What were Ian Karkull and Wotan up to in 1941? Ian Karkull is my Platonic Ideal of the Median Super-Villain: he has two Golden Age appearances (detailed here) and a handful of post-Silver Age ones but also was seemingly pulled out of a hat (probably by Roy Thomas) as the villain who did some sort of scheme that blasted the Justice Society with some sort of energies that made them age slower so that otherwise normal WWII veterans like Wildcat…
What was Wotan up to in 1940? A trip back in time! A year or so ago when I was reading the 1940 issues of More Fun was before I started doing Super-Villain Yearbook posts and so I skipped poor Wotan, an injustice compounded by the fact that he is what I would call a Median Villain: one who has either enough appearances or importance to a hero’s history to be more than a minor villain but without the name…
(More Fun Comics 069, 1941) We don’t get a lot of backstory on the Tentacle. Presumably he’s a botanist or at least a gifted amateur horticulturalist, as he has developed a type of plant that strangles folks to death and can be triggered remotely (or on a timer, possibly). He uses this creation to blackmail rich men until he is tracked down by the Spectre and of course meets his end at the fronds of his own creation.
(More Fun Comics 068, 1941) The Green Men are little alien bigheads who rock up to our Solar System one day in their mobile planet and start siphoning life from the people of New Jersey in order to create a life-extension fluid. To this end, they depopulate at least three entire cities before being stopped, which is cool and dramatic as a bit of villainy and plays merry hell with the idea of a unified comics continuity: whither the monuments…
Weaknesses: A very specific weakness for the Spectre: a once-in-a-hundred-million-year alignment of constellations that surely will never happen again. (More Fun Comics 071, 1941) Misc: This is my first encounter with Golden Age Johnny Quick so I’m not sure if the slow-down formula that he uses in the third panel above is a regular thing or a one-off but it sure has been left by the wayside. (More Fun Comics 071, 1941) EDIT: He does it again in More Fun…
(More Fun Comics 068, 1941) Yes, the Sea Khan is just a pirate, but he’s a very successful one, with fifteen years of piracy on his cv, a whole fleet of his own, a super great name and even a nemesis who blames the Khan for the death of his family. No points if you guess that the Sea Khan’s daughter Sului is actually the guy’s daughter raised to be a pirate. Though the Sea Khan ends up being shot…
(More Fun Comics 067-068, 1941) On paper I should love Dr Mause, a weird little creep who preys on Allied shipping for his legally-distinct-from-German masters using not only an “electroblast ray” but a cool floating island base, but in practise he leaves me cold. I’m glad he gets captured by Captain Desmo, see if I’m not.
(More Fun Comics 068, 1941) Mister K is an unspecified enemy agent encountered by macho adventurer Clip Carson in Panama. His plots and schemes are pretty rote – any comic set in Panama is almost certainly about trying to sabotage the Panama Canal, after all – but his tool of choice is a carnivorous plant called the Devil-Flower, so that’s fun. Interestingly, we last saw Clip Carson battling unspecified enemy agent Mister Z in Colombia. Assuming a linear distribution, we…
(More Fun Comics 068, 1941) The Master is… probably Russian. It’s the same as all of the “pseudo-German crypto-Nazi” characters that populate comics pre-Pearl Harbor. Reading through the vagueness, he is a scientist whose partner emigrated to the US about the time of the Russian Revolution while the Master stayed behind. Now the Master wants revenge for his partner’s success and also is gearing up to take over the world and he’s using his sonic death ray device to achieve…
(More Fun Comics 068, 1941) The Master is… probably Russian. It’s the same as all of the “pseudo-German crypto-Nazi” characters that populate comics pre-Pearl Harbor. Reading through the vagueness, he is a scientist whose partner emigrated to the US about the time of the Russian Revolution while the Master stayed behind. Now the Master wants revenge for his partner’s success and also is gearing up to take over the world and he’s using his sonic death ray device to achieve…