BEING A SLIGHT EXPLANATION OF THE REAL STORIES
OF SOME COMIC BOOK "SUPERHEROES" IN THE WNU

Part One
Marvelous, Fantastic Heroes

Submariner

In this segment we return to the sea from which all life began to examine the true origin of Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner.

    According to the earliest origins as revealed in the comic books, Namor was the son of a human sailor, a Captain Leonard MacKenzie of an arctic sailing vessel and a Princess Fen, a member of the blue skinned aquatic race that lived in the sunken city of Atlantis. Their marriage took place in the waning days of WWI. The Princess' father sent a group of Atlantean warriors to rescue his daughter, in doing so they killed McKenzie and his crew. The Princess gave birth to a son.

    Because of his dual heritage Namor was able to live comfortably in either in the  water or on the land. He was depicted as a tall, muscular human with dark hair and an almost satanic face, with pointed ears and tiny wings on his feet. He was also super strong but the amount of this strength depended on his moisture content, the drier he became the weaker he was.

    Around the same time as Namor's adventures were being published a rival comic book company came out with an aquatic hero of their own. Although the first origin given to Aquaman had him as the son of a scientist Tom Curry, who studied the lost Kingdom of Atlantis, and taught Aquaman how to live and breathe underwater and to communicate with sea life. Years later Aquaman is revealed to be the son of Atlanna, an exiled Poseidonian (for leaving to check out the outside world) and Tom Curry, a lighthouse keeper. The Atlanteans of this version are depicted as living in the rival cities of Poseidonis and Tritonis. The people of Poseidonis bear a strong resemblance to surface dwellers, with legs and no fins. The people of Tritonis are half-human, half-fish, commonly referred to as Mer-People by surface dwellers. He was further more given the liability of being having to immerse in sea water every hour.

As his popularity grew, National Periodicals created a much richer back story that emulated and yet differentiated Aquaman from the Sub-Mariner.

    Still another aquatic hero who appeared a few years later was Neptune Perkins. He was a human dolphin but his origins were not fully fleshed out until much later and was done so by one of our fellow Wold Newtonian researchers, Jean-Marc Lofficier.

    Neptune Perkins was eventually revealed to be the grandson of Arthur Gordon Pym at the time he was using the name Captain Nemo. Although the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ends just as he spots a tall humanoid shape, further research Pym had discovered Dyzan, a race of humanoids that he discovered in underground civilization. An unknown narrator in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race also described the Dyzan. There are some discrepancies in that in The Coming Race they are described as dark skinned yet normal human beings with a highly advanced civilization. In the version described in the comic book the Dyzan are a tall albino people who may have been extra-terrestrial in origin.

    We will deal with this further down.

    Pym had returned to America told his tale to a writer name Poe. He married and had a child. When his  wife died he took the child with him and returned to Dyzan. Pym had acquired a working knowledge of the vril, the energy source of the Dyzan, which their adepts used to manipulate energy and matter. Borrowing their technology and devising engines that ran on vril energy Pym created a submersible vessel, which he used to pirate ocean going vessels. According to fellow Wold Newton researcher he used the name Nemo and called his vessel the Nautilus. The vril had increased his life span so that Pym was still alive in 1912 when he sank the Titanic.

    His son was horrified at his father's amoral behavior, especially at the sinking of the Titanic. He forsook his name and married a survivor of the Titanic. Using his knowledge of the vril force he imbued his wife and he with it when they attempted to conceive a child, as a superior being to go against his father. The child was born with a serious deficiency in sodium salts and had to be immersed in salt water periodically. He also had webbed feet and hands. This was Neptune Perkins.  He later acquired the ability to hold his breath for long periods of time and also to communicate with cetaceans.

    As we can see all three of these aquatic heroes had similar if not duplicate origins involving lost cities, humanoid and human intermarriage. All were above normal strength and all were to a degree amphibious.

    Perkins and Aquaman had to immerse themselves in sea water within a certain time period or experience weakness and possibly death. Namor could gain strength from water and was weakened when dried out by the sun or fire. He also had to immerse himself in water once a week.

    Perkins and Namor had body parts not normally found on humans. Namor had pointed ears and little wings on his ankles. Perkins had webbed hands and feet.

    Dr. Jess Nevins theorized that part of the exploits credited to Namor were actually performed by Neptune Perkins. (1) I am going to take this theory a couple of steps further. Perkins was credited with those activities because Perkins was Namor.  There were not three aquatic heroes as depicted in the comics at various times, there was but one, Namor.

    However I believe that fellow Wold Newton researcher Jean-Marc Lofficier was instrumental in pointing out the truth of the Sub-Mariner's true origins, as depicted in the Dyzan Inheritance from the Young All-Stars comic book. As with everything from the comic book source material you must weed out the truth from the fiction.

    In A Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Pym travels to the Antarctic circa 1927-28. Although his narrative ends rather suspiciously just as he find a humanoid which is taller than a normal human and whose skin was white as snow. The Young All Stars account goes further to state that Pym encountered the Dyzan which are depicted as tall, white haired and white skinned people they are a sort of counter balance to the jet black persons that Pym had previously encountered. The Dyzan depicted by Edward Bulwer-Lytton are however of normal stature and have the skin tones of a Native American. The narrator of The Coming Race had entered the lands of the Dyzan via a mine in England.

        Despite the apparent differences in appearance and location, I believe that the two "Dyzan" civilizations were very much connected. The Dyzan in The Coming Race were depicted as a highly advanced civilization with great technological achievements, including a mastery of the vril force.

    Pym returned to the United States circa 1838 yet had purportedly returned to the Antarctic by 1839 to die. (2)  Dirk Peters died so the only person that could have identified Pym had also died.

    Between 1827 and 1838 and  between 1838 to 1866, Pym was learning about the Vril energies. With the aid of the Antarctic Dyzan he created a submersible vehicle driven by vril engines. He had convinced the Dyzan that the submersible vehicle would allow for greater understanding and interaction between the land bound humanity and the Dyzan. He did not explain that he was actually creating a machine to plunder the seven seas. In 1867 he launched his ship. Upon hearing of the mysterious exploits of another submarine, and its master, Captain Nemo, Pym also begins calling himself "Captain Nemo," and begins plundering ships worldwide.(3) Having his destructive exploits attributed to the real Nemo is an added benefit.

    During the course of his undersea voyages Pym-Nemo encountered other members of the "Dyzan" civilization, which were substantially different in appearance than those from the Antarctic. They lived in undersea cites of stone decorated with mother of pearl coatings. Using the vril technology and the aid some of the more human appearing Dyzan he made an undersea headquarters out of a Dyzan city that had been devastated by a disease. Disease was exceedingly rare among their kind, so rare that the Dyzan workers would not stay at the city for more than a few hours for fear of becoming infected by the long vanished microbes. Nemo-Pym took for his consort a comely young woman very human in appearance. She was the Princess of the Dyzan city comprised mostly of Dyzan who were mostly human in appearance.

    Pym-Nemo had a transparent dome constructed over the city using a glass derived from synthetic diamonds. Upon its completion he began to populate the city with persons he rescued from sinking ships, these ships were of course more often than not sunk by him. As he invested time in this project, especially when his guest proved to be ungrateful, his contacts with the Dyzan faded. What became of Nemo-Pym after his Underwater City was destroyed is unknown, although the article WHO WAS NOBODY? The Life and Times of the Man We Knew as "Nemo" by Jean-Marc Lofficier provides some very interesting speculations.

    Pym encountered quite a few varieties of the "Dyzan". One is lead to ask why were there such varieties of the Dyzan and why did they differ from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's account in The Coming Race?

    I believe that the Dyzan which were depicted in The Coming Race were related to the Dyzan in Antarctica but only culturally. The dark skin of the Dyzan and the fact that the entrance to their civilization was in a mine gives clues as to their identity. Since I believe that the word Dyzan is another pronunciation for Dagon their origins become even clearer. Dagon was a god worshipped by the Caanites, by the Philistines and by the Phoenicians. . Dagon is one of the really old gods. The Ras Shamra texts describe Dagon as coeval with El, who is the most ancient and senior of all the Semitic gods. To the Ugarites he was Dagan a chthonic god of fertility and of the Underworld. Dagon was portrayed half man and half fish.

    It is pretty well known that the Phoenicians had mining facilities in Britain, mostly in Cornwall.  Therefore it is not unreasonable to speculate that the original people who came through the mine were of Phoenician origin. We can only speculate that when they claimed to be escaping from the Deluge that they may have been part of an apocalyptic Phoenician cult. As to how they acquired the super science accredited to them, they may have in their millennia of isolation outstripped surface mankind in knowledge and achievement or as I believe they happened onto a pre-existing civilization and over the next few generations taken it over.

    The civilization I refer to is one derived from the Children of Dagon, the Deep Ones.(4) The Deep Ones are fish-like humanoid beings who look much like bipedal frogs with scaly skin, bulging eyes, gills, webbed hands and feet. They are immortal, never dying except through violence or misadventure. Because of their long lives the Deep Ones have become scientists of great ability. They live in great undersea cities such as Y'ha-nthlei off the coast of Massachusetts, Ahu-Y'Yhola near Cornwall and G'll-Hoo in the North Sea. The cities that the Phoenician refugees discovered had once been part of a sister city to Ahu-Y'Yhola but a seismic shift had cut the undersea city off from the ocean and from the rest of the Deep Ones. Over the millennia water surrounding the cities had dried up leaving them for the most part underground cities with water sources.

    The population of the Deep Ones had dwindled as their seas dried up. They either died by accident, suicide or acts of violence. The Phoenicians were at first awed by the living Children of Dagon but as their numbers increased while the Deep Ones dwindled, the Phoenicians came to dominate the Deep Ones and during internecine wars killed them after mastering much of their civilization and technology.

    Although the Deep Ones generally remain apart from humanity, they do have some contact with them. Stories of mermaids, tritons etc are derived from the Deep Ones. Inter-species breeding is not only possible but also encouraged by many of the human cults that also worship the Deep Ones or Dagon. The children of these unions appear to be normal humans but after many years undergo a metamorphosis into Deep Ones, diving down into the ocean to join their kindred. The effects of this change vary widely between individuals; the length of time the transformation takes is different for every individual. Some never complete the transformation between human and Deep One.

    The Deep Ones who are pedigree and those who are hybrids but have fully transformed into Deep Ones live in their cities in a homogenous culture. This is, they believe, because they only allow the fully transformed offspring of Human-Deep One's to live in their cities. The others are left to fend for themselves. As stated the transformations vary from individual to individual, some never fully transforming, yet these transformations seem to follow certain body types. There were the amphibious nearly human Deep Ones which had an epidermis halfway between scales and mammalian flesh that gave their skin a bluish tint, webbed fingers and feet, gills and large eyes. They were also those with a typically human upper torso and lower piscine half (as Dagon was depicted). (5)  There were also those Deep Ones were odd hybrids between Human-Dyzan and Dolphin-Dyzan matings. The offspring of these matings became the tall, white skinned Dyzan encountered by Arthur Pym at the South Pole. They were less amphibious than their ancestors were although they retained some of their dolphin ancestor's sonar skills and some of the language. The strange cry Tekeli-li heard by Pym which these Dyzan taught to watch-birds, was originally the distress cry of a Pod. To simplify matters I will use the term Dyzan generally to be inclusive of the Deep Ones and the hybrid races.

    The variant types of Dyzan tended to cluster together and formed communities filled with the same basic type of Dyzan. Over the millennia they became almost a breed apart, breeding true among themselves, although they still retained the ability to breed with human, Dyzan or dolphin. (6)

    Princess Fen of the Dyzan gave birth to a child she named Nemo Arthur since Pym-Nemo called himself either one of those names. In the language of the Dyzan it was contracted as Namor. He was raised among his mother's people for about five years in the city, which translates as Aquaria. The King of the city insisted that he be fostered among his father's people so should Nemo Arthur ever return his son would not be a stranger to him.

    Nemo Arthur was left on the shores of a small island off the coast of Massachusetts circa 1875. The island was home of a light house kept by one Tom Curry. Nemo Arthur had been coached to say he was from a shipwreck and that his name was Arthur. Even the Dyzan knew that the name of Nemo had become notorious.

    The lighthouse keeper however was no ordinary light house keeper but was a student of the esoteric; reading helped while away the boredom of his post. He was semi-familiar with the Esoteric Order of Dagon and knew about the tales of the undersea people. However Tom Curry believed that the Deep Ones were the inhabitants of sunken Atlantis. Tom Curry taught Arthur and gave him the last name of Curry. He knew there was something not quite normal about Arthur because of his ability to stay under water for an extended period of time.

    It was not until after Arthur had reached puberty and began exhibiting changes that Tom Curry suspected that Arthur was a hybrid. The changes were his ears becoming pointed and growth appearing on his ankles. In the comic book these growths were transformed into little wings, in reality they developed into tiny little flappers or fins.

    Shortly after the tiny fins developed, Arthur was compelled to leave Tom Curry and travel to his birth place. Returning to Aquaria the second phase of his education began. His mother was distressed to see that his transformation had not even progressed to the point of him having the skin or webbing of his people. He also seemed to be more human in attitude than Dyzan. Still feeling a mixture of hatred at Arthur Pym for abandoning her and yet still in awe of his achievements, she taught him both to respect and loathe the surface dwellers. He learned how the surface dwellers such as his father would kidnap Dyzan women for their pleasures, how they would capture and exploit the Dyzan people to use as slaves, they stole the ancient treasures of the Dyzan.

    Princess Fen's version of the surface dwellers was seemingly confirmed circa 1920 when large chunks of ice began falling on the Antarctic city of Y'Psoodsn. Princess Fen and two hand maidens were seal hunting when they received word of the disaster. They discovered that a surface dweller ship was blasting the ice to make passage to the Antarctic Sea, the falling ice was hitting the city below.

    Princess Fen decided to try and tell the surface dwellers of the damage they were causing. Princess Fen and her handmaidens were captured. The Captain of this ship was named Leonard Mackenzie and he and his crew were members of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Mackenzie was under orders from The Captain, Barnabas Marsh, to find artifacts of the Ancients Ones that were either known to be possessed by the Dyzan or were thought to be possessed by the Dyzan. With Mackenzie was a sensitive, a partially transform descendent of a Human-Dyzan mating who could sense them telepathically, he also could sense the artifacts which Barnabas Marsh sought.

    Barnabas Marsh was tired of playing second fiddle to the Deep Ones. He wished to collect the sections of the Cobra Crown of the Valusia and make it whole again. He would use this power, the pure power of the vril to make humans dominant over the Deep Ones. Another part of Mackenzie's mission was to collect as many of the human appearing females of the Dyzan as they could get their hands on. Marsh wished to bring their heritage into the mix, believing that the ever growing preponderance of the dominant Deep One physical characteristics in Innsmouth could mean its doom.

    Being a long time away from shore Captain Mackenzie and his men passed the women around, since they were all adherents of the Esoteric Order of Dagon they did not find the women too strange or unbecoming.

    When Princess Fen and her party failed to return, Nemo Arthur took a party of warriors up to the surface and found the ship. Discovering that his mother and her handmaidens had been repeatedly raped, Namor slew all of the crew, save one, the sensitive who jumped overboard at the first sign of trouble. Nemo Arthur and his warriors found no trace of him.

Princess Fen and her handmaidens were returned to the city of Y'Psoodsn. Shortly thereafter Princess Fen committed suicide. She had been defiled by the inferior surface dwellers and could no longer consider herself worthy of living among the Dyzan.(7) Nemo Arthur vowed eternal hatred for the surface dwellers and began to use exclusively the Dyzan contraction of his name, Namor, which appropriately enough mean Avenging Son. His grandfather however forbade him to wage war on the surface dwellers. A few years later when they heard of the destruction of the Dyzan city of Y'ha-nthlei off the coast of Innsmouth and the near decimation of the hybrid population of Innsmouth, Namor saw the wisdom of his grandfather's advice.

    The sensitive whose name was Destine had managed to find shelter in a cavern in an iceberg. Here he found a piece of the Cobra Crown but was so weakened by his ordeal that he froze but the energies of the crown preserved him in a state of suspended animation.

    Namor remained outwardly human with the repulsively pink skin that made him an outsider even among his people who were considered outsiders by the pure bred Deep Ones. Even though he appeared human he did change in subtle ways gaining more of the innate Deep One abilities. He learned to communicate telepathically with the Dyzan and with the cetaceans, he learned the ability of altering his mass and density by the absorption or expulsion of liquid, (although his size would only be altered by growth over the centuries.) (8)

    In late 1938, two deep sea divers were discovered searching the area near Y'Psoodsn. Namor's grandfather believed that this was the onset of an invasion and had Namor lead a raid to destroy the surface dweller's ship and kill them all so that no one would be able to find their city.

    The ship was an exploration vessel from the Third Reich searching out the truth of the story of Pym, seeking clues to the true land of Thule and looking for artifacts of occult power. Finding the city of Y'Psoodsn was mere happenstance. Namor and his warriors decimated the ship's soldiers and killed all of the scientists aboard. Namor knew enough about explosives to rig the dynamite aboard to blow up the armory. However he did not know about radios or that a submarine accompanied the exploration ship. The ship's radioman had sent a message to the submarine that they were under attack. The submarine responded to the attack by dropping depth charges on Y'Psoodsn, destroying it.

    Namor and his warriors returned to Y'Psoodsn only to find it in ruins with most of the population dead, including the King. Being the only living heir, Namor placed about his loins the golden belt of P'traoz, the emblem of Kingship among the Dyzan of Y'Psoodsn. In time he hoped to rebuild but now he wanted the remnants of people out of danger. He ordered the remaining warriors to escort the living and wounded to their sister city near Ponape. He would seek vengeance on the surface dwellers. From the description of the submersible ship that had attacked them, Namor was under the impression that it was his father Pym who had attacked Y'Psoodsn. His homeland would be the first to suffer the wrath of the Avenging Son.

    Namor discovered that the golden belt was more than ornamental, it allowed the wearer to channel the vril force for short periods although the effort was taxing. It thus allowed him to swim faster, jump higher and increased his considerable strength in short spurts or bursts. (9)

    Using the extra boost provided by the belt, Namor soon caught up with the submarine that was in the vicinity of the burning exploration ship. His considerable strength with channeled vril energy via the belt went into a double handed blow against the submarine's keel. It took five or six such blows placed at key places around the ship's structures before the vessel broke in half. The blows were also spaced out over a period of several minutes as Namor recovered his strength from great exertion of each channeled punch. It took nearly an hour to sink the submarine in this manner.

    Namor traveled to New York and went on a rampage there, his golden belt lending him the temporary might of a near superman. In an unrecorded adventure of Doc Savage, Richard Benson and the Shadow fought against the Sub-Mariner singly and were defeated. It was only when they worked in concert that they were able to stop his rampage. The incident must have taken place over a 2 week long period in early February 1939 Where was Superman you might ask, he was still recovering from the incident against the Ultra-Humanite at the World's Fair.(10) Doc Savage deduced that the Sub-Mariner gained strength through water and so he and the others  managed to keep him away from water sources, dehydrate him through heat, exertion and flame. A member of Doc Savage's research team whipped up a makeshift flaming suit to do battle with the Sub-Mariner. A modified design of the suit was later used by Francis Loring during WWII.(11)

    The Shadow and the Avenger were more than happy for Doc Savage to take charge of the prisoner. The Sub-Mariner was sent to the Crime College to be rehabilitated and to see where his delusion of being from an underwater sea kingdom could be cured. The Sub-Mariner escaped from Doc Savage's Crime College but did not go on another rampage.

    His escape had been executed by Click Rush. Rush had two reason for doing this, he had been recruited by an Intelligence agency to infiltrate Doc Savage's organization, with the war approaching they wanted to make very certain that Doc Savage was not a security risk, his constant trips abroad could be a clever cover for espionage activity. Rush also released the Sub-Mariner because he realized what he was. One of the odd facts about the Click Rush stories is that he had a talking frog named Bufa. Now this could be dismissed as pure fantasy if we did not know that the Dyzan or Deep Ones resembled large bipedal talking frogs. Bufa the frog was normal sized you might say, yes but there is also a little know facet about Dyzan physiology. The Deep Ones can grow to tremendous size over the centuries and are immortal except for accident or misadventure. Prolonged starvation may cause the Deep One to shrink until it is only a tiny fraction of its former size. I submit to you that Bufa was such a one of the Deep Ones. Rush had found him encased in a lead lined urn and shrunken to this size through starvation. The tiny Dyzan did not want to be returned to the ocean until it had reached a more survivable size, it feared being snapped up by a sea creature. A former scientist among the Dyzan it had given Click Rush some pointers.

    While Namor was still in a weakened state Rush managed to get him out of the "Crime College". He convinced Namor that the United States had nothing to do with the attack on his undersea city. When Namor described the vessels and their symbols, Rush had told him that this was the Third Reich of Germany that had attacked the Dyzan city. He warned Namor that the surface world's modern weapons could destroy Namor easily if he was not careful. Namor realized that he had much to learn about the surface world and moved to a city near the sea where he learn and acclimate before carrying out his vengeance.

    It was in Baltimore that he stayed and where he would, on occasion, use his strength against malefactors and criminals of the surface world. He came into contact with a police woman named Betty Dean, she became his friend, confidant and finally lover (12). He aided her in police work while he continued his studies of the surface world and drew up plans for his ship of war. Using wealth found in the ocean and drawing on resources provided by Click Rush, Namor designed a vessel that would be a submersible capable of flight, it would also be equipped with a small vril engine that would provide power for the engines as well as armament. Tom Swift III helped out with many of the system and propulsion designs.

    Namor departed from Baltimore in mid-1941. Namor intended to wage a one man war against the Nazis and their allies. For the most part he did just that at infrequent intervals he would team up with Captain America or the Human Torch (13) . While it is true that he may have worked with one or more other individuals such as the Creature Commandos or Unknown Soldier, these accounts have either not been released to the general public or have been lost. His exploits and his ability to single handedly sink Nazi U-boats or airplanes became rumored throughout the armed forces as this entry from the Original Crossover Chronology for 1942 demonstrates "Not seen, but mentioned by a couple of Army privates, is Namor, the Sub-Mariner. He is not mentioned by name, but they refer to rumors of a man with tiny wings on his feet who is single-handedly sinking Nazi subs."

    Namor either used blasts of vril energy from his areosub or physical force, although both had their limits. He could only use the vril blast thrice in an hour before his energy supply needed to recharge. The physical force took at least fifteen minutes to sink each sub and he needed at least that long to recover.

    According the comic book history of Namor one of his greatest foes during this period was a fellow Dyzan who had been indoctrinated into the Nazi cause, one of his former friends. This was unfortunately true the young man had witnessed the destruction of his city and it had driven him a bit mad. He wished to align himself with such great power. He aided the Nazi's by helping them to find lost treasure ships and by attacking Allied Subs. Only a few people in the German High Command such as Himmler knew about him and they viewed him as a subhuman to be used and discarded. Although his real name has been lost to us, he did go by the code phrase U-Man. Namor encountered him several times but was eventually forced to kill him and three of his Dyzan friends that had joined the Nazis.

    About 1943, Namor found that for some reason he was undergoing a further transformation into one of the Deep Ones. His eyes became more protruding, his hands and feet developed webbing and he discovered that he had to immerse himself in water at least once an hour or else he would sicken and perhaps die. (14) As a result he spent more and more of his time in the water seeking out Nazi subs and letting the surface dwellers fight the land war.

    When the war had ended and the Third Reich was defeated. He returned to the remnants of his people in the Dyzan City near Ponape. Some of his people had moved to a Dyzan city in the Marshall Islands. Namor looked it over and decided that this would be a good place for his people to be independent and still make plans to rebuild Y'Psoodsn which was an obsession for him. He took as his wife one of the remaining members of Y'Psoodsn's aristocracy.

    Circa 1953, he returned to Y'Psoodsn to access the damage to see how it could be rebuilt. While he was examining the city a barrage of ice fell on the city. Namor went to investigate and discovered that a man was blasting his way out of an ice cavern, breaking up an iceberg. Namor remembered the man's face but could not place it. He however recognized Namor and blasted Namor with a bolt of vril energy that came from a tiara he wore on his head. Namor's belt absorbed most of the blast. Namor and the man, Destine of Innsmouth had a knock down drag out fight that broke apart the iceberg and buried Y'Psoodsn under tons of ice.

    As Namor broke Destine's neck, he blasted Namor full in the right temple with all his remaining vril energy. Namor clutched the tiara in his hand and made his way to his areosub. It had been heavily damaged by the ice falls. Namor felt brain scrambled and was bleeding heavily from many wounds. He aimed his areosub for New York city dimly remembering getting help there. His vril engines were damaged and began to overload two miles out from New York harbor. Namor abandoned ship as the ship imploded, the shock wave concussed him even further. Still clutching the tiara he climbed aboard a pier in Manhattan. His golden belt caught on a projection and was pulled from his body.

    Head splitting, still bleeding from many wounds and naked, he walked naked towards New York City. He remembered trading the tiara from an overcoat and gloves to cover his naked body. Namor felt progressively weaker after an hour he convulsed and lay still. He woke up lying in a pool of his fluids. He felt weak and had no memory. He learned early to hide his "deformities" of webbed hands and feet and pointed ears. Because of these and his amnesia he lived in the skid row sections of New York City, preferring the docks. Yet he had a great fear of water. (15)

    In late 1960, Johnny Storm was working at one of the soup kitchens the Four sponsored. Reid had thought he was getting a bit too arrogant and wanted him see how the other half lived. In the comic book tale recognized Namor's face despite him being heavily bearded from a comic book, in reality he spotted Namor's hand webbing slipping out of a tattered glove.

    Johnny began asking Namor questions that made his head hurt. He reacted by shoving Johnny Storm into a crowd of onlookers. This started a melee in the soup kitchen. Namor ran from the restaurant. He ran to the pier where he had come out of the Ocean several years ago. At the edge of the pier he froze, afraid to go into the water. Johnny Storm followed him. In the comic story he burns Namor's beard off, in reality he pushed the transfixed Namor into the water.

    Namor hit the water screaming. Water filled his lungs and he began choking and then he began breathing again. Memories trickled into his mind like water from a slow tap into a large glass. He found his belt lying near the pier where it had fallen. Place it on he again felt the tingle of vril energies. Namor swam towards his people in the Marshall Islands. His people were gone; the city they had inhabited was destroyed. Deadly radiation's still clung to the stones and silt of the city.

    Namor's people had lived too close to Bikini Atoll and had been wiped out in the hydrogen bomb test of 1954. (16)

    As far as he was concerned all surface dwellers were now fair game. He discovered from extracting information from the surface dwellers near the islands that the United States had been the one that had blown up the big bomb. Namor swam and attacked the United States. Although the comics show him returned to New York City, considering the location of the blast site is more than likely he attacked the West Coast, although he did considerable mayhem along the way. On Sept 19, 1960  in Guam an airliner carrying U.S. military personnel crashed and exploded. On Sept. 22, South of Okinawa, an U.S. Marine transport plane crashed into the sea. (17) When he arrived in Los Angeles in early October the damage that his rampage caused was attributed to an earth tremor. The Four were on hand to stop his rampage, Reid Roberts having anticipated his trip to America from the suspicious plane crashes. The Four managed to capture the Sub-Mariner and end his Los Angeles rampage. However he escaped and took Sue Storm captive. He stole an airplane and had her pilot it across the Pacific. He planned to find as many of the Dyzan colonies as he could and return with an army to wipe out America and the rest of the surface dwellers.

    Sue knew that the others would follow her and flew the airplane directly into the clutches of Typhoon Lola. They crashed landed in the Philippines. The rest of the four were right behind them, although due to Ben Grimm's piloting skills they had weathered the storm.

    An epic battle between the Four and the Sub-Mariner followed. This culminated on Oct 19, in Jolo, Philippines when they were forced to use fire to stop the Sub-Mariner. The fire quickly spread out of control and razed the central business district destroying hundreds of buildings and a dozen lives. The Sub-Mariner's burnt corpse was discovered a few feet away from the Ocean. As the Thing, Ben Grimm picked up the corpse and threw it contemptuously into the ocean, muttering burial at sea.

    The Sub-Mariner was not dead but had been sorely wounded and he would return to plague The Four on several occasions.

Notes

1.The All-Aces Squad: Super Heroes At War by Jess Nevins

2. The Sphinx of the Ice Fields by Jules Verne

3. You will note that that I diverge from my colleague Jean-Marc Lofficier in speculating that Arthur Gordon Pym was not the Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I have instead stuck with Professor Starr's admittedly flawed theory that James Moriarty was the Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. While I respect his scholarly research on the matter and concede that his theory is perhaps more logical than Professor Starr's I prefer the older theory and its refinements by Mr. Farmer in The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, the further refinement by Rick Lai in The Secret History of Captain Nemo and refinements on that theory by Win Eckert as seen in various entries on his The Original Wold Newton Crossover Chronology. It is perhaps irrational but my feeling is however flawed, as it is this theory is one of the cornerstones of the Wold Newton Universe.

4. Dagon is also worshipped by the Deep Ones as Father Dagon, the male progenitor of their race. He is depicted as a Deep One of tremendous proportions. Captain Obed Marsh founded the Esoteric Order of Dagon in Innsmouth, Massachusetts. One of the primary activities of these cultists were mating with members of the Deep Ones.

5. Despite being mostly fictional, the Aquaman comic stories did depict the undersea cities of Poseidonopolis and Tritonis as the respective homes of the human-like sea dwellers and the merpeople.

6. They Dyzan or Deep Ones may have interbreed with another species before the advent of man, possibly the Serpent Men who conquered Valusia. One such by blow  may have been the so called Gill Man from the Black Lagoon. The Gill-Man was later revealed to also have a set of lungs making it a true amphibian. He is sometime depicted as having eyes and other features reminiscent of the Deep Ones. See NOTES ON THE GILL-MAN OF THE UPPER AMAZON by Michael D. Winkle. The Gill-Man's primitive intelligence suggests that he may have been the precursor to a more evolved race, the Lizard People of Haad and Gaan. See Stranger From the Depths, by Gerry Turner, Doubleday, 1967

7. Even though Human and Dyzan interbreeding is practiced regularly by the cultists of Dagon and by the Deep Ones that live near the inhabited shore, those not near human habitation do not often have such encounters.  One also must not suppose that the Dyzan females are promiscuous or that they find Human's especially attractive. The matings usually take place either as part of a ritual or through an arranged intermarriage. Princess Fen had fallen in love with Arthur Gordon Pym (Nemo) because of his charisma, intellect and personality, she may have overlooked his hideous appearance.

8. Ability to talk telepathically to cetaceans  or sea life were powers later accredited to Aquaman and Neptune Perkins. The ability to increase his mass and density through the absorption of water accounts for tales of Namor's strength increasing when in water or when covered by it. When he dries out through perspiration  his mass and density decrease to human norm.

9. In your purveyance of the articles on Thor and Wonder Woman you will see that they also possess belts which augment their strength. The curious may wonder if there is a connection to these belts and the belt worn by Namor. Yes, but so far as I know only indirectly. There were originally ten to twelve of these belts which were worn by Thoan soldiers during the Thokkina War. They were a combination of personal armor via force field, strength augmentation via force field and stealth/camouflage creating effects such as invisibility or generating holographic illusions. In the two remaining one became the girdle of Hippolyta but by the heroic age many of its capabilities had been lost, it still had the ability to augment strength and provide a protective force field but little else. Heracles (John Gribardson/John Clayton) used this for many of the legendary exploits of Heracles. By the time that Diana found it in the early 1940s, it only had a limited capacity for strength augmentation. The belt that Thor possessed however retained most of its abilities, probably because it was his personal property for millennia. I believe that a Dyzan scientist attempted to copy one of the belts but used different technology and power sources and so created this vril powered belt.

    Much has been written about Namor's ability to fly via the tiny wings on his ankles. It was an instrumental plot element in many of the comic book adventures based on his life. As previously demonstrated the "wings" on his ankles were actually fins or flippers. Namor did not fly. What he did was the activity called breaching. You may have seen whales, porpoises or dolphins do this. They  leap out of the water at incredible speeds and often at amazing heights. This is what Namor did assisted by a burst of channeled "vril" energy. While he could leap incredibly high the idea of him launching from the ocean depths to attack airplanes in flight is pure fantasy. The belt also assisted his land based jumping ability but it was not as profound as his breaching.

10. Please see The Lethal Luthors by Dennis E. Power

11. This was probably Click Rush the Gadget Man. Doc knew of his inventive genius through their mutual friend Lester Dent. Doc offered Rush a large salary to join his research and development team.  I hope no one is offended by the revelation that Doc Savage had such a team. While Doc was a scientific genius and did do much of the primary and practical research for his various projects, he did not do it all. After all Thomas Alva Edison did not create the electric light bulb by himself.  The details of the flaming suit can be found at The All-Aces Squad: Super Heroes At War by Jess Nevins.

12. Betty Dean would give birth to a daughter by Namor whom she would name Namorita. She was perfectly human in appearance and behavior until her puberty when she developed pointed ears. In her early twenties, she moved to Texas living by the Gulf of Mexico. While living in Galveston, she met and had an affair with an oil man from Dallas named Ewing, despite him already being married. She became pregnant with his child. The pregnancy's hormonal changes transformed her rapidly into a scaled humanoid Dyzan from the destroyed city of Y'Psoodsn. She dove into Baltimore harbor and was not seen again. In the mid seventies however a humanoid male with webbed fingers and feet, purportedly lacking memory of his origins. He was given the name Mark Harris by Dr Elizabeth Merrill, and was then drafted into the Foundation For Oceanic Research. After aiding them several times against a man named Schubert, he disappeared again. A highly fictionalized version of his life appeared in the television series, The Man From Atlantis.
Special Thanks to Brad Mengel for feedback and suggestion about The Man From Atlantis connection.

13. The teaming of Namor with other heroes is explained at Mr. Nevin's The All-Aces Squad: Super Heroes At War  and I believe that his arguments about this aspect of Namor's life are correct.

14. This partially explains the liabilities of Curry and Perkins and why Perkins was said to have had webbed fingers and toes.

15. This may mean that Namor's increased dependency on seawater was partially psychosomatic. The lack of sea water weakened him to the point where he was not any stronger than any ordinary man. His innate arrogance and ego simply would not stand for that. Since this condition arose during war time, it may have been also a form of battle fatigue. There is also the chance that Namor felt that he was being somehow corrupted by constant exposure to these beings he considered inferior. The constant immersion in water was a means of isolating himself from them and also to symbolically and physically wash away their "stench".

16. Considering what the U.S. Government did to the Dyzan city off the shore of Innsmouth, Massachusetts in 1927, one has to wonder if they knew about this undersea city when they planted their bomb here.

17. If he could not fly how could he knock airplanes out of the sky? Well, he threw projectiles with his strength augmented by water strengthened muscles and by the belt. The projectiles clipped the wings and made the airplanes crash.

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