I feel like one thing we rarely see in this series is some real freak behaviour from the women superheroes. I mean, there's Fantomah, a real unhinged queen right there, but are there any others? Well, there is at least one other...

Meet Dianne Grayton, just your average wealthy socialite... or is she? Turns out, she has her own fun hobby - she goes out dressed as a Witch (complete with green mask) and fights crime using her ability to command a hoard of Black Widow spiders that she just has on her at all times. As you do. It's not clear if this ability is magical in nature or if she just trained them at some point,

With this behaviour, it's only natural she attracted an almost equally bizarre boyfriend - the Raven, an anonymous rich man who dresses up in a bird costume and fights crime for no clear reason... possibly they're the first example of an avian-based furry. Good for them!

It's not revolutionary or anything, but at the time their dynamic was quite unconventional - mainly because the Raven (a man) acted as the sidekick to the Spider Widow (a woman). Usually this ended up being the other way around with teams such as Bulletman & Bulletgirl, and the Flame & Flame Girl.

Other fun facts about these characters:

• As shown in the various crossovers with The Phantom Lady, both characters are aware that they're comic book characters, making them a very early example of that sort of meta-awareness.
• Speaking of those crossovers, it's one of the few times you'll see a Golden Age comic crossover with more than one female superhero
• Along with Nazis, the Spider Widow also went up against fearsome foes such as a circus clown, the Tiglon man and... my notes say "Spider Man" but that can't be right-
  
  Huh.

The Spider Widow appeared in 17 comics total but unfortunately has sort of fallen into obscurity, save for a mention on an internet listicle about Badass Golden Age Superheroines. I suppose someone in a Halloween Witch costume isn't exactly the most compelling character design. Still though, hopefully, she does get used again someday...

Whenever something becomes popular, many people will inevitably try to make something similar to cash-in on their success. So far this series has seen superpowered flying men made to cash-in on Superman, as well as flag-clad American crusaders designed to cash-in on Captain America, but there also exists a wide variety of bare-chested white jungle swingers made to cash-in Tarzan (and I might even cover some of them if I really run out of ideas).

On the surface, Tabu should be yet another one of these - he certainly nails the aesthetic... but also, if you read the title, you may notice he's a wizard? Yes, he possesses magical powers thanks to being gifted a sixth sense by a Witch Doctor (let's not forget that these comics were often at least a bit racist), which naturally gave him the ability to fly, cast magic. and transform into various animals - powers that he'd use to exact cruel justice on people who wronged the jungle, saying that he'll give the villains "a Jungle Fate"... that sounds a bit familiar...

Yes, Fletcher Hanks fans may remember a similar phrase being said by Fantomah. This isn't entirely coincidental, since Fletcher Hanks created both characters, and Tabu really ends up functioning as a proto-Fantomah (since his comic predates Fantomah's first issue). Unlike Fantomah however, he faded into obscurity after one issue (despite the promise of further escapades by Tabu being gifted a seventh sense)...

Or did he?

I've been a bit sneaky here, since one of the pictures of "Tabu" I included isn't from Tabu's only comic, but rather a Fantomah story. This one deals with an unnamed jungle man who is rescued by a snake as a baby and raised by them into adulthood. He lives peacefully until, one day, he eats some bad berries and turns very very evil, prompting him to paint himself in blotchy blue paint and terrorise the nearby village. Unlike most Fantomah comics, she doesn't directly punish him. Instead, she guides him to some herbs that would cure him and then sort of banishes him and his snake, saying "FROM NOW ON, YOU BOTH SHALL DWELL ENTIRELY ALONE!"

While Fletcher Hanks probably intended this to be a different character and was just reusing art, I like to think that they're the same character. We learn nothing about the characters that would contradict anything (Tabu's backstory is unspecified, and obviously we don't know the name of the Fantomah character). We don't know where the giant snake is, but it's not like they're joined at the hip, they can do their own things. Perhaps the most compelling bit of evidence is a magic phrase they both sort of share. In Tabu, Tabu says "Alla ka tabu nee paph en yal!" to cause a minor earthquake. In the Fantomah comic, they say "Ali kah bab loo ne paph en yah!", which you may notice is spelt differently but mostly pronounced the same way. This might also imply that the unnamed one's name is "Bab Loo". For this theory, maybe it also means he got the name Tabu at a later point (maybe in response to his actions in the Fantomah comic - it's a bit nonsensical to think of the name in relation to the English word it sounds the most like, but I don't think Fletcher Hanks would've considered that).

Now, obviously, the more likely reason for these similarities is just Fletcher Hanks being lazy and racist, but still.

Sometimes I wonder if Sir Broomwell Moppington I, my ancestor, is proud of me. If they saw that I was up 15 minutes past midnight writing about some hero nobody cares about (something I should've done yesterday), would they think "Yes, I like what Broomwell Moppington III is doing". Would they reach out to me? Help me fight crime? Convince me to become a patriotic superhero?

Well, that's the life experience of Bruce Carter III, whose ancestor, Bruce Carter I, fought in the American Revolution before getting killed by British Spies. Now a ghost, he haunts his descendant, bullying him into fighting Nazis (which isn't a bad use of his time mind you - quite the opposite).

Now, these patriot heroes were literally a dime-a-dozen back in the day, to the point where I try to avoid them unless it's a day where I'm out of ideas... yet this one has a costume that stands out for all the wrong reasons. I mean, it's not the worst flag-based costume (that honour would have to go to the ones based off the Confederate Flag for moral reasons), but what even happened here? I can't put it out of my mind that someone was given the prompt "put the American Flag on his shirt" and misunderstood the intent. They included the flag pole for crying out loud!

Despite this egregious setback, Fighting Yank lived through, like, 40 issues, getting by on pure American Spirit alone (no pun intended). In 2001, AC Comics produced new comics about him homaging the works of Jack Kirby and overhauling his costume design - that same year, Alan Moore included him in an issue of Tom Strong, and he'd go on to revisit the character in Terra Obscura. They also redesigned the costume. In 2007, Project Superpowers made him a central character in their series, and for some unknown reason they just didn't change the costume there.