(Marvel Comics v1 001, 1939) The Six Big Men ain’t much, just a bunch of guys who teamed up to do the maximum amount of Crime possible in an unidentified American city. But I am including them in this list, for two reasons: 1. they’re the first even marginal minor super-villains in Marvel Comics (I of course know about Timely Comics, pedants, but I round up) history, and 2. the Six Big Men are actually Seven Big Men and One Big…
(Funnies 001, 1936) Top notch dinosaur illustration.
(Funnies 001, 1946) Really great scared hair on the kid with the braids.
(Hit Comics 018-025, 1941-1942) I know I talk about how wild the origins of various characters are a lot on here, and I don’t think that I can justify declaring one or another “the most wild” anymore, but the Ghost of Flanders would absolutely have to appear on any reasonably comprehensive Top Ten Characters Who Will Amaze and Befuddle You With Their Wild Origins list. The Ghost of Flanders is in reality Rip Graves, who enlisted in the US Army…
They’re back! They’re costumed! They’re generic! Shorty Jones/ Generic Mummy: It’s a sad day for me but I fear I have to classify this fake mummy as a generic costumed villain, even though he has a shortsword, one of the top swords. Ultimately, he’s just a thief named Shorty Jones who robs the museum every night and even with the power of the fake mummy on his side Shorty just isn’t interesting enough to qualify as a minor super-villain. (Detective…
(Hit Comics 013, 1941) The Strange Twins get a medal from the San Francisco PD. (Since they may never come up again: the Strange Twins were a set of English twins (natch) separated as infants when an enemy of their father had one kidnapped as revenge. That one, Rodney, was raised as a criminal and became a feared gang boss, while his brother Douglas grew up to become a Scotland Yard Inspector. The first year or so of Strange Twins…
(Hit Comics 010, 1941) Patriotic numbskull Don Glory gets a new set of wheels after foiling a plot to drag the US into WWII, a very mid-1941 thing to be against and presumably a thing that everyone conveniently forgot about from 1942 onward.
(Hit Comics 010, 1941) Hercules cleans up the Giller Mob and gets the key to… a city. Probably New York? Who can say for sure – he moved around more than most 40s super-heroes. This also leads to a brief and harrowing Hollywood career in which he stars in one – alas! – unnamed jungle action movie.
(Hit Comics 008, 1941) I gotta say: I really like these guys. Now, obviously they’re stinkers of the highest order – their plan involves siphoning all electrical power in the US until they are paid an unspecified amount of big bucks or possibly even placed in charge – but when you spend a little (or a lot of) time thinking about supercrime in a super-hero universe you get opinions about these kinds of things. If these guys had developed this…
(Hit Comics 007, 1941) If Tibetan Lams aren’t the top religious figures cast as super-villains then they at least have to be in the top three, along with druids and Catholic priests – we won’t see any of those for a while but once they get going they go hard. This bunch of Lamas have decided to turn their formidable mental powers (natch) to the task of world conquest, and have chosen to do so by influencing the mind of one…