(Nickel Comics 006, 1940)
A costumed gang that managed to take over a small town under the direction of head devil Lucifer. Not the most distinguished costumed gang ever but you gotta give them credit for trying. And not only do they have devil horns on their hood but there’s a skull-and-crossbones on both the hood and the chest! Sartorially speaking, they’re years ahead!
Anyway, most of them get drowned by Bulletman.
(Mystery Men Comics 010, 1940)
It’s the Moth vs. the Weather Kings, the very definition of a great name wasted on some run-of-the-mill weather controlling chumps and really I’m only bringing them up to roundly condemn the wasting of such a good name on such jabronis.
The only good thing about them really, is that they’ve remained unused for more than 80 years so the name is basically up for grabs.
(More Fun Comics 060, 1940)
Here’s the thing about these guys: they probably aren’t the Norns and they probably don’t call themselves the Norns. They’re three giant purple guys who hang out in a cave in the Catskills and send a flying saucer full of little green guys to attack NYC, ostensibly to conquer it. But! Earlier in the story:
… Dr Fate is reading a book about the Fates when Inza comes to tell him about the saucer attack, and then jumps to the conclusion that they are the same as the purple guys when he sees three people together. It’s weird!
(More Fun Comics 060, 1940)
Here’s the thing about these guys: they probably aren’t the Norns and they probably don’t call themselves the Norns. They’re three giant purple guys who hang out in a cave in the Catskills and send a flying saucer full of little green guys to attack NYC, ostensibly to conquer it. But! Earlier in the story:
… Dr Fate is reading a book about the Fates when Inza comes to tell him about the saucer attack, and then jumps to the conclusion that they are the same as the purple guys when he sees three people together. It’s weird!
(More Fun Comics 053-057, 1940)
Comic books love the Order of Assassins – it’s a ready-made group tough enough to tackle most heroes, plus they’re all foreign and such. They crop up all over the place – it’s like that thing where so many remnants of Atlantis exist that it’s hard to imagine that anyone died, but instead when the power of the Assassins was shattered each individual member went off and founded their own new Order.
This bunch of Assassins operated out of Algiers (but also Bombay, because as noted previously the creative team behind Captain Desmo had a fairly shaky grasp on the geographical distinction between India and North Africa) and caused a lot of trouble for Captain Desmo and his pal Gabby until, in a moment of poor judgement, they captured them and took them to their HQ.
If I was the Grand Assassin of Algiers I simply would not rig my mountain fastness with explosives and leave the trigger in an easily accessible location.
(All American Comics 001-071 plus appearances in All-Star, World’s Finest, New York World’s Fair Comics and Comics Cavalcade, 1939-1946)
They keep coming up, so I might as well spare a word for Red, White and Blue. The concept is simple: three childhood friends, each of whom went into a different branch of the armed forces (and each of whom has a convenient nickname) work for G-2/ US military intelligence to root out enemy plots, most often in partnership with G-2 operative Doris West. Red Dugan (Marine) is their leader, while Whitefield “Whitey” Smith (Army) provides muscle and Heermance B. “Blooey” Blue (Navy) is mainly comic relief.
Their stories are great looking and generally pretty entertaining but if they have one great flaw it’s in the character personalities: Whitey and Blooey are both complete comic relief dum-dums, which leaves Red and Doris to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of moving the actual plot forward, which theoretically works great because they’re both portrayed as quite competent, particularly Doris. What really drags a lot of the stories down, though, is Red’s constant macho assertions that Doris shouldn’t go into danger and his pooh-poohing of her hunches etc as mere womanly fabulation. So many Red, White and Blue stories have an interminable middle portion in which Doris has basically figured everything out and Red refuses to listen to her.
I’m less familiar with the RWB stories that take place after the US enters the war and the boys are deployed. The few I’ve read from that era take the form of letters home to Doris or one of their parents telling of their war exploits. I’ll check back in if there’s anything worth writing about there (especially if we eventually learn Red’s real first name – secret knowledge).
(Adventure Comics 049, 1940)
The Tiger-Men are… contextually villains, I guess, in that they do arson and murder and are opposed by hero Steve Conrad.
They are ALSO part of a pattern that emerges if you read a lot of old comics that take place in international locales: the hero rocks up and helps solve a problem between colonizers and the native population and the narrative frames what are usually pretty reasonable demands by the latter as rank villainy.
In the case of the Tiger-Men, their whole deal is that they are Indians who would please like their land back, if the English plantation owners could be bothered to leave (great violence is meted out to them for this).
(Action Comics 018-063, 1939-1943)
The Three Aces consist of Gunner Bill (blonde, bland), Fog Fortune (fat, Cockney – the kind of character who starts out 1% comic relief and increases by increments until he is unrecognizable. In this case he gets fatter and more faux-Cockney until his word balloons are up to 1/2 apostrophe) and Whistler Will (dark haired ladies man – more on him in a moment). They’re fairly standard aviator type heroes except for a couple of things: they have a greater than average rate of running into stuff like lost civilizations and minor super-villains and they have Whistler Will.
Okay, maybe I’m bigging up Will a bit. For most of their adventures he’s just your standard square-jawed lothario, but in Action Comics 022 they did a peek into his backstory and it made a big impression on me:
Whistler Will is some sort of feral desert child or fey spirit of the American Southwest or something, an implacable and free spirit of justice. He has a mystic othersense that tells him in this issue that his adopted sister is in trouble with enough advance notice to fly across the continent to help her. He does stuff like this fairly regularly and his mystic senses express themselves as eerie whistling. All of this is very cool. All of this is never referenced again.
Anyway, the Three Aces all fought in WWI so I guess I’ll mark them as dead, with a dead? for Will because maybe he just went back to his home in the halls of Avalon or wherever.
(Action v1 017-018, 1939)
There’s a lot of ancient murder-cults in comics, and a lot of them are orientalist nonsense about primitive superstitions and such. I present this one (duped into doing the bidding of a couple of no-good brothers) solely because of the magnificent crotch-throne.
(Feature Funnies 016, 1939)
Not much to distinguish this spy organization foiled by Quality character Black X, other than the fact that their leader spends the entire adventure dressed for bed, complete with a little tasseled nightcap. I choose to ignore the in-text indications that he was in fact just about to go to sleep and instead believe that he dressed like that all the time. BRING BACK tasseled nightcaps!