When picking a public domain superhero to talk about, the name plays a really important part for me. Half the time I just look for a name I find interesting and then do more research. This is all to say that Dr Vampire is one of the more disappointing ones (and yet he's the last one for this year).

His real name is Dr. John Rogers, a... guy. Like most public domain superheroes, he has no backstory other than doing what he does - namely killing Vampires... I think.

Here's the fun twist about Dr. Vampire: I have no clue why he's called that. Is he a vampire? Probably not. Does he hunt vampires? Maybe. His intro panel says he goes after "fiends who thirst for warm, red blood!" which seems pretty cut and dry, but then in his first comic, it's unclear if the person he's hunting is a vampire or just, like, some guy who kills people in a very bloody way.

And it is never elaborated on. Dr. Vampire was in only 1 comic and never showed up again.

Have a good New Year!

Upon looking at this hero, you may notice that both his name and costume are really similar to another, more famous Superhero… I’m ofcourse talking about Cat-Man.

Cat-Man (formerly David Merryweather) was just your average child until, one day, his entire family was killed in just vaguely The Jungle. Left alone, a Tiger found him and raised him to be the best catboy known to man. After a while, he made his way back to America and took on the persona of Cat-Man (with a hyphen), fighting crime using his special cat powers. He also got a sidekick who, dissapointingly, is named “Kitten” rather than Catboy.

This comic series was also sent to Australia and published by Frew Publications. This was going well until, one day, Wartime rules meant imports of these comic books ceased… but Frew was attached to this character, so what do they do?

Introducing Catman (without the hyphen). Catman looks an awful lot like Cat-Man, except their costume is green instead of orange (not that it made much difference since the comics were printed in black and white). We don’t know who Catman is besides the fact that he lives in Australia and is joined by a sidekick known as Kit.

Every time I geek out about Golden Age superheroes, I'm really just delaying the part where I talk about Dynamite Thor (my favourite one due to just being a terrible idea for a Superhero)

Joe Blair was just your average private dick with a dream… sadly, his detective day job didn’t give him many opportunities to fulfil that dream until, one day, he saw an opportunity to fulfil it. This one case required him to act quickly, and luckily Joe had something to help him with that…

Turbo-charged heelies!

So yeah, unlike most speedster characters, Zippo gets his speed from wearing big wheels on his feet (which is presumably hell when he’s trying to walk short distances).