(Weird Comics 001, 1940)
Dr Mortal, in contrast to his fellow Weird Comics character the Sorceress of Zoom, is your typical comic-headlining super-villain, in that he is a mad scientist with an obsession with making monsters. Like most of his ilk, Mortal is opposed by a heterosexual couple of upstanding moral character, and in his specific case they are his niece Marlene Mortal and her lover Gary Brent (as Marlene’s surname is never actually given in print, I’m just making an assumption that it is also a Mortal, because I want it to be). Dr Mortal’s main distinguishing characteristic is that thanks to his eyebrow/mustache/skin droopiness he kind of looks like he’s melting.
Some 1940 Dr Mortal highlights:
In his first appearance, Dr Mortal is up to some basic mad scientist stuff: he is kidnapping and mutating people into big gobliny guys called the Monster Men. He is of course mind controlling these Monster Men to serve him, but it’s not very good mind control, as can be seen above as it is broken by Gary Brent. Dr Mortal seemingly dies in a fire but actually just scuttles out the back door.
Weird Comics 002 sees Dr Mortal rebuilding, with the aid of his faithful assistant Salvo, and includes the immortal line “Now, Salvo – get me the lion entrails!!”
Just what are the lion entrails for? Why, to create Lion-Men, of course! And what are the Lion-Men for? Why, to terrorize the countryside to no stated end, of course! They just kind of rampage around, smashing up local farms.
Whatever the reasoning behind this, it ends up backfiring on Dr Mortal, as when Gary Brent shows up to rescue Marlene (and here I must say that any time that Marlene Mortal is not explicitly mentioned one can safely assume that she has been captured by Dr Mortal and is about to have something terrible happen to her) he is able to round up an armed group of farmers with relative ease, and it turns out that the Lion-Men are less effective against pitchforks and shotguns than they are against isolated farmsteads. Dr Mortal supposedly dies in a fire for a second time, and for a second time he’s just fine.
Weird Comics 003 is one of those off-model appearances that you get in longer Golden Age series and especially in Fox Features comics, that could either be a different artist taking over for one issue or a comic intended for another character with a few minor edits. My money’s on the latter, but only because Marlene keeps calling Dr Mortal “father” instead of “uncle” throughout.
Whatever its provenance, this story features Dr Mortal in a pretty straightforward “I’ll show ’em all!” revenge scheme in which he is creating a robot with a human brain and the terrific name “Jaque the Super Automaton.” After an interruption by Gary and Marlene, Jaque goes rogue and beats up Dr Mortal before setting his sights on the world at large.
Poor Jaque meets his end at the barrel of a ray gun, while for the first time Dr Mortal is carted off to jail instead of seeming to perish.
Dr Mortal shows some flexibility in Weird Comics 004, as he plays on the tremendous 1940s obsession with class to lure Gary and Marlene into a trap. He convinces the two of them that he has turned over a new leaf by surrounding himself with beautiful, high-class people who he has made in his lab. Called “Pseudo-Socialites” at least once, these are in my opinion Dr Mortal’s greatest creations.
Mortal invites Gary, Marlene and a few other people who he presumably has beef with to a dinner party liberally stocked with Pseudo-Socialites, then excuses himself and uses a beam to revert his creations to their true, monstrous forms. It’s a great little plan, spoiled only by the fact that Gary Brent manages to electrocute all the monsters and capture Dr Mortal.
Weird Comics 005 sees Dr Mortal experimenting with mind transferral and is mostly concerned with a poor ape who has been injected with the memories of a dead man. Oh, that poor ape.
Any mad scientist worth their salt eventually gets into shrinking people and Weird Comics 006 is Dr Mortal’s shrinking phase. He of course uses this technology in an attempt to get revenge on Gary and Marlene and is immediately betrayed and shrunk by his own butler Kalak, forcing the three tiny enemies to team up against him.
All of this revenge-based science must have drained Dr Mortal’s cash reserves, because Weird Comics 007 features him charging rich middle-aged people big bucks in order to transfer their minds into young, attractive bodies. As per usual, Mortal shoots himself in the foot by attempting to get revenge on Gary and Marlene and the whole scheme falls apart, leading to the deaths of all the old rich body snatchers.
Of particular note is the lady above, who just wants to have her mind placed in the body of Marlene Mortal and ends up in the body of a gorilla instead. And then Marlene shoots her dead.
(important note – Gary and Marlene only know about this scheme beacuse he calls them and tells them to stay away. They didn’t even know he was alive!)
Weird Comics 008 features another mad scientist classic: giant insects, which Dr Mortal releases after the police take their first-ever on-panel interest in him and attempt to raid his laboratory. Hearkening back to the old days, this one ends with Mortal seemingly dying as his lab explodes.
This is of course not the end, and Weird Comics 009 sees Dr Mortal in the South Pacific. He abducts men from nearby islands to test his devolution ray on, but is foiled when Gary and Marlene (who just happen to have been vacationing in Waikiki) rally the local police to raid his yacht.
That’s it for Dr Mortal in 1940, but don’t worry, he wasn’t really eaten by sharks. We’ll see this rascal again in 1941.
