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Category: Marvel Comics

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 300: THE RINGMASTER OF CRIME

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 300: THE RINGMASTER OF CRIME

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(Captain America Comics 005, 1941) Finally, FINALLY, after 300  of these guys an arbitrary milestone lines up with a reasonably cool character: the Ringmaster of Crime AKA the Ringmaster of Death. Compounding the fun of the circus of crime aesthetic is the fact that some of that good-style retconning has been going on and the Ringmaster in this tale has been made the father (and presumably later grandfather, per Marvel’s sliding timeline) of the mid-level super-villain the Ringmaster! Uh, if…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 299: DOCTOR GRIMM

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 299: DOCTOR GRIMM

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(Captain America Comics 004, 1941) Doctor Grimm is your regular-style mad scientist, subtype Owns a Private Hospital and Conducts Unethical Experiments on the Inmates and Staff. He comes to Captain America’s attention when Bucky gets bashed on the head real good (teen sidekick head trauma is no laughing matter and I hope we never get an earnest comic about it) and has to be admitted for observation. Things get predictably creepy, with disappearing nurses, strange cries in the night and…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 298: THE UNHOLY LEGION

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 298: THE UNHOLY LEGION

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(Captain America Comics 004, 1941) This is one of those moments where the first examples of a thing that shows up here is not a great example of the thing. Blame the tyranny of alphabetical order, I suppose, because I know for a fact that Star-Spangled Comics will feature the Ring of Rags when I work my way down my list to it, and that is a good example. The thing in question is of course Poor People as a Horrifying and…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 297: THE BUTTERFLY

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 297: THE BUTTERFLY

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 296: THE HUNCHBACK OF HOLLYWOOD

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 296: THE HUNCHBACK OF HOLLYWOOD

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(Captain America Comics 003, 1941) The Hunchback of Hollywood is a villain in the same classic vein as Clayface: dressing up like a horror character and using murder and fear tactics to shut down a movie production. Also like Clayface, the production is within the hero’s range due to the studio taking advantage of the castle-rich landscape of the Eastern US  (the castle in question is said to be near Camp Lehigh, home base of Steve “Captain America” Rogers and…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 295: RED SKULL II

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 295: RED SKULL II

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 294: THE WAX MAN

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 294: THE WAX MAN

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(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…

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CREEPS OF THE WORLD: THE WALKING MOUNTAINS

CREEPS OF THE WORLD: THE WALKING MOUNTAINS

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 293: RATHCONE

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 293: RATHCONE

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(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…

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MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 292: ARMLESS TIGER MAN

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 292: ARMLESS TIGER MAN

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(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…

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