(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 016, 1941) This guy’s a real ding-dong, and I was sorely tempted to just pass him by. I couldn’t in good conscience not mention a guy who not only hypnotizes Professor Zog and (by proxy) Electro as his minions and does so while wearing both an eye patch and a monocle. PLUS he’s one of my favourite types of villains: a complete failure. Literally all he does after acquiring his new giant robot/ robot operator team is…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941) Dr Lorrof is your true mad scientist’s mad scientist. He’s all worked up about being “cast out of science,” and he’s not going to take that lying down. To the contrary, he’s going to go way overboard and try to destroy Titan City with a blob that he made out of crabs. Plus, not only does he refer to himself in the third person but he does so while attempting to steal a radium…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 015, 1941) I must admit that I was predisposed to give Professor Donaire the benefit of the doubt, given that where I’m from a donair is a delicious late night drunken street food. But he didn’t need it! Even with a non-snack-based name, Prof. Donaire would be a terrific villain. Having said that: Prof. Donaire is a real dummy. He suffers from exactly the same failure of imagination as our old pal Python: that nobody would…
Folk: Luther Robinson and Lynne Harris! These folks are hard to categorize! They’re not villains, despite being antagonists to Namor the Sub-Mariner, because Namor is very much a villain at least half of the time. They’re not heroes, despite eventually allying with Namor to fight Nazis, because they definitely attempt to commit at least one genocide against the people of Atlantis. They’re adventurers, they’ve both been surgically modified by Atlantean scientists to be amphibious, and Lynne is one of a…
(Hit Comics 018-025, 1941-1942) I know I talk about how wild the origins of various characters are a lot on here, and I don’t think that I can justify declaring one or another “the most wild” anymore, but the Ghost of Flanders would absolutely have to appear on any reasonably comprehensive Top Ten Characters Who Will Amaze and Befuddle You With Their Wild Origins list. The Ghost of Flanders is in reality Rip Graves, who enlisted in the US Army…
They’re back! They’re costumed! They’re generic! Shorty Jones/ Generic Mummy: It’s a sad day for me but I fear I have to classify this fake mummy as a generic costumed villain, even though he has a shortsword, one of the top swords. Ultimately, he’s just a thief named Shorty Jones who robs the museum every night and even with the power of the fake mummy on his side Shorty just isn’t interesting enough to qualify as a minor super-villain. (Detective…
(Hit Comics 013, 1941) The Strange Twins get a medal from the San Francisco PD. (Since they may never come up again: the Strange Twins were a set of English twins (natch) separated as infants when an enemy of their father had one kidnapped as revenge. That one, Rodney, was raised as a criminal and became a feared gang boss, while his brother Douglas grew up to become a Scotland Yard Inspector. The first year or so of Strange Twins…
(Hit Comics 010, 1941) Patriotic numbskull Don Glory gets a new set of wheels after foiling a plot to drag the US into WWII, a very mid-1941 thing to be against and presumably a thing that everyone conveniently forgot about from 1942 onward.
(Hit Comics 010, 1941) Hercules cleans up the Giller Mob and gets the key to… a city. Probably New York? Who can say for sure – he moved around more than most 40s super-heroes. This also leads to a brief and harrowing Hollywood career in which he stars in one – alas! – unnamed jungle action movie.
(Hit Comics 008, 1941) I gotta say: I really like these guys. Now, obviously they’re stinkers of the highest order – their plan involves siphoning all electrical power in the US until they are paid an unspecified amount of big bucks or possibly even placed in charge – but when you spend a little (or a lot of) time thinking about supercrime in a super-hero universe you get opinions about these kinds of things. If these guys had developed this…