House of Mystery #161 (1966)
by Dave Wood & Jim Mooney
This might just be the most Silver Age cover I have ever seen.
Words on the cover? Check. A gorilla? Check. A plant-gorilla controlled by a mummy wearing a snake mask? Check!!!
We begin with the opening of a movie, where all the profits from tickets go to charity.
This is where the villain of the story shows up: a mummy wearing a mask of the Egyptian god Set.
Who WAS the god of deserts (among other things), so at least DC gets it better than Marvel that inexplicably made him a snake-themed god of death (there are like a dozen death gods in Egyptian mythology and they picked one of the few who wasn’t!!!).
Robby hears about this from the news, so he transforms into a new hero: Magneto!
In case you’re wondering: Marvel’s Magneto was created three years earlier.
Robby’s version has a much worse costume, sure, but the way he moves makes SLIGHTLY more sense for his powers rather than the mutant’s ability to do whatever he wants as long as he includes “magnetism” in its explanation.
And consider that I’m praising the realism of a story that features a mummy piloting a rocket-powered sled to escape from the sandstorm he has summoned.
Shockingly, the mummy’s goons are no match for Magneto.
But then the mummy changes his mask from Ra to Thoth, the ibis-headed god who summons rocks from the Moon. Which apparently is orange. (WTF!?)
I was about to criticize the story for claiming he’s the god of the Moon, but thankfully I double checked because he IS. In addition to being the god of wisdom, knowledge, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magic, art, judgment and multitasking.
So are they meteors or parts of the Moon? I wouldn’t be surprised if Thoth was ALSO the god of meteors, honestly.
Too bad Magneto is too busy saving a schoolbus buried in the sand to prevent the mummy from escaping.
Unlike his mutant counterpart, THIS Magneto is not stupidly overpowered.
As we’ve seen before, Robby is an amazing detective. So even if he’s currently powerless, he STILL continues the investigation! He briefly saw the mummy’s face when he exchanged masks, so he goes to the police to identify him.
Ah, so this guy is basically a slightly less nuts version of the Living Pharaoh.
Not only he discovered the magic masks, but also that he needs to cover himself in mummy wraps to avoid losing his powers.
Could you actually do this in 1966? It sure would be incredibly illegal for a civilian to do this today.
So Magneto goes to the guy’s apartment to investigate. He’s still wearing his costume and he’s powerless, so is he just walking around the city dressed like this?
This is easily the most realistic detective work we have seen in this series.
One of the pictures is marked, but Robby doesn’t recognize it. At least not until the morning after.
Time for a new hero! Definitely less catchy than Magneto.
And just in time, because the mummy is now wearing the ram mask of Khnum, the god of waters.
Score another point for mythological accuracy, because Khnum WAS the god of the source of the Nile.
Hornet Man stops him thanks to his stinger. It’s not as fancy of that of Marvel’s Wasp, though, because it’s literally a singer on his index finger.
This is when the mummy takes the power of Ranno.
And the comic loses its mythological roots because I have no idea where they’re pulling “Ranno” from. I couldn’t find any Egyptian god that could be identified with “the god of gardens”… I guess gardening wasn’t particularly important for Ancient Egypt, go figure!
Even going through the snake-headed gods, the only one is Wadj-wer who is such a minor god I couldn’t even find an image, plus he was a sea god.
The only other two snake-headed Egyptian divinities I could identify are the cobra-headed Renenutet who was in charge of the harvest and Meretseger who was a guardian of the necropolis… but not only these two have nothing to do with gardens, they’re both goddesses.
Sadly, there are no gorillas made of plants in Egyptian mythology.
This is a story where a hornet man defeats a magic gorilla made of plants with a statue of George Washington. Comics, everybody!
But this allows the mummy to escape AGAIN. Only the following day Robby gets the final clue to figure out his plan, and apparently he has photographic memory.
Between this and his detective skills, it’s a wonder Batman never recruited him to be Robin. He’s an orphan too!!!
Time for the last hero of the issue: The-Artist-Was-Tired Man!
Okay Anubis WAS one of the many gods of the underworld, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have subways in Ancient Egypt.
See? Told you Robby is a great detective. Who else would figure out that in order to rob an underground safe you’d need the powers of an underworld god?
Time for the final mask: Ra, the god of the Sun. I would’ve been fine if this the mummy used the mask to shoot laser beams, making the connection between the Sun and light… but why flames?
So… is Shadow Man two-dimensional? Or extremely thin?
No, the mummy is just stupid.
Also he’s able to fight the heat of the Sun because it’s colder in the shadows.
Sounds legit.
Historical significance: 0/10
Definitely less impactful than Marvel’s Magneto.
Silver Age-ness: 10/10
The sentence “That mummy had a rocket-powered sand sled” is used. That is all.
Does it stand the test of time? 7/10
Far less formulaic than the previous issues, and the mummy isn’t a bad match for Robby’s transformations since he has different powers.
It’s very short, sure, but the basic structure still works. I especially liked Robby not relying only on his powers; it’s his brains that ultimately defeat not just the main villain, but all the various goons.
Give the mummy a less goofy design, play up the mythological aspect, and you can do most of the story today.
Dial S for SOCKAMAGEE! : 38
The catchphrase is used 8 times, the new record. Remarkable for a 16 page story!
Dial I for superhero identities: 16
Adding Magneto, Hornet Man and Shadow Man.
Dial C for the superpowers count: 24
Magneto and Hornet Man are straightforward, adding magnetism and a bio-stinger. You would think Shadow Man’s ability would be to be invisible in the shadows, but it doesn’t look like it… I’m just going with “heat immunity”.
When I heard that the mummy had six heads elsewhere, I was hoping it would have those six heads all at once. That might have been enough to push the Silver Age-ness score up a bit.
Your search engine must be on the fritz, sir, because my Google-search turned up a few sites which made reference to the ancient Egyptian god Ranno. TOTA.world provided the most information:
This garden-god, Ranno, was represented under the form of an asp, whose figure is found on wine-presses and garden and agricultural implements.
Further, according to the TOTA article on Egyptian mythology, Ranno doesn’t get as much play in stories that throw around the names of the Egyptian gods because he was subordinate to Khem, Egyptian god of generation and reproduction.
Hope this helps.
Neat! Now we just have to find some plant-based gorillas.
They got heka half-right too. “Heka” is the ancient Egyptian word for “using the ka (lifeforce)” (it was also the name of the goddess who was the personification of “using the ka” but that’s neither here nor there). It was believed that people could use the energy of their lifeforce to affect reality around them, using their speech, provided they were skilled enough at this sort of thing and had a strong enough ka. Doctors would prescribe chants for patients to say to help them heal along with drugs and other remedies, for instance, and in ancient Egyptian literature when wise people use magic it’s by speech that cause incredible things to happen. But using “heka” as your magic word is like saying the magic word is “magic”. I’m not sure how often heka was even supposed to involve unusual words; my impression is that it was ordinary speech and the magic power came from your life energy, not special properties of the particular weird words you were saying.
Now I want to see a magic hero/villain who shouts “Magic!” instead of a spell.
…or if it was Zatanna “cigam!”