(New Adventure 027, 1938)
Just a kidnapper, but there’s something about a man who wears a snake, and he’s yet another Siegel and Shuster villain from a pre-Superman series – in this case, Federal Men, about Steve Carson of the FBI.
Category: DC Comics
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 009: THE COBRA
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 008: THE HUMAN FLY
(Detective Comics 009, 1937)
A very marginal entry on the list, but he really makes the concept of “guy who can climb” work as a masterful crime skill. Plus he’s an early Slam Bradley foe, so more charming Siegel and Shuster fun as Slam demonstrates his early tendency to be amazing at all tasks by following him up the side of a building for a trademark fight. -
MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 007: THE BRAIN
(More Fun 020, 1937)
Another common sub-type of masked criminal, the guy who runs his own pirate fleet. Other than being the first example of this on the list, a real snoozer. Taken out by Sandra of the Secret Service.
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 006: THE LORD OF LIFE
(More Fun 018, 1937)
Used a drug to simulate death in others, then revived them post-funeral and made them do his bidding by claiming that without continual treatments they would die again. Unfortunately for him, he tried the same trick on Dr Occult and was unmasked as a fraud, leading to his swift murder at the hands of his former minions.
SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? My initial thought was that he would only be useful as a legacy name, but if, say, you were telling a Dr Occult yarn and worked in a recap of the original adventure early on then a reveal of the Lord of Life as someone who had really returned from the dead could be a nice cliffhanger/ ongoing mystery. Heck, tie it in with the Methuselah and Vampire Master stories (and maybe even work in something to do with the Master of Corpses, MSV No. 12) and you could have a neat little adventure where Dr Occult must reckon with the legacies of his earliest cases. Fun!
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 006: THE LORD OF LIFE
(More Fun 018, 1937)
Used a drug to simulate death in others, then revived them post-funeral and made them do his bidding by claiming that without continual treatments they would die again. Unfortunately for him, he tried the same trick on Dr Occult and was unmasked as a fraud, leading to his swift murder at the hands of his former minions.
SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? My initial thought was that he would only be useful as a legacy name, but if, say, you were telling a Dr Occult yarn and worked in a recap of the original adventure early on then a reveal of the Lord of Life as someone who had really returned from the dead could be a nice cliffhanger/ ongoing mystery. Heck, tie it in with the Methuselah and Vampire Master stories (and maybe even work in something to do with the Master of Corpses, MSV No. 12) and you could have a neat little adventure where Dr Occult must reckon with the legacies of his earliest cases. Fun!
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 005: KOTH
(More Fun 014, 1936)
Another Dr Occult foe (and thus another early Siegel and Shuster creation), Koth is a fairly generic magic guy, for all that his origin involved being a magic alien who swore to destroy humanity when his companions were slain by cavemen.Unlike the preceding minor villains, Koth has gone on to appear in more modern comics, though whether any of them were set in the modern day as opposed to being period pieces is something I’m not sure of..
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 004: THE PURPLE TIGER
(More Fun 012, 1936)
A member of the surprisingly robust fraternity of guys who get a head injury and then become criminal masterminds. Distinguished mainly by appearing in Radio Squad, a pre-Superman Siegel and Shuster joint featuring police offers with RADIOS in their CARS, which is honestly more revolutionary than it might sound to us in this far future year.
SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? Honestly just putting this here to note that I won’t be adding this to every generic crime idiot’s mini-writeup. If it’s not there, just assume that my opinion is the same as for the Purple Tiger: There’s no reason to bring the specific character back, but it’s a perfectly fine name for a minor villain and you know I love legacy characters.
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 003: METHUSELAH
(More Fun 010, 1936)
Another Dr Occult foe, Methuselah was basically a serial killer who believed that he could absorb the time he was stealing by killing people and so targeted folks with long-lived ancestors. Dr Occult set a trap and captured Methuselah, which leads to:
SHOULD THEY BE BROUGHT BACK? Absolutely! The assumption in the comic is that Methuselah is wrong, but what if he wasn’t? Just a dude locked up in Arkham or wherever for 90 years, all records lost in the oldest filing cabinets, and then one day he notices a grey hair and busts out to get more time. Is Dr Occult even still around?
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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 002: THE VAMPIRE MASTER
(New Fun 006, 1935)
The *second* DC super-villain, the Vampire Master was upset that a lady rejected him so responded reasonably by holding the city to ransom via hordes of machine-created Universal movie monsters, possibly the first example in comics of someone creating something of unbelievable power and using it for petty nonsense instead of becoming the richest person in creation.
Theoretically, the Vampire Master was beaten by Dr Occult, but *really* he was shanked by one of his own creations after talking about how he was going to shut off his machine and make her disappear.
SHOULD THEY COME BACK? Maybe not the Vampire Master himself, but a story about someone breaking into an abandoned basement and finding his tech, still set to fill NYC with Frankensteins and Draculas would be a real hoot.
