Caleb Ketchum

Caleb Ketchum
Character Information
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Occupation	Chemist
Behind the Scenes
First seen in	COMIC: The Man Who Betrayed Himself
Also seen in	COMIC: Truth Serum
Copyright	Public Domain (believed)

Caleb Ketchum was a chemist-turned-criminal and an associate of one version of Jenny Nowhere.

Physical appearance

Caleb Ketchum was a middle-aged, square-shouldered man with blue-green eyes, a small white mustache and darker hair. He usually wore a blue business suit with a red necktie. (COMIC: Truth Serum)

Biography

At some point, Caleb Ketchum met and teamed up with the supervillain Jenny Nowhere. Together, they sought out a rabbi for unclear reason, but he managed to go into hiding. The two kidnapped Jenny Everywhere in the hope that she could reveal to them the hiding place of the rabbi; Ketchum forced her to take a truth serum he had developed (despite Nowhere's insistence that getting Jenny drunk would work just as well). However, though the serum appeared to work per se, this was of little use to the evildoers, as she did not know where the rabbi was hiding anyway. (COMIC: Truth Serum)

Behind the scenes

Origins

The character of Caleb Ketchum is not original to the Jenny Everywhere mythos, but rather originated as a one-off villain in the 1948 comic story The Man Who Betrayed Himself, which starred the superhero “the Black Terror”. Like many other Nedor Comics characters, Ketchum fell into a copyright limbo when the company collapsed, and is held by most authorities to be functionally public-domain.

The original Caleb Ketchum in 1948's The Man Who Betrayed Himself.

In The Man Who Betrayed Himself, Ketchum was identified specifically as a specialist in insect extermination; the chemicals he used in that story included one to grow termites to enormous size and an extermination spray powerful enough to stun human beings. However, his insect-based background is not referenced in his (thus far) single Jenny Everywhere appearance, COMIC: Truth Serum, and it is not altogether clear that he is the same Ketchum as the one in the Black Terror's universe, rather than a parallel counterpart.