Some heroes fade into obscurity because they're too generic: Why do we need Cat-Man when we have Batman? Why do we need Captain Battle when we have Captain America? Why do we need Kaza? Sometimes however, a hero can have the problem of not being generic enough.

Dean Alder was just your average headmaster of a private school named after him until, one day, while on holiday in Tibet, he saved the High Lama from being assassinated by a random drunk guy. As a reward, they gave him a magical red garment.

What does it do? Well, whenever he's wearing it, he can walk through a mirror and turn invisible. He can also walk through any reflective surface, but those don't turn him invisible, only the mirrors do - and while he's invisible, he's also intangible... except he can also punch people and can't go through normal walls... and he can also heal quickly in his invisible form... oh and all this is contingent on if he's using the suit for good - if there's any evil intent, he can't use it.

One has to wonder if passing through a mirror has the same bad luck effect as smashing one because a lot of his adventures take place literally back-to-back. Like, he'd stop a bank robbery, save a local youth, run his school for three seconds and then someone would go in and tell him one of his students went missing - and then when he finished solving that problem, there's now a troubled youth getting involved in a gang that he needs to stop, and then... It's like that one Astro City comic where the Superman analogue is surrendering every hour of his day to stop 50 million crimes a second.

His run of bad luck didn't stop there. In total, Mirror Man had about 7 stories before he disappeared from the human eye... forever...

There are many ways to disguise yourself: put on a mask, change your voice, maybe even don a costume. However, only one hero has gone so far as to go without a head for the sake of fighting crime.

Betty was just your average teacher in the Wild West, fed up with how Wild and Western it all was with all the crime and... yeah that's it, I'm sure there were no other injustices going on around that time. Her solution was simple: put on a really big shirt that conceals your head and fight crime as the Headless Horseman!

(She had eyes cut out in the torso, don't worry about it.)

Unfortunately for her, Betty realised all too quickly that you can't ride a horse for too long without a head to see anything. She went on for two comics before disappearing into the sunset, never to be seen again...

Nobody likes it when you take credit for somebody else's work. I'd know, what with me being the inventor of the glowing red "cancel" button on the side of the toaster (just trust me)... but in terms of having credit stolen from them, is there anyone out there more wronged than Abaraxx?

Probably Bill Finger.

Zongar was just your average wealthy socialite... actually, he probably wasn't, since he owned a magic amulet and his legal name was fucking Zongar. This amulet contained a green spirit named Abaraxx, who would assist Zongar in fighting crime... by doing all the fighting for him. Whenever Zongar was up against a wall - maybe the trail went cold, maybe he was captured, maybe he just couldn't open the door - Abaraxx would be summoned, they'd do all the work, and Zongar would get all the credit.

But every wish has its price. While Zongar achieved fame in the short-term amongst his piers, he couldn't sustain it outside his world... and by that I mean he probably wasn't very popular with readers since he only ever appeared in one issue.

While I usually look at these heroes with neutrality (no open love or hate, just seeing them for what they are... well, okay, maybe the bullying isn't neutral, but I have to entertain myself somehow), today's hero is someone I'm sad we didn't see more of.

Master Mystic is an anomaly. Nobody knows who he is or where he came from (not unusual for a Golden Age Hero, but it's quite rare for the comic to call attention to it)... and honestly, I'm not sure where they came from either. They're just here, fully formed, sitting in their red tower waiting to stop villainy. Their powers come from the simple idea of "Mind over matter" taken to its illogical extreme - being able to defy any and every law of physics and reality just by thinking it.

Their presentation really does lean into a sinister quality about them - they wear red robes obscuring every identifiable feature, and they live in a tall, fantastical tower which shouldn't belong in the modern day, yet here it stands... Even their speech bubbles are off. Square, but... dripping?

Their first appearance gives Stardust the Super Wizard a run for his money in terms of cruel punishments. Their foe has grown to a large size, but is still biologically human... yet Master Mystic melts them!

Everything about this is just so compelling to me. I get the impression that he sat in the back of someone's mind for a while, just waiting for their chance to be unleashed upon the world... and so it's sad to say they only had one comic. Maybe they were too unconventional - even Stardust and Fantomah had some pretensions of being regular heroes, but Master Mystic... from the offset, they were different.