Lieutenant Peter Noble of the U.S. Navy miraculously lives through a submarine accident, in which Peter learns that he can now live underwater! To avenge his crewmates, Lt. Noble makes a vow to battle all evil upon the high seas. Lt. Noble builds himself an oceanic cave as his secret hideout where he will wage his war on the miscreants of the seven seas! With the strength of twenty men and the ability to swim very swiftly, Peter Noble becomes the Fin! However, if the Fin remains out of the water for more than a few days his mighty strength rapidly declines and he becomes very weak. Exploring an old shipwreck beneath the waves, the Fin discovers a magic cutlass that can slice through metal. He uses this weapon in his fight against evil. Unfortunately, the Fin's career was a relatively short one, lasting only three adventures.
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The Fin was Bill Everett’s other water hero for Timely. Despite Everett’s superb art, the strip lacked the intensity of the Sub-Mariner and only appeared three times. While Namor was the ruler of an underwater kingdom who traveled to the surface, the Fin was a surface man who learned that he could breathe underwater. He discovered and eventually ruled the sunken realm of Neptunia. This last development is straight out of late 19th and early 20th century lost race or planetary romance fiction, where the heroes are forever journeying to hidden kingdoms on mountaintops, under the sea, beneath the ground, on other planets, or in parallel dimensions.
The Fin fought various sea-going menaces mostly Nazis, including the Barracuda (there must be dozens of villains with that name), who had his own sub. The Fin made a brief appearance as one of the constructs of Rick Jones’s imagination in Avengers # 98, but so far has not appeared outside of the Golden Age.
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