(More Fun Comics 071, 1941) The Cipher is a fairly unremarkable oceangoing spy with a really great name. He attempts to extract some information on winter warfare tactics from a friend of Clip Carson (on behalf of unspecified employers – somewhat interestingly, the Cipher is explicitly a freelance spy) and gets blown up for his efforts.
(More Fun Comics 071, 1941) The Great Caesar is the antagonist of the first published Johnny Quick adventure (though not, of course, the first overall Johnny Quick adventure – as revealed in the last round of Generic Costumed Villains he had a several-year career before this). He’s got the ever-popular array of circus of crime henchmen who he coerces to rob and kill at his pleasure. He also has the much dumber but just as popular “death as consequence of…
The Scar was a spymaster encountered and captured by adventurer Biff Bronson and maybe if he dressed like that all of the time he’d have an entry of his own but no, he had just left the opera. (More Fun Comics 067, 1941) This bunch work for the villainous Count Parla and his pal Eddie in a classic case of “work your way into polite society in order to set up a big score”. If there’s a non-evil Count…
(More Fun Comics 070, 1941) I got some gripes about Bandar and they’re not really Bandar’s fault. But let’s start with who Bandar is: the source of a mysterious spectral figure that keeps bamboozling the Spectre and killing former members of the Crimson Circle Mystic Society. Jim Corrigan goes deep cover and joins the Society in order to get to the bottom of what the heck is going on and discovers that they’re just a bunch of dupes that society…
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…
(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…
(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…