TYPHON issue #1
The 1940 comic strip, newly remastered!
This post contains a sunken treasure trove of behind-the-scenes info and activities. Dive in!
Be sure to leave your comments on this post—if enough of you write in, next issue might even have a letters page…
Who—or what—is Typhon?
The hideous serpentine son of Gaia and Tartarus—beast of one-hundred heads, wedded to Echidna, sire of all the monsters in the world!
What connection Typhon has to this creature from Greek myth, except in name, is a mystery. Appearing in the first seven issues of Weird Comics, a 1940 anthology from Fox Feature Syndicate, Typhon battled perplexing sea monsters, rescued scantily-clad damsels, and terrorized the racially-caricaturised indigenous populations of the seven seas’ lost civilizations.
Credited to “Phillips Judge”, a man who never existed, each of Typhon’s strips looks and reads like it was created by an entirely different writer and artist to the rest—which is because it was. From one issue to the next, Typhon’s appearance, his submarine, his female companion, and even his basic abilities seem to vary wildly. Running between 8-10 pages, the stories are crammed into the available space, feverishly explaining the limited plot.
Typhon met an ignoble end when sister title Science Comics was axed, leading to four of its strips taking refuge in Weird Comics beginning in issue #8—with Typhon being replaced by Navy Jones, another undersea hero. Where Typhon was an obvious ripoff of Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Navy Jones was more like Namor the Sub-Mariner.
Now, over eighty years later, Typhon has been dredged from the benthic depths of public domain comic book history, and is having horrific rib-breaking CPR performed on him.
In this issue, as originally written…
“Typhon, adventurer of the underseas, battles with weird, unnatural monsters.” Captaining the A-14 “super-submarine” and its “sister ship”, he plans to reach “unknown depths”. At the “ocean floor”, the subs use their “traction gear” to crawl along. Suddenly, one of the vessels is attacked by “a giant electric eel”. Typhon hops into a “transparent sea suit” and uses his “underwater ray-gun” to blast it, but it turns out to be just one of “hundreds”, all connected into a single monster with the head of a “beautiful girl”. Typhon’s crew fall under her siren-like spell and leave the sub en masse, “unable to resist the attraction of the strange creature”, but Typhon uses his “charm-dispelling ring that had been handed down to him from ancient times” to keep hold of his senses. When he “strikes” the creature with his ring, it “falls dead”; the girl, now free, explains that she was “enchanted by a wicked ruler of the underseas”, trapped in the form of the monster “for many years”. Meanwhile, the wicked ruler in question watches this all happen “in a televisor”, and “sends his serpent-men after Typhon”. They “wind their long bodies around” the submarine and drag it to the palace. The ruler threatens to turn Typhon and the girl “into living seaweed”, but Typhon—seemingly by chance—flashes the ring, somehow leaving the villain “paralyzed”. Back aboard Typhon’s submarine, the girl asks how-ever can she thank him… but Typhon brushes it off: “It’s all in the line of duty, and there are more adventures waiting—looks like you’ll accompany us from now on.”
Behind-the-scenes…
As part of a wave of “good girl art” in comics and pulp at the time, the original Typhon strips are notable for their overtly psychosexual content which, per the standards of the time, never crystallizes into anything more than a kiss. They operate on pure id, bereft of logic, a bleary grab-bag of the laziest tropes of the day, dreamlike in moving from one panel to the next. Effectively, they’re vintage slop.
As the text in these comics rarely does anything more than describe in hyperbole what is blisteringly self-evident from the art, it was begging to be replaced with something more interesting. I mean, it’s not like Phillips Judge is gonna complain, is he? I originally rewrote two pages as a po-faced played-straight Alan-Moore-esque deconstruction, literally making Typhon the mythological father of monsters, before deciding that it was cringe and swapping it for something much sillier. You’re welcome. My goal was to blur past and present, mentioning fax, Vaseline glass (it’s real!), and cravats in the same breath as Bluetooth, video essays, and having a “sob sesh with the boys”. In the modern day, Typhon is less Nautilus, more Titan.
Fun fact: this isn’t the first time I’ve rewritten a comic like this! I love writing comics but have very little artistic talent. Way back in 2017, in my final summer holidays, I swapped out all the lettering in an obscure ‘80s Transformers comic. By pure coincidence, that story starred a character called Triton, who transformed into a submarine.
NEW TYPHON PRODUCTS
Why not try making your own comic? Are you lazy or something?
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i was on the damn edge of my seat through this whole thing.
I don't want to make comics, I just want to endlessly critique comics.
I love the pace of 1940s strips. Things constantly happening, pages often wildly different to one another.
I like the touch of Typhon telling his boy to fax his ex, that is a nice nod to the fact that e-mail wasn't in common use during the war. But there is a continuity flub on the next page, Bluetooth actually wasn't invented until the 1980s. Strange but true.
Will we learn about Typhon's ex? Where did he get his billions? An intriguing new character with plenty of depths to plumb.