(Batman Comics 008, 1941) I got pretty excited when reading this story, as it concerns murders among the cast and crew of a play called the Superstition Murders and there’s a lot of kerfuffle about bad luck and jealousy and drunk has-been actors and I was hopeful that it might boil down to my favourite motive for supercrime: mad art. Just as mad as mad science but it really makes you think, you know? Sadly, the real motive for the crimes is…
(Batman Comics 008, 1941) Professor Henry “Radium” Ross has things stacked against him from at least three different angles by my count. First, he’s a classic Victim of Orthodoxy as his research is rejected as too fantastic by a stick-in-the-mud institute director and he feels compelled to test his radium-based cure for death on himself. It works, but turns him into a radioactive man in the process, and he starts to go mad from a combination of radiation poisoning and…
(Batman Comics 006, 1941) A few different longstanding comic book bits make early appearances in the tale of the Clock Maker. First, Bruce Wayne has to go to a boring old board meeting at one of the many companies that he has an stake in, but that meeting sows the seeds of crime. Specifically, they all go to a clock store together afterward and Atkins, the evil board member who wants to gain sole ownership of the clock company for…
(Batman Comics v1 005, 1941) Batman and Robin’s first interdimensional jaunt took them to Fairyland, where they were tasked with rescuing the daughter of one Professor Anderson, who it seems he was using as a test subject for his narrative-dimensional travel device? There they face off against sundry giants and dragons and so forth before confronting the top evildoer of the realm: the Black Witch. One could argue that a villain whose existence is defined by peasant morality tales that…
(Batman Comics 005, 1941) A while ago I decided that groups were going to go into my lists (and charts and graphs) of super-villains. After all, if I was willing to accord one fellow who went around as the Masked Bandit, why should I spurn four guys who do exactly the same, only pluralized? Accordingly, masked gangs get as much credit as masked crooks, if they fulfil enough other criteria. The Four Cards, however, introduce a new wrinkle. Simply put: if…
(All-Star Comics 005, 1941) Mister X is another team comic overboss, like the Leader before him. Outwardly an unassuming little man, he has managed to gather a wide range of organized crime under his control while remaining completely anonymous, even to his own underlings. His only mistake (and the inciting event of the story) is being so threatened by the crimefighting activities of the Justice Society that he mobilizes his forces in an attempt to kill them even though they…
(All-Star Comics 004, 1941) What makes them a super-villain? Sheer scale! The Leader AKA Fritz Klaver is the top spy for the “dictator nations” in America, commanding units of his subversive Grey-Shirts as well as other less blatant agents in numbers estimated at 30 000. They come real close to saying he’s a Nazi, too, but it’s about a year out from comics folks being willing to actually do that. What makes them interesting? The real deal interesting thing about…
(All-Star Comics 003, 1940) This is the kind of super-villain that you see magical heroes taking on a lot more often than other types: the preemptive striker. The likely cause of this is the status of so many magical heroes as the de facto head of Earth’s magical security, someone that a bad actor can take out and then be free to act with impunity. What’s interesting about this super-villain? The thing that appeals to me about this guy, who is primarily…
(All-Star Comics 003, 1940) Oom the Mighty is, by his own description, a sort of low-rent Gozer the Gozerian: a murderous entity of the ancient past who has returned to kill again. Only instead of whole civilizations boiling in his belly or what have you, Oom kills a handful of people every full moon – still bad, but not quite as much cosmic terror. The original appearance of Oom (involving a dimension-hopping battle with the Spectre) maybe kind of implied…
(All-Star Comics 003, 1940) Much of the information that we have on Mazda the Great comes from the mouth of one of his dying henchmen at the end of the story, but what reason would he have to lie? According to this man, Mazda was a scientist (I assume a vulcanologist. An enormous one!) who developed both technology to control/ redirect the energies of a volcano and also volcano-proof suits. Thus equipped, he set up shop in the crater of…