Religion: not determined yet
Name: unnamed guard
Classification:
villain
Publisher(s): 
First Appearance: Action Comics (vol. 1) #23 (Apr. 1940): "Europe at War, Part 2"
Creators: Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster
Number of Appearances: 1
Worked for: Lex Luthor
Gender: male
Note: coerced by Lois Lane to help her
When Lois Lane and Clark Kent were in Europe covering the war between Toran and Galonia, Lois Lane was kidnapped by henchmen of the criminal mastermind responsible for fomenting the war: Lex Luthor. Lois noticed something different about one of her guards, and she used this observation to her advantage. As described in the narrative caption in panel 3 of page 8 of the Superman story in Action Comics #23, "Lois is placed under guard, but studying her guard, she notes . . ."
In this panel, Lois Lane is shown carefully observing her guard. The guard wears the same all-green smock-like uniform that all the other Luthor henchmen wear in this story. Like many (but not all) of Luthor's henchmen, the guard is bald. The guard's appearance is reminiscent of monks in a mysterious East Asian temple of some sort, but the man is Caucasian. Lois Lane, observing the guard, thinks to herself, "The way that guard looks at me . . . It's not like the others . . . It must be that . . ."
Lois speaks aloud to the guard, "You're not under Luthor's hypnotic influence!"
It's true! For some reason unknown to me, my mind is able to withstand Luthor's suggestion, but don't reveal this or my life will be forfeit!"
All of the other henchmen working for Lex Luthor exhibit a strange zeal for following their master, Lex Luthor. They have an almost religious-like zeal or perhaps hypnotically-induced loyalty. The exact nature of Luthor's hold over his followers was never revealed in detail, but Lois Lane's guard was apparently an exception to this, and the guard knew it. Yet, the guard was performing his duties as assigned to him by Luthor and did not want to simply leave Luthor's base. Why was the guard still there? Did this guard sincerely believe in Luthor's cause of world domination? Was he there purely for the paycheck?
Whatever this guard's motivation for staying, he didn't want to end the arrangement, and his fear of being discovered as being different from the other henchmen allowed Lois Lane to coerce him into action on her behalf. Lois Lane firmly demanded of the guard, "Unless you deliver a note from me to Clark Kent, I'll expose you!"
The guard fearfully answered, "I'll do it! But please don't give me away!"
When Lois Lane's guard was relieved of his shift on guard duty, he used an airplane to fly to the surface from Lex Luthor's high-flying dirigible base. The guard snuck into Clark Kent's hotel room and left the note from Lois Lane. The moment the guard left, Clark Kent was wide awake, He sat up and read the note from Lois, learning that Lois was in trouble. Donning his Superman uniform, Clark followed the fleeing guard. He watched as the guard's plane flew straight up into the sky, heading to Luthor's dirigible. Superman jumped up to the colossal dirigible and was eventually able to rescue Lois Lane and force the entire dirigible base to crash to the ground in a fiery conflagration. It is not clear whether Lois Lane's guard survived the downing of the dirigible. This story was published before Superman had established a clear-cut policy against killing. From the looks of things in the panel, it looks like everybody left on the dirigible would have died. But in the very next story, it was revealed that Lex Luthor himself survived. Perhaps some or all of his henchmen were able to escape through some unknown means, such as by using the small airplanes utilized to travel to and from the dirigible.
Many similarly-attired nameless henchmen of Lex Luthor were shown in the Superman story in Action Comics #23. Lois Lane's "un-hypnotized" guard merits is being singled out here because of his significant role in this story and his distinguishing characteristics. This guard was shown or mentioned in 8 panels on pages 8 and 9 in the story.
Action Comics (vol. 1) #23 (Apr. 1940): "Europe at War, Part 2" (6-panel cameo)
Suggested links for further research about this character:
- https://www.comics.org/issue/723/
- http://comicbookdb.com/issue.php?ID=291