(Captain America Comics 003, 1941) The Butterfly is great. You just can’t beat a guy in a semi-accurate butterfly outfit (I mean that head is a bit of a mashup) who robs museums. He’s got a glider rig and a weaponized proboscis! The only really problem with his operation is that he is in reality museum curator Doctor Victroli, both because he is a fairly obvious suspect and because he is an old man who ends up biting the dust…
(Captain America Comics 001 & 003, 1941) When I started this here blog I tried to put a little bit of thought into the tagging system, and specifically tried to work out how to deal with the fact that a lot of super-villain types have the same names. The solution I came up with is that everyone named, say, the Skull gets the same tag but legacy characters who are adopting a specific persona that another has used get appended…
(Captain America Comics 002, 1941) The Wax Man is a bit of an oddball. For one thing, he’s not explicitly a Nazi, just “in the pay of a hostile foreign power,” which is only strange in that this is Marvel Comics, the only big publisher not hedging their bets about calling bad guys Nazis – the story previous to this featured Captain America and Bucky punching out Hitler and Goering and leaving them in trash cans, for heavens sake. But…
(Captain America Comics 002, 1941) The Himalayas of any comic book universe are simply chockablock with hidden communities of mystics, monsters, creeps, enlightened souls and weirdos. One such group are the so-called Walking Mountains (AKA the somewhat less PC Oriental Giants). The Mountains are enormous, invulnerable to all harm, possibly immortal and dumb as bricks, which leads to them becoming the muscle for Benson, an unscrupulous banker with poor long-term planning abilities. Luckily for Captain America and Bucky, they also…
(Captain America Comics 001, 1941) I’ll be honest: Rathcone doesn’t have too much going on. He’s your regular style Nazi spy with enough extra sauce to make him stand out. To whit: -a maxed-out “Jack Kirby draws a weird creep” stat, complete with fangs and talonlike fingernails -an oblique gimmick whereby he plays out his strategy on a chessboard while his men listen in over an intercom. The custom chess set is of course one of the great super-villain accessories…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 026, 1941) Armless Tiger Man! A minor classic in the Characters With Goofy Names category and almost certainly a Wizard Magazine Mort of the Month some time in the late 90s. Also: he wears stirrup pants. Unfortunately there’s not a lot going on in the story: Armless Tiger Man is a Nazi saboteur who murders a man in order to save a few bucks on bribes, which leads the Angel to get involved. He ends up…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025-026) Jarna here is Queen of the Lavarites, a group of aliens from Venus who coordinate with the Nazis (shown here as a chunky guy in his pyjamas about to be punched out by the Sub-Mariner). This is all regular comics stuff but there’s some fun highlights: a) the main Lavarite force is composed of these little roughnecks who talk in their own untranslated language and are clearly having a ball at all times. If your…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024, 1941) There are two different comic book tropes that come together in the Parrot. The first is simple: the weird-looking guy adopts a criminal persona based on their appearance -. So: the Penguin, the Vulture, the Chicken, the Platypus, the Skull etc. This is basic stuff, but generally fun. The second thing has to do with the nature of super-powers, that by their very nature they require countering Just as every penny-ante gangster who faced…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025, 1941) Enric Zagnar is your classic Victim of Orthodoxy. His beliefs (mankind will someday be able to control the weather) clash with the view of the establishment (that is wrong) and so he is left adrift. He of course goes off into the mountains to learn how to control the weather and dream of revenge. Harnessing the power of black magic, he attempts to flood and drown the entire town and is opposed by everyone’s…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025, 1941) The King is your regular old gang boss who decides to pivot from running a numbers racket to selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and if that was it he wouldn’t be listed here. The dang guy just wasn’t content to be regular, though. Some salient features of his crime time: -he made the fake drugs in a sprawling underground lab using kidnapped doctors -recalcitrant doctors ended up in a giant vat of boiling acid -he has…