(Adventure Comics 051-052, 1940)
Snegg’s your classic villain who can’t handle the thought of revising a plan. In his first appearance he animates a trio of crime boss statues from a wax museum to serve him as henchmen and then, having been foiled once by Hourman, he tosses the whole idea of animated wax out the window to indulge in hypnotism-based crime. If he hadn’t died in a car accident he might be thinking up new implausible schemes to this day.
(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).
(Adventure Comics 046, 1940)
The Coin is a few different super-villain clichés rolled into one. Firstly he’s an old college chum of Wesley “Sandman” Dodds, and “old schoolmate of hero turns out to be villain” is as much a recurring thing in comics as an old friend showing up and immediately dying. Which the Coin also does.
Finally, the Coin is a man who dresses up as an old lady to do crime, which is a super-villain bit and also something that regular-style crooks are apt to do in the Golden and Silver Ages. Old women are such unlikely villains that everyone else poses as them – even Catwoman, in her first appearance.
Anyway, he’s a counterfeiter.
(Action Comics 030, 1940)
I’ve decided to introduce a system for dealing with some of the more minor super-villains who do not incite as much excitement in me to vomit out more than a cursory sentence about them (slightly unfair to the Master, who is kind of interesting, but I am uninspired today) In such cases, we will be answering one or both of the following questions:
What makes them a super-villain? In addition to his super-villain name, the Master has three qualifying super-villain attributes
1) Methods: he kills those who resist his extortion attempts by releasing huge poisonous beetles in their homes.
2) Powers: the Master, unlike many of Zatara’s opponents, is a magic user. Specifically, he has the ability to resist and shrug off Zatara’s own magic
3} Association: he employs the services of the Tigress
What’s interesting about them? Honestly, it’s the idea of a crook being able to resist a magical hero’s powers. Underused and underappreciated!
(Action Comics 030, 1940)
I’ve decided to introduce a system for dealing with some of the more minor super-villains who do not incite as much excitement in me to vomit out more than a cursory sentence about them (slightly unfair to the Master, who is kind of interesting, but I am uninspired today) In such cases, we will be answering one or both of the following questions:
What makes them a super-villain? In addition to his super-villain name, the Master has three qualifying super-villain attributes
1) Methods: he kills those who resist his extortion attempts by releasing huge poisonous beetles in their homes.
2) Powers: the Master, unlike many of Zatara’s opponents, is a magic user. Specifically, he has the ability to resist and shrug off Zatara’s own magic
3} Association: he employs the services of the Tigress
What’s interesting about them? Honestly, it’s the idea of a crook being able to resist a magical hero’s powers. Underused and underappreciated!
(Action Comics 030, 1940)
In thinking about Zolar I realized that he engages in a surprisingly common plot-expedient activity which I, unwilling to root around on TVTropes for whatever twee thing they might dub it, am hereby going to call “the Reel”: the villain sends a minion from their exotically-located HQ to wherever the hero is located to accomplish some sort of McGuffin task – collect an item, kill or kidnap someone, etc – thereby alerting the hero to the threat and drawing them to the exotic location. As soon as I thought about this I realized that many of the minor super-villains on our list employ the Reel: the Gorilla King sends a squad of gorilla-assassins to kill his enemy, thereby alerting Zatara, for instance.
In Zolar’s case, he sends some of his men (mind controlled desert tribespeople, natch) to Metropolis to eliminate an impediment to his plans, which involves first Lois Lane and then Superman. Cut to the Sahara Desert, where Zolar is trying to conquer the lost city of Ulonda using a combination of mind control, rocket planes and flesh-destroying death orbs.
The whole thing ends in bloodshed: Zolar and his lieutenant attempt to death orb Superman only to have it bounce back on themselves, while his fleet of mind controlled rocket pilots are caused to crash by a slightly-pre-anti-killing-code Superman. The lost city of Ulonda, though battered, survives.
(Action Comics 028, 1940)
AKA the Leopard Skin Thief AKA the Strongarm Bandit – this is our first example of a clear super-villainous character who has not bothered to give themself a name and so we must take one from the text boxes or (as in this case) from the names given to them by the other characters.
Mr Leopard Skin is fun because he is obviously dressed as a circus strongman, and that is because his crime career is an attempt to frame a circus strongman. The actual culprit, the circus clown, has to basically be caught before anyone else at the circus thinks to mention that the clown used to be the old strongman before a stronger strongman showed up and he got demoted and maybe might want revenge.
(Action Comics 025, 1940)
Former chess master turned crimelord, Asmodeus has three of my favourite features in a villain:
-he employs the Tigress
-he builds little models of crime scenes to use as teaching aids for instructing his gang
-he lives in a house of traps
Unfortunately for him, he ends up battling Zatara, so all the traps in the world avail him not.
(Action Comics 025, 1940)
Former chess master turned crimelord, Asmodeus has three of my favourite features in a villain:
-he employs the Tigress
-he builds little models of crime scenes to use as teaching aids for instructing his gang
-he lives in a house of traps
Unfortunately for him, he ends up battling Zatara, so all the traps in the world avail him not.
(Action Comics 025, 1940)
The “World’s Greatest Hypnotist,” Medini embarks on a life of crime using his gifts. He’s so good at hypnosis, in fact, that he is able to put Superman himself out of commission with the power of his mind, which might be why his story ends with Superman throwing an entire plane at his head.