JUST IMAGINE! June 1941: Vanished into Thin Air

The ranks of gaseous superheroes may be small, but they are a valiant (if necessarily amorphous) lot.

Leading the way was Vapo-Man, who debuted in Centaur’s Liberty Scouts Comics 2 (June 1941).

Caught in a lab explosion caused by Nazi saboteurs, researcher Bradford Cole becomes living vapor — able to fly, enter any structure, disintegrate matter at a touch, generate gas at will, shrink, expand his limbs to huge and intimidating sizes and, if all else fails, transform into a tornado.

The dying Dr. Kreiner tells him, “For centuries, chemists have sought in vain for the formula which would decompose man — and change him to a gaseous state.”

That’s news to me. But Kreiner continues, “Once acquired, you will have the ability to will yourself into and out of this state. You are the long-sought-after Vapo-Man!”

A yellow t-shirt and blue shorts — ais undergarments at the moment of the explosion — become his initial “costume.” He later added a mask, a flared collar, and not much else.

 

There was nothing foggy about Vapo-Man’s resolve. Flying after the Nazi spies who’d killed his scientific mentor, Vapo-Man swells his hand to giant size, grabs them and vaporizes them.
After four Axis-smashing exploits in all, Vapo-Man was gone with the wind.

But others carried on the tradition. DC’s science fiction/fantasy title House of Mystery featured not just one but two separate one-shot protagonists called a “Human Hurricane,” with powers to match — one in 1959 and another in 1965.

Starting in 1967, the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon Birdman & the Galaxy Trio included the blue-clad Vapor-Man, who had powers similar to Vapo-Man’s (apparently because he hailed from the planet Vaporus).

Vapo-Man was preceded by Bill Everett’s innovative character Amazing-Man, who debuted in 1939.

“In addition to great strength and control over his body, plus certain mental powers up to and including a low level of telepathy, Amazing-Man also, through western science, acquired the power to disappear in a cloud of green vapor,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “Thereafter, he was sometimes called the Green Mist.”

Menaces, too, got in on the volatilized action. Starman’s archenemy, the Mist, for example, first appeared in Adventure Comics 67 (Oct. 1941).

The telepathic alien smoke monster Diablo tried to conquer the planet Earth in Tales of Suspense 9 (Dec. 1959).

And by murdering Janet van Dyne’s father, the gaseous, green Creature from Kosmos inadvertently created the crime-fighting team of Ant-Man and the Wasp (Tales to Astonish 44, June 1963).

In 1960, the concept made it into the movies with Ishirō Honda’s Japanese science fiction film The Human Vapor. The subject of a scientific experiment by a researcher whom he immediately murders, the unstoppable thief Mizuno, even volunteers to demonstrate how he commits his bank robberies to police, confident they can’t stop him.

And indeed they cannot — it is only love that finally finishes him.

The Human Vapor was the third in Toho’s “Transforming Human” series, the earlier two being The Invisible Avenger (1954) and H-Man (1958).

 

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