This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at one of Warren Publishing’s most neglected 1970s characters from Eerie magazine – the disfigured, gun-wielding vigilante priest called the Butcher.
EERIE #62 (Jan 1975)
Title: Forgive Us Our Trespasses
Hero: The Butcher
Villains: The New Orleans Mafia
NOTE: Along with Eerie‘s recurring characters the Spook (a big, black zombie in the 1840s American South who slaughters slave owners, evil Voodoo practitioners and their zombie armies) and Coffin (an undead and disfigured gunslinger in the late 1800s West who suffers under an Indian curse), I consider the Butcher to have tragically wasted potential.
Written by Bill DuBay and drawn by iconic artist Richard Corben, the Butcher combined Marvel’s the Punisher with its horror characters and paperback novel antiheroes like the Executioner and the Destroyer.
Synopsis: In June of 1932, New Orleans Mafia Don Carlo Gambino (no relation to the real-life New York Mafia boss of the same name) is on his deathbed. He has an unnamed priest brought to him to hear his last Confession. Continue reading
FIRE-EATER 
Powers: Fire-Eater, as his name would imply, could “eat” and suck in large flames as well as blow fire-blasts from his mouth. He was also impervious to fire and was skilled at unarmed combat. 
MADAME STRANGE 
Powers: Madame Strange was strong enough to rip iron bars out of a jail cell’s window, was bullet-proof and could run at greater than human speed. She was also an expert at unarmed combat and was skilled with a riding crop AND at knife-throwing. In addition this superheroine had her own personal plane from which she could drop bombs. 
THE BRICK MOON (1872) – Written by Edward Everett Hale, best known for The Man without a Country. This novella started out as a serialized story published in 1869 in the October, November and December issues of Atlantic Monthly. A follow-up installment, titled Life in the Brick Moon, was published in the February 1870 issue. 
The story begins in the 1840s when Frederic Ingham, the tale’s narrator, and his college friends Orcutt and Halliburton plan a dream project which winds up taking decades to fulfill – a manmade artificial satellite, the first recorded in science fiction stories. 
THE VOYAGE OF MAEL DUIN (Immram curaig Mail Duin) – Dated to around the late 900s A.D. or earlier, this story deals with the epic quest of Mael Duin (aka Maildun and Maeldune) and the crew of his ship as he seeks revenge on his father’s killers. This lengthy epic deserves to be as well-known as the Odyssey or the Quest for the Golden Fleece.
Mael Duin matured, and proved better than his presumed siblings at athletic, martial and academic competitions. Losing their temper over this, one of our hero’s foster brothers ridiculed Mael Duin for not even knowing who his real father and mother were. 
CONAN THE BARBARIAN Vol 1 #52 (Jul 1975) 
Conan finds the Ring of the Black Shadow, thus animating a huge statue of the Scorpion God which guards the ring to keep it out of human hands. Our hero fights the statue and renders it inert again with a sword through its “brain.”
MR. A 
MARVEL PREMIERE Vol 1 #31 (Aug 1976) 
Superstitious people in Liberty, NM get covert glimpses of the creature and decide to raid the Pace ranch to destroy Woodgod and any other such “monsters” being created there. David and Ellen are shot to death in the attack but our main character is super-strong and invulnerable, so he survives being shot multiple times.
THE LUNARIAN PROFESSOR AND HIS REMARKABLE REVELATIONS CONCERNING THE EARTH, THE MOON AND MARS TOGETHER WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE CRUISE OF THE SALLY ANN (1909) – Written by James B Alexander back in the glory days of titles so long they might not fit in a 140 character limit. 
TEEN TITANS Vol 1 #44 (Nov 1976) 
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