libbylawrence
Magno blinked.
The reaction was small, and no one noticed it, but a man named Tom Dalton who had been known as Magno blinked, and that changed everything.
Deep within one of the tunnels that reached far beyond the Fuhrermuseum to the hills beyond the city rested a very peculiar facility known as Project Ymir. The super-secret scientific project had been named for the frost giant of Norse mythology. Not only was the name a fitting one, since it drew upon the image of a terrible and preserving cold, but it also carried with it the suggestion of birth or the creation of new life. Ymir was more than a being of ice and snow. He was the father of a race of monsters. The irony appealed to the Nazi scientists who used the name for a special project designed to both preserve some unique captives through the cold sleep of suspended animation and also use the DNA of the super-humans to spawn their own group of loyal super-powered soldiers.
The specimens so perfectly preserved within the strange suspended animation matrix had not originally been in the custody of their German captors. It was the Japanese who had first found them and imprisoned them for years until Japan fell to Germany in 1946. The German army had discovered their existence, and eventually these silent sleepers had reached their present location. Hitler had crowed with elation over the acquisition of the American heroes. His first instinct was to use them for propaganda and display them to the world, but wiser heads had prevailed, and the captive heroes had instead been hidden away beneath Hitler’s precious museum. In time, Axis counterparts of these specimens were created through scientific experimentation including mental probes and genetic duplication to become the champions of the Fourth Reich. Generations had passed, and the heroes had remained trapped in their artificial slumber beneath their greatest enemy’s egotistical shrine.
Then Valkyrie temporarily disrupted the flow of power that sustained their prison, and for only a moment one of them knew a moment of freedom.
Magno was a handsome man in a brief costume of bright red that left his arms and legs uncovered, with boots and cape that were a brilliant blue. Tom Dalton had been a promising college student in Chicago when the lingering effects of the Great Depression and obligations to an ailing father had forced the young man to drop out of college and seek work. After his father’s death, Tom had found himself in Norfolk, Virginia, where work was more plentiful, and he became a lineman for the Atlas Electric Company in the coastal city, though his work took him to many of the surrounding towns and cities. He retained an active imagination and a desire for learning, which he fed with his voracious reading appetite in his time off.
It may or may not have been due to a moment’s distraction on the job that led to the accident in early 1940 that changed Dalton’s life, but when he was electrocuted by 10,000 volts of direct current (DC), his heart completely stopped. His boss Mike Harvey, panicked when he found Tom completely unresponsive and apparently dead, tried to bring him back through a very unorthodox means — by shocking him with an application of 10,000 volts of alternating current (AC). The combination of two different types of current shouldn’t have done anything but cause damage to his body, but Tom Dalton awoke from that near-death experience to find himself empowered with a wide array of superhuman powers. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See Magno the Miracle Man, Smash Comics #13 (August, 1940).]
He soon found that he was able to absorb and generate electric energy, but he was far more than the Human Dynamo some Norfolk newspapers named him. He was, in fact, more accurately described as Magno the Miracle Man, because he possessed abilities that extended far beyond the already impressive ability to generate electrical energy. Creating special wrist bands, he used them as induction coils that allowed him to draw upon magnetic attraction to achieve numerous effects ranging from the simulation of flight toward metallic objects to enhanced mobility and strength. His senses were enhanced, allowing him to see over great distances. Eventually, he even learned how to create a magnetic force-field, which he could propel forward in the form of a magnetic blast.
For a young man who had known poverty and disappointment, Tom Dalton selflessly chose to use his powers for good. He remained a mild-mannered lineman, and his frequent excuses for leaving work to perform some vital heroic task as Magno earned him the reputation of being a bit of a weakling. His good-hearted but gruff boss Mike Harvey never failed to express a combination of bemusement and dismay at how his young protégé consistently managed to fall victim to ailments ranging from sunburns to nausea. Of course, every excuse was fictional. Magno merely needed to provide Harvey with a reason for his abrupt absences from work.
Magno had barely begun a promising career in which he had defeated mobsters, Axis agents, and monstrous beast-men when he abandoned his mystery-men identity. He never knew exactly why he quit, but something ephemeral had changed for him at that time, which left him feeling like a stranger in an alien world. It was almost as if the electromagnetism of the world had changed, and he was no longer in tune with it. Gone were his impressive array of skills including great strength, vision, and electromagnetic shields; now all he could do were mere magnetic tricks. Moreover, each time he used his powers he would feel discomfort and even pain. Thus, in early 1941 after one last case against a few gangsters in which he found himself making mistake after mistake that could have ended his life, Tom Dalton put away his Magno costume seemingly for good, and was left a deeply troubled man.
But then, in December of that same year, he was visited by a patriotic figure who appeared to be nothing less than the living embodiment of the spirit of America: Uncle Sam. Finding no solid reason why he shouldn’t answer this fateful call to duty, Dalton became Magno once more, this time to defend the America of a parallel world that needed them. On December 7th, 1941, Magno had followed Uncle Sam and his first team of Freedom Fighters on a brave journey to the Pacific Ocean of that world, where Magno soon began to feel like his old self once again, causing him to realize that retirement didn’t suit him. Unfortunately, it was also the place where he and his new allies met with disaster, eventually leading to their current predicament. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See “Crisis on Earth-X: The Prequel,” All-Star Squadron #32 (April, 1984).]
Of course, none of this flashed through the young hero’s mind during the brief instant in which the failure of the suspended animation matrix gave him a sudden awakening. The power returned from a back-up source, and Magno returned to his slumber, but in that small moment of freedom he had managed to act on some instinct. Whether it was fate, a moment’s freedom had enabled Magno with his enhanced senses and vitality to sent a surge of power directly to the costumed man trapped to his left.
That sleeping figure was called Neon the Unknown, and the man clad in different shades of blue with a red bandana over his dark hair possessed possibly more raw power than any other hero on the embattled planet.
His real name was Tom Corbet, but for all practical purposes he had given up his civilian identity and had allowed most of the world to assume that as Corbet, a serious and dedicated soldier in the French Foreign Legion, he had met his death in the burning desert sands along with most of his original regiment in March, 1940. Like Magno, Tom Corbet had not truly died, but had instead been reborn with amazing powers all his own.
Corbet had been a serious, selfless man who had sought to serve mankind as a defender of the weak. He had enlisted in the Foreign Legion in those heady days before the U.S. had entered into World War II, and had proven himself a skilled and capable soldier with a keen mind and courage rivaled only by his higher principals. He hated oppression and truly believed that all of mankind should strive to live in harmony and peace. As a soldier who fought for peace, he was something of an idealist, but the jokes his fellow soldiers made about him were silenced by his obvious bravery and sincere devotion to higher ideals.
When he and a troop of his fellow soldiers had been sent on a suicidal march through the deserts by the power-mad Lieutenant Cracket, all of the others perished except for a nearly dying Corbet whose life was saved when he stumbled into a bizarre desert oasis and discovered water that glowed with a strange potency.
One drink from the gleaming pool transformed Tom Corbet in more ways than one. He was immediately revived from his weakened state, and he found his entire body to be surging with an incredible energy source that he somehow instinctively knew to describe by the vague term of neonic energy. With a mere thought, his dirty, ragged uniform was transformed into the blue costume he currently wore. The strange fabric formed from neonic energy did not burn when he emitted his new power, nor did it tear when he transformed his entire body into a swirling comet of blazing power.
As Neon the Unknown he soon stopped a would-be tyrant who was orchestrating a worldwide invasion using native troops from Africa, South America, and Australia. Recognizing the greater threat, he enlisted the help of his former commandant to bring enough Foreign Legion troops to help him end the threat, instead of pursuing personal vengeance against Lieutenant Cracket. (*) Still, he was not recognized by any of his former fellow Legionnaires, and allowed them and the world to believe he had perished in the desert with the others, though he would later reveal his true identity to a few friends. He called himself Neon after his new power source, and he never questioned its origin nor returned to the strange oasis, somehow knowing that it would no longer be found there should he attempt to return to the place of his life-altering transformation. He didn’t question the source of his powers, nor did he mourn the loss of his normal life as Tom Corbet. He embraced his new role and exulted in using his powers in several amazing adventures.
[(*) Editor’s note: See Neon the Unknown, Hit Comics #1 (July, 1940).]
Not only had he gained physical abilities, but Neon’s mind had also changed. He now possessed strength of mind that enabled him to defeat the collective mental energies of a group of mystically empowered Tibetans who sought to dominate the West; they were mentally powerful enough to dominate a European world leader from a continent away, but he was greater. (*) He liberated a small Balkan nation called Slovia from an Axis pawn named Otto Schickler. (*) He befriended an Eastern European necromancer named Damus the Wizard. (*) He discovered a hidden underwater Nazi base in New York Harbor before destroying it with a few well tossed bolts of neonic energy. (*) He formed an alliance with the genius known as the Professor to stop the spread of madness-inducing dust by Axis agents. (*) And in what was perhaps his most memorable battle, he defeated an evil genius called Fritz Cardif who had created a way to rob Neon of his powers. The loss had been short-lived, and Neon had defeated the brilliant scientist and destroyed his eerie glass fortress. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See Neon the Unknown stories in Hit Comics #7 (January, 1941), Hit Comics #12 (June, 1941), Hit Comics #11 (May, 1941), Hit Comics #14 (August, 1941), “A Metropolis of Madmen,” Hit Comics #5 (November, 1940), and Hit Comics #6 (December, 1940).]
Like the other Freedom Fighters, he had joined Uncle Sam in a crusade to stop the Axis forces from conquering the world. The mission had appealed his sense of duty. However, upon arriving in the Pacific, he and his new allies had met with sudden defeat, and Neon blamed himself. For several months by that time, his powers seemed to have lost much of their former potency, and the transition to a parallel world through Uncle Sam’s mystical vortex had weakened them even more. While previously he had defeated entire squadrons of enemy bombers single-handedly, on that day in 1941 he found that he could only hold his own until a surprise attack stunned even him.
Neon had relied too much on his previously useful danger sense that had alerted him in advance to impending perils, and had let his guard down for a moment. In the present, he found himself suddenly awake, and his neonic powers tingled in response to the surge of magnetic energy that ever so briefly passed from Magno to his own body.
Glowing brilliantly, his body changed from a humanoid form to a swirling comet of cosmic energy that exploded out of the matrix, leaving it shattered. Neon the Unknown instantly took stock of the situation — his mind was that keen.
Returning to human form, Neon swiftly drew the other captives closer to him in a circular band of neonic energy that lifted them all to freedom and shielded them from the rubble of the broken matrix.
His dark eyes swiftly recognized the nature of their surroundings. We’re underground in some kind of tunnel, he thought. That device that held us was keeping us in a frozen sleep!
As he looked he saw Magno, the ex-Navy submariner Red Torpedo, and the wealthy crime-buster the Invisible Hood, but he found no trace of the other Freedom Fighters.
Uncle Sam, Hourman, and Miss America aren’t here, he realized. That explosion will attract our captors all too soon! Got to revive the others before I use my powers to locate our missing friends. I sure hope they aren’t dead! If they are, we’ll make the Nazi devils pay!
Magno was the first to revive, as was natural considering his innate power. “Neon? What’s going on?” he said, looking at his friend through the neonic energy shield that surrounded them.
“We were trapped in some machine,” explained Neon. “I freed us after you sent magnetic power into me. The others are coming around now.”
Former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Jim Lockhart was a rugged man with sandy-colored hair, who wore a red jumpsuit with a matching red domino mask. He took his heroic name from an incredible submarine called the Red Torpedo, which he had designed and built within a secret cove near his Maine home. (*) He was a skilled engineer, and he could probably understand the function of the matrix that had held them all better than any of the others. Still, he lacked any superhuman powers and was recovering from the shock like the athlete he was and not as a super-being like Magno the Miracle Man or Neon the Unknown.
[(*) Editor’s note: See The Red Torpedo, Crack Comics #1 (May, 1940).]
“The plane! He’s coming right at us!” he shouted as he struggled to come to terms with his new environment. In his mind he was reliving the attack of the Japanese Zero that had dived directly at the heroes shortly after they’d successfully repelled a squadron of Japanese Zeroes from hitting the U.S. base at Hawaii. That cold December day in 1941 had been one of short-lived victory as their newly named team of Freedom Fighters worked together to protect their country. Moments after that triumph, Hirohito’s men were ordered to fight to the death, and one pilot took his orders to heart by diving directly at the heroes. The terrible impact was the last thing he could recall.
“Easy, Red, we’re okay,” assured Magno. “That so-called divine wind was one ill wind for us. We ended up trapped here, but we’re free now, and we’ll find the others!”
Kent Thurston was a skilled detective and amateur inventor. Like Lockhart, he also lacked any super-powers, but as the Invisible Hood he wore a hooded cloak that enabled its wearer to turn invisible. He also carried a pistol as well as a gas-gun that had served him well since before he ever came into possession of the garment that suited his crime-fighting name so well.
“Last thing I remember was standing on the deck of the Red Torpedo craft Miss America conjured up for us,” he said. “We had managed to destroy the wave of Japanese bombers that were determined to target Hawaii. Uncle Sam’s weird mystical hoodoo had brought us all together, and we arrived just in time to meet the attackers as their planes soared toward the U.S. We won, and then Joan cried out a warning!”
“Our Miss America’s warning came too late,” said Neon. “I fear she and the others perished that day.”
“That poor, brave, beautiful girl,” said the Hood. “I could have really gone for her.”
“Don’t write any sad songs yet,” said Red Torpedo. “She and Sam and Hourman were all superhuman! They may have survived!”
“If we’re going to survive, we’d better pull ourselves together,” said Magno. “We are not alone!” His keen vision had enabled him to see through the shadows to where several uniformed soldiers were racing forward. “Ratzi gunmen! Somehow we’ve travelled from the Pacific to Germany, unless–!”
Tom “Magno” Dalton didn’t finish his sentence. Unless the Axis forces have followed up that Japanese bombing with a full-fledged assault on the good ol’ U.S. of A., he thought grimly.
As he raised his arms, the induction coils in the wristbands he wore enabled him to focus his powers into a carefully directed magnetic beam that ripped the guns away from the soldiers.
The Hood vanished from sight as he pulled his hood over his head. He tripped the first soldier, then stunned him with a precisely delivered blow to the neck. Fighting a bunch of uniformed thugs is not exactly the use Grandpa envisioned for my skills, but I’d say he’d surely approve! he thought. He never could stand a bully, nor could he abide any system of state-approved tyranny.
As he sidestepped the next soldier and punched him in the nose, Kent Thurston recalled his own beginnings. My father Kent Thurston II shocked my grandfather by rejecting the family fortune to join the police force in Littleton, P.A. I know Grandpa was pretty proud, though, when my father rose through the ranks to become the city’s youngest police commissioner.
Jumping up, he kicked another soldier to the ground as he relived the moment he received the sad news of his father’s death from Inspector Bill Blake.
“Your father died fighting for justice,” Blake had explained. “He was gunned down because he wouldn’t back down, and the thugs who killed him were afraid of him. He was going to clean up this town, and they knew it!”
Kent had been a boy at the time, but he had never forgotten the words of the man who would become a mentor to him. He also never forgot the anger his grandfather felt at the sudden loss of his son.
“Playing cops and robbers in a crooked system led to your father’s demise,” the old man had said. “He was a hero, but his hands were tied by red tape and crooked officials. He died because he had no choice but to fight his fight within the system. I’m going to honor his memory by equipping you to carry on his fight in your own way! You aren’t going to be tied up or limited by laws or rules! I’m going to pay to see that you receive the best education any crime-fighter could want. Our wealth was disdained by your father, but I’m going to use it to make you into the kind of man he would have been proud of in every way!”
Kent Thurston III had mastered martial arts, criminology, various sciences, and had acquired an expert knowledge of a wide variety of odd fields ranging from gemology to medicine. True to his grandfather’s vow, he had first used his talents as a private investigator before inheriting the entire Thurston fortune when his grandfather died. He used the money to enable himself to travel the globe in order to help those in need. He fought injustice without having to rely upon or be bound by the rules a police officer would have been required to follow. He acquired a criminal rogue’s gallery of data on known felons that he stored within his apartment, and even developed a gas-gun that served him well as a potent weapon against gangsterism. He made a name for himself as the Invisible Hood, although some tabloids wrongly called him Invisible Justice or Hooded Justice. By any name he became a hero and had amazing adventures, battling costumed criminals such as the odd pair called the Green Ghost, the Asian mastermind the Golden Dragon, Dr. Robb the Gravity Master, the bizarre hypnotist Dr. Moku, the deceptively feeble Mr. Mite, and the White Wizard. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See Invisible Justice stories in Smash Comics #11 (June, 1940), Smash Comics #13 (August, 1940), Smash Comics #16 (November, 1940), Smash Comics #18 (January, 1941), Smash Comics #21 (April, 1941), Smash Comics #27 (October, 1941), and Smash Comics #30 (January, 1942).]
In his most fateful case, he also avenged the death of the brilliant Hans Van Dorn at the hands of the Garrick Spade Gang. Before the old man was murdered by Spade, Professor Van Dorn gave the Invisible Hood the ability to become actually invisible by covering his hooded red cloak with the last of his chemical formula, transforming it into a cloak of invisibility like something out of a storybook.
“I promise you, Professor,” Kent had vowed as the genius died in his arms, speaking of the great gift the genius had bequeathed upon him, “I’ll only use it for the good of society!” (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See Invisible Justice, Smash Comics #2 (September, 1939).]