The Spirit was sort of an anti-superhero, just a guy in a fedora and a domino mask. But he was backed up in his 1940s newspaper “Spirit Sections” by a genuine superhero – an extremely formidable one, in fact.
Created by Will Eisner and Bob Powell, Mr. Mystic fought crime with a vast and unspecified arsenal of superpowers that included teleportation, astral projection, animal transformation, growth, and shrinking. And he suffered from the problem that afflicts all such characters — how do you generate dramatic suspense about a protagonist who can do anything?
“Superman is generally regarded as the progenitor of the superhero genre. But many of the superheroes that populated American comic books during the early 1940s owed more to an earlier costumed, super-powered comics hero, Mandrake the Magician,” noted comic historian Don Markstein.
“These magician heroes came in various sub-genres. Some, such as DC Comics’ Zatara and Street & Smith’s fictionalized version of Blackstone, wore a stage magician’s tuxedo with tails, just like Mandrake. Others, including Fawcett’s Ibis the Invincible and All-American’s Sargon the Sorcerer, wore an alternate outfit popular among stage magicians, a regular business suit augmented with a cape and a turban. Zanzibar the Magician wore a fez. Mr. Mystic (no relation) was an early example of the turban wearers.”
“Mr. Mystic’s mystic powers, like those of Thunderbolt, Dr. Droom, Iron Fist, and many others, came from that most popular of mystic power sources, Tibet.”
Mr. Mystic was markedly similar to the earlier Chandu.
“Eisner himself scripted Mr. Mystic under the pseudonym W. Morgan Thomas, with Bob Powell providing the artwork,” noted comics historian Kjell Knudde. “The comic stars a magician named Ken. During a peace mission to Tibet, he crashes near a monastery, where the monks believe he’s some kind of prophet.”
An arcane symbol tattooed on his forehead by the Council of Seven Lamas served as his power ring.
Mr. Mystic’s July 7, 1940, adventure is typical. Rescuing a young woman from a murderous cult, the superhero tangles with the 8-foot-tall magician Ganga Lin. I enjoyed Mystic’s “meta” method of teleportation — simply stepping out of one comic book panel into another!
Battling as mental projections, Mystic and Ganga Lin exhaust themselves. Ganga Lin attempts to flee in the fleet form of a deer, but Mystic becomes a hawk and rips open his neck. When Mystic returns the unconscious Erica Cooper to her home, she revives and wonders who this “strangely dressed man” is.
“Just a friend,” replies the modest and cryptic Mr. Mystic, anticipating the 1978 Superman movie.
That ‘wizards’ duel’ of transformation is reminiscent of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, published two years before in 1938. The battle there between Merlyn and Madam Mim was edited out when White expanded the story into The Once and Future King in 1958, but was included in the Disney animated film version in 1963.
“Like many U.S. superheroes during World War II, Mr. Mystic not only fought ordinary criminals, but also Nazis,” Knudde said. “After Powell was drafted in 1943, Fred Guardineer continued the feature until its cancellation on 14 May 1944.”
Mr. Mystic’s many superpowers apparently included precognition. On Sept. 8, 1940, he successfully repelled “certain foreign powers” in their attempt to overwhelm American forces in the Philippines.
Two years later, those same forces would surrender to the Japanese on Bataan and Corregidor.
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