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.

In recent years, we've seen many attempts to deconstruct Superman, ranging from murderous manchildren to actual murderous children... but this idea isn't entirely new. In fact, the earliest Super-Man we were warned about came from Siegel and Shuster, years before they created the boy-scout of the same name.

In the short story The Reing of the Super-Man, we meet Bill Dunn, just your average person working on the bread line in this marvellous metropolitan city until, one day, Professor Smalley asks him to come to his house for dinner. Unfortunately for him, this polite gesture is actually a rouse to inject him with a serum that gives him powers - mainly mind control and astral projection. Not very Superman, I admit, but I don't want to discard the opening paragraph.

One criticism of many Superman deconstructions is that they're often done without a purpose other than shock value. Indeed, the easiest thing to do is to take someone with Superman's powers and imagine him acting out our worst impulses with no deeper commentary beyond "Wouldn't that be messed up?" - The Reign of the Super-Man (while not technically being a deconstruction due to predating Superman by 5 years) avoids this by using this idea to very unsubtly deconstruct capitalist ideology.

Professor Smalley holds the belief that all the poor people in the world could simply just stop being poor if they "had the slightest ambition at all..." - again, it's not very subtle, and neither is it subtle that he's blatantly in the wrong. Interestingly though, Bill Dunn (despite also living the life of a poor person trying to make ends meet) basically converts to the same thought once he starts using his mind control powers to become rich:

As [Bill Dunn] walked, it spoke to itself. "Fool! Why did you sleep on the ground when there were thousands of unoccupied beds in the world! Money, obviously, was the reason. You lacked money. How hilarious! Money is the easiest thing that can be secured upon this planet! And you have spent a full year in idle wastefulness when you could have been living the life of a Prince, an existence incomparable in its ease."

He is of course neglecting to mention the fact that he is only rich now due to the unnatural advantage of having mind control powers that he literally didn't have the day before. Or, to keep it entirely within the realm of things that apply to our day-to-day lives, he is ignoring the advantages he has received in life that make his status possible for him and only him.

Of course, like all things, this comes to an end. After causing a series of robberies and one geopolitical crisis, Bill ends up fighting with Professor Smalley, and he does end up killing the Professor, but he never learned how to create the serum. As his powers run out, he realises that, without these advantages, he will be back on the Bread Line the next day. This also makes it a bit tricky if you want to use the character in your own work, but eh, most sequels completely squash the themes of the original movie anyway for the sake of generating more plot, you'll be fine.

[Also I had no room to put this anywhere, but at one point Bill says "NOW, I will proceed to collect a large sum of money." and I don't know why, but that phrase has stuck with me ever since. I think I just find the vagueness of "large sum of money" funny. It's to the point where it's entered my lexicon.]