A particularly eerie Nazi fanatic, Frau Von Sade has sadistic and vaguely erotic plans for Captain Midnight.
“My dear captain, I’m beginning to enjoy your presence,” the green-robed, braided blonde tells the captured pilot. “We vibrate in sympathy although on different moral planes! But a simple brain operation upon you will change that!”
Von Sade’s solution is to inflict physical and moral blindness on Captain Midnight.
“Then I remove your eyes, as I have removed my own,” she says. “And working together while the world sleeps, we shall overpower it!”
“Good heavens! She means it!” thinks the rattled superhero. “I’ll string along until I see a chance to go into action!”
A mystery-man combat pilot who originally flew out of Chicago’s WGN radio in 1938, the early-evening adventure serial Captain Midnight went national in 1940 on Mutual as Ovaltine’s replacement for Little Orphan Annie.
Immensely popular, the good captain moved to comic books in Dell’s The Funnies and Popular Comics, but really came into his own when Fawcett gave him his own title in 1942.
In the Fawcett version, Captain Midnight was a scientific genius who wore a red glider suit emblazoned with his clock insignia, and wielded such crime-stopping inventions as a “drill tank,” a flying aircraft carrier, a “swing spring” grappling hook and his “doom beam torch,” used to mark enemies and penetrate walls.
In both the Fawcett comic and a 1942 Columbia movie serial, Captain Midnight was a full-fledged superhero whose secret identity was Jim Albright.
“Zeit (German for ‘time’) was a costumed ace meant to be the Luftwaffe’s answer to Captain Midnight,” noted Kurt Mitchell and Roy Thomas in American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944. “He was a touch generic, and nowhere near as interesting as Frau Von Sade, a German noblewoman and fanatical Nazi who deliberately blinded herself to sharpen her senses. Able to fly her custom fighter, the Dragon Fly, despite her handicap, Von Sade twice seemed to die at the end of a story, but no body was found.”
In Captain Midnight and the Blind Woman (Captain Midnight 20, May 1944), Von Sades holds the bounded superhero at bay with a special pistol that fires “pellets of solidified oxygen” that would blow him to bits.
“I had the courage to destroy my own eyes, so that I could train my other senses and work in the night while the world sleeps,” Von Sade says. “My acute perceptions tell me of every move you make.”
While she gloatingly explains her scheme to destroy England by secretly extracting the substrata of the island nation, Midnight cuts his bonds with a hidden belt knife, escapes in a Messerschmitt and wrecks her plans.
I’ll always wonder if the half-civilian/half-superhero cover from Fawcett’s Captain Midnight 20 might have caught the eyes of a 17-year-old Steve Ditko. It’s a visual idea the artist would later use to impressive effect.
Von Sade returned in Death in the Dismal Swamp (Captain Midnight 21, June 1944), now allied temporarily with “the Japs” while working to bring “…all mankind under my ruling hand.”
To that end, in her American swamp base, she has created giant man-eating plants that she intends to test by giving them a Midnight snack. But the superhero dodges both her plants and her crocodiles, and captures the villainess.
Briefly.
“You think you haff me, Captain Midnight!” Von Sade says. “But no man — not even the great Captain Midnight — can control Von Sade!”
And with that, the bound fascist fanatic rolls out of Captain Midnight’s plane to her apparent death in the swamps.
Weird even by comic book standards, the fiendish female never returned to further explain the theoretical vibrations of her “moral planes.”
Fascist fiends weren’t in short supply in April 1944, the month Captain Midnight 20 hit the newsstands. That month, Rudi Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and provided the first detailed information about the atrocities there.
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