This weekend’s escapist, light-hearted superhero post looks at the sidequels to Hugh Jackman’s 2004 movie Van Helsing.
FROM BENEATH THE RUE MORGUE (2004) – This Dark Horse comic book companion to the Van Helsing film is set in between scenes in the movie. After the death of Mr. Hyde in Paris, we see that Van Helsing winds up arrested for murder.
The monster slayer is ultimately found guilty and sentenced to death, but priestly agents of the Vatican (for whom Van Helsing works in his crusade against unholy forces) engineer an escape. Our hero flees through the catacombs beneath Paris.
Soon, he is forced to abandon his plans to escape the city when an unseen force abducts a female spiritual medium. Van Helsing follows the screaming woman and her invisible abductor to a secret laboratory beneath the Rue Morgue.
That lab is the lair of THE Dr. Moreau in his younger years. The mad scientist has created a number of beastly man-monsters that are barely controllable, unlike his later experimental creations.
Van Helsing learns that the invisible being which abducted the medium was made so by a process that Moreau stole from England’s Invisible Man, whom he double-crossed. The unseen figure is made visible and is a Moreau creation that resembles the much later Creature from the Black Lagoon. Continue reading
DETECTIVE COMICS Vol 1 #400 (June 1970)
The anguished Langstrom realizes he must go into seclusion until he can devise a cure for his condition. That night he happens by as Batman interrupts the Blackout Gang’s attempt to rob a Gotham museum. 
PENITENTE (Penitent) 
To redeem himself in the eyes of Heaven, the Penitente had to save seventy times seven the number of innocent victims he had killed while alive. As part of this purgative servitude he would also be periodically pitted against dark forces which had escaped from Hell. 
Comment: Our hero rose from his grave and masked his decaying, scarred face behind a red cloth like those worn during Brazil’s Procession of the Penitents. 
SWAMP THING Vol 1 #3 (March 1973) 
Alec’s body was dumped in the swamp, where the bio-restorative chemicals his body had been soaked in interacted with his own anatomy, the mud and the plant life in the swamp, letting him rise from the dead as a murk-monster. The Swamp Thing retained Alec Holland’s intelligence but could not speak for the first several issues. 
THE DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU SPECIAL Vol 1 #1 (June 1974)
Synopsis: Storywise, this tale features three separate sections as Iron Fist, the Sons of the Tiger and Shang-Chi the Master of Kung Fu go up against Fu Manchu in three separate stages of his “master plan.” 
CAPTAIN BRITAIN Vol 1 #37 (June 22nd, 1977) 
The event is crashed by a new supervillain called the Highwayman, who rides a high-tech motorcycle which uses laser cannons and other weaponry. The villain also wears a monocle that shoots energy blasts and wields a battle chain. 
MICRONAUTS Vol 1 #29 (May 1981) 
Acroyear’s wife, Cilicia, condemns her husband for using the Worldmind against Karza, thus causing so much damage to Spartak that it is now uninhabitable. Even now, the survivors must be leaving the planet to find another home elsewhere in the Microverse/ Quantum Realm. Cilicia quits the Micronauts in disgust.
LONGSHOT Vol 1 #1 (September 1985) 
At length, Longshot escapes through a random portal and ends up on Earth. We readers learn he has lost his memory and has two hearts and only three fingers and a thumb on each hand. His first superpower (aside from his incredible agility) is revealed to be incredible “luck” and that luck prevented his pursuers’ blaster fire from actually hitting him and instead hitting everything around him. 
Superheroes have been huge in pop culture in recent decades. Will Eisner’s iconic superhero the Spirit – who debuted in June of 1940 – rose from the grave of his secret identity, Private Investigator Denny Colt, after his apparent death when he got saturated in some chemicals of the supervillain Doctor Cobra. 
GREATER THAN HUMAN STRENGTH – Taking this hero’s origin story at face value with no ret-conning necessary, when Denny Colt came to in his coffin he dug his way to the surface. It would require much more than the strength of a normal human to burst through the coffin lid AND force his way upward through six feet of soil. For all I know The Big Bang Theory guys may have once done a calculation on how much actual strength it would take to accomplish this feat. 
CAPTAIN BRITAIN Vol 1 #28 (April 20th, 1977) 
A very eccentric old professor, Robert Willard Scott, has retired from the university and lives alone with his hawks. When those birds die, Brian Braddock uses his scientific genius to construct a large hawk-shaped remote-controlled android to keep Professor Scott company. 
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