All characters and prose copyright Michael Chabon.
pre-history
A man named Nanok, who schools himself in the ways of bloodshed and black magic, sets himself upon an obsidian throne. He sends his armies of demons into battle against the peace-loving and matriarchal Queendom of Cimmeria; men take over the world, the Cimmerian moth-goddess Lo is banished to the nether kingdoms, and Cimmeria is plunged into a legendary perpetual night. [All Doll #1]
circa 875
The Caliph Vathek, who, for the sake of empty pomp and forbidden power, sullies himself with a thousand crimes, becomes a prey to grief without end, and remorse without mitigation. [Classics Illustrated]
10th century
The Cimmerian moth-goddess Lo creates the latest in a line of human champions, a woman warrior with the power to help right the world's many wrongs. [All Doll #1]
15th century
In France, the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel have adventures. [Classics Illustrated]
16th century
Rabbi Loew of Prague creates the Golem. [The Golem graphic novel]
19th century
Greta Gatling has first public case as a cowgirl. [All Doll #1]
Crack Carter, with his bullwhip, fights evil amid the tumbleweeds. [Racy Adventure]
The Lone Wolf has first public case, eventually accompanied by Cubby. [Frontier Comics #1]
1900's
Max Mayflower, a spoiled young playboy, is kidnapped from his family's mansion on Nabob Avenue. He is rescued by a member of the League of the Golden Key, who is fatally shot in the process. Max becomes a member of League, whose members roam the world, acting anonymously to procure the freedom of others, always opposed by sinister agents of The Iron Chain (who had been responsible for Max's kidnapping in the first place). [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1]
1933
The Iron Chain realise their dream of ruling an entire nation. As a result of their manipulations, Atilla Haxoff, leader of the Razi party, is elected chancellor of Germany. [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1]
NOTE: Once America entered WWII, the publishers of Empire Comics allowed direct criticism of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis by name, rather than through obvious pseudonyms. Nevertheless, I have retained use of the original pseudonyms for the sake of consistency (and variety), although it does not reflect actual published Empire Comics of the time.
1937
The Gray Goblin has first public case. In the many years which follow his adventures would include "Strange Frigate," "Pyramid of Skulls" (which involved a giant Olmec head with a secret compartment in the left ear), and "Death Wears a Black Sarong". [Racy Police Stories]
Sharpe of the Mounties has first public case, accompanied by Whiskey, the husky dog with whom he shares an almost uncanny bond. [Racy Adventure]
1940
January
Max Mayflower, aka "The Great Misterioso," is assassinated by members of The Iron Chain. He gives his gold key to his adopted nephew Tom Mayflower, which cures his lame leg and allows him to become The Escapist. He is based in Empire City and accompanied by "Big Al" Alois Berg, the brilliant Viennese eight foot tall giant; the man known as "Omar", the Great Misterioso's assistant; and Miss Plum Blossom, an aged Chinese seamstress. They are later joined on occasion by the old Portuguese stagehand, Pedro. [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1]
For the next several months, the Escapist along with his eccentric company tours the dark European bastions of the Iron Chain, including Zothenia, Gothsylvania and Draconia, while secretly going about his real business of arranging jailbreaks for resistance leaders and captured british airmen, helping great scientists and thinkers out of the clutches of evil dictators, and freeing captives, missionaries, and prisoners of war. [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1-3]
The Black Hat, wealthy playboy by day, has first public case. [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1]
A doctor develops Synth-O-Blood from ground-up iron meteorites from outer space. But when some enemy agents break into his laboratory to try to steal it, shooting him when he resists, he managed to hook himself up to the Synth-O-Blood pump just before he dies. The liquid meteorite brings him back from the very brink, and when he comes to, he can fly, and begins his career fighting espionage as the winged hero known as The Swift. [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1]
The Snowman, in his blue-and-white union suit, a gun that fires freezing gas and an ice-blue roadster, accompanied by his Korean houseboy Fan, has first public case. His adversaries include the claw-fingered, monocled, Obsidian Hand. [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1]
Radio Wave, able to transmit himself through the air on the invisible rails of the airwaves, has first public case. [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1]
March
The Escapist battles Miss Plum Blossom's evil sister Poison Rose and her giant henchmen. [Amazing Midget Radio Comics #3]
April
The League of the Golden Key, in its secret mountain sanctum at the edge of the world, calls for a rare convention of the scattered master of the globe, including a Chinese master, a Dutch master, a Polish master, and a Lapp master. The assembled masters agree to vote Tom Mayflower an emergency Champion of Freedom, increasing the power of his key twentyfold. [Radio Comics #4]
Poison Rose (apparently) dies. In the Grand Opera House on the Bund in Shangpo, she had thrown herself between a bullet meant for Tom Mayflower and the pistol of a Razi agent with whom she had, until that moment, been allied. [Radio Comics #4]
Slugger O'Toole, a brawling, rough-and-tumble, wise-cracking tough guy from "the mid-western stockyards of Windyanapolis," is a crooked boxer who got double-crossed in a thrown fight and is treated for his broken arm by a kindly refugee doctor who, it turns out, has just invented a riveted-steel "motorized suit" to enable paralytics to walk. When the doctor is subsequently gunned down by the Forces of Oppression, Slugger dons the battleship gray suit, "enhancing the abilities of his own powerful physique," and goes after the murderers, adopting the name of "another iron-clad that fought in the name of freedom," The Monitor. [The Monitor #1] He is eventually accompanied by the Liberty Kid.
Dr. E. Pluribis Hewnham, The Scientific American, fights, as his nickname implies, by means of the [not always accurate or well-understood] principles and applications of science, equipped with a satchel-sized, [rather unscientifically miraculous] "mini-laboratory" from which he draws an endless supply of incinerating optical gizmos, Archimedean screws, antimagnetic compounds, etc. [Triumph Comics #1]
The Four Freedoms (four teenage boys Kid Einstein, Knuckleduster O'Toole, Tommy Gunn, and Mumbles), a reformed gang of hooligans who abandon street fighting and pinked derbies in favor of the Axis menace and matching suits of tricolor tights, have first public case. [Triumph Comics #1]
Mr. Machine Gun, who wears a flag-inspired costume that was among the most stylish of the Golden Age, an old-glory blue bodysuit emblazoned with a single, enormous white star whose five points reached down to his feet, out to his hands, and up to mask his face, has first public case in what he likes to call "the hero biz." He is, simply, a killer, armed with "acrobatic strength" and his eponymous, overheated gat. [Triumph Comics #1]
October
The Escapist flies to Europe (in a midnight-blue autogyro) to rescue Plum Blossom from the tower of the nefarious Steel Gauntlet, who battles inside a diesel-driven suit of armor. [Radio Comics #10]
1941
Winter
Judy Dark, Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommisioned Volumes at the Empire City Public Library, rescues the sacred The Book of Lo from a library robbery. Lo appears to her, to transform her into her avatar. Judy Dark takes the name Luna Moth. [All Doll #1] She battles in the wonderworld against spectres and demons, and defends unsuspecting dreamers against attack from the dark realms of sleep. By spring of 1941 she has twice flapped into battle against slavering Elder Creatures readying vast interdimensional armadas of demons.
Kid Vixen, a crime-fighting female boxer, has first public case. [All Doll #1] Her opponents include Battling Brunhilde, a champion Razi girl boxer (see note). [All Doll #6]
Venus McFury, a hard-boiled girl detective who is the reincarnation of one of the classical Erinyes, has first public case. [All Doll #1]
The Escapist breaks open a Razi spy ring whose screw-nosed "armored mole" had been trying to dig under Fort Knox. "I wonder what that head-in-the-sand crowd of war ostriches would say if they could see this!"
April
The Four Freedoms achieve the goal of killing Haxoff, only to learn that their victim had been merely a mechanical double (see note).
July
The denizens of Kane Street in Empire City, hearing the news that The Escapist lies near death in the hospital, recall in turn the way he has touched their lives and the lives of everyone in town, only to have it all turn out as a cruel hoax perpetrated by the evil Crooked Man. [Radio Comics #19]
1942
The Escapist's many foes by now include Kapitan Evil; Kommandant X; The Panzer; Siegfried; Swastika Man; the Four Horsemen; Wotan the Wicked; and The United Snakes of America (The Fifth Columnist; Mr. Fear; Benedict Arnold, Junior; and The Escapist's arch-foes The Saboteur and his companion Renata von Voom, the Spy Queen).
1945 (Pharoah Comics publications)
The Pharoah, a reincarnated Egyptian ruler sporting an elaborate Tutankhamen headdress, foils evil with the mystic power of his Scepter of Ra. [Pharoah Comics #1]
Mack Granite has first public case. [Brass Knuckle #1]
The Argonaut has first public case, eventually accompanied by Jason.
Earthman, with his superhuman control over rocks and dirt, has first public case.
The Rolling Rose, with her shiny red skates, has first public case.
The Snowy Owl, with his supersonic hoot, has first public case.
Kommandant X makes a postwar transition from Nazi to Communist agent. [Escapist Adventures]
late 1940's - early 1950's
The Escapist's equipment now includes the Keyjet as well as an array of specialised crime-fighting uniforms.
The Escapist battles Dr. Magma.
The Escapist, bored as anyone by the dull routine of crime-busting, deliberately introduces obstacles and handicaps into his own efforts the thwart the large but finite variety of megalomaniacs, fiends, and rank hoodlums he fights in the years after the war; in order to make things more interesting for himself, he would agree with himself beforehand, say, to despatch some particular gang of criminals "bare-handed," and to use his by now vastly augemented physical strength only if one of them uttered some random phrase like "ice water," and then, just after he was almost licked and the weather too cold for anyone ever to ask for a glass of ice water, hit on a way to arrange things so that inoxerably the gang ended up in the back of a truck full of onions.
1953
March
In between acts of saving the Earth from the evil Omnivores, the Escapist attempts, with the help of a lisping decorator, to renovate the Keyhole, his secret sanctum under the boards of the Empire Palace. [Radio Comics #130]
September
The Escapist, blindfolded and bound to a thick post with his hands behind his back, faces a grim-visaged firing squad; the signal to fire about to be given by, of all people, Tom Mayflower, leaning on his crutch, one arm raised high, his face diabolical and crazed. "How can this be?" the Escapist cries out, "I'm about to be executed by my own alter ego!" He escapes, of course. [Escapist Adventures #54]