Dr. Hormone, a man who appeared to be 25, but was really 75, was a great American chemist who had unlocked the secrets of life and death many years before, it was during this prolonged youth that the doctor distilled hundreds powerful hormones, that along with keeping him unaging, were capable of many other things, from causing people to grow younger or older, fatter of thinner, grow and loose height, change bodily form, and other more extreme changes.
Content to continue with his work alone Doctor Hormone finds this no longer possible when Eastern European dictator Rassinoff steals many of his preparations.
Soon one quarter of the nation of Novoslavia has been turned into creatures with the attributes of animals (eagle-men, tiger-men, locusts-men etc) but with there minds and feelings still human, his goal conquest of all of Eurasia.
However things start to go wrong for the dictator when on trying to give himself the strength of a beast of burden, he is only able to give himself the ears of a donkey.
Thereafter called Assinoff the dictator kidnaps the doctor’s “mischievous” granddaughter Jane, demanding that the doctor help him with he plots or he will torture Jane to death.
With his hormones stolen, and his granddaughter, the people of Novoslavia, and the rest of Europe and the world in danger Dr. Hormone comes out of seclusion to set things right.
That done the good doctor decides that he can no longer stay remote from the world, so he and Jane (who most people mistake as his younger sister) set about searching out other evil and righting it.
One of the Golden Ages truly obscure ones
Dr. Hormone is one of the strangest of the forgotten oddball heroes that popped up from time to time during the Golden Age.
Draw and written by someone calling himself Bob Bugg, the character appeared for only a few issues of Popular Comics, a magazine that started out doing reprints of Chicago Tribune newspaper strips, until during the middle of it’s run they started presenting original creations such as The Voice: Invisible Detective, The Marvel Man, Professor Supermind & Son and others.
None of these however compare to a hero who fights evil by changing the race of Ku Klux Klan like villains, the age of “Naziias,” and setting animal men against animal men in central Europe.
Forgotten to the point of almost being considered a hoax by some, the good doctor did indeed hang up his shingle and take part in some of the strangest battles against evil, along with his plucky granddaughter, for a few months in the 40’s.
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