(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…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024) A simple if gruesome one: Dr Hyde steals the eyes of wealthy men and then ransoms them back. One expects there to be some sort of ultra-technical removal process but no, he just yanks them out – the secret must be in the replacement. He is of course undone by the fact that the Angel is a rich guy and has rich guy friends. Once their paths cross in the person of artist Keene, Dr…
(Marvel Mystery Comics 024, 1941) It’s been a while since we’ve had a proper evil equivalent, so here’s Grosso to show us how it’s done! Golden Age Vision, see, is from an extradimensional realm usually called Smokeworld that’s full of smoke and that the Vision travels to and from via (you guessed it) clouds of smoke. Smoke is kind of his whole deal. Grosso, by contrast, is from the World of War-Dust, with war-dust being defined as clouds of metallic…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024-025, 1941) Rudolf Hess, a major figure in the Nazi party, flew to Scotland in May 1941, probably without authorization and probably in an attempt to broker some sort of peace treaty. As you can see from the previous sentence, even today the whole thing is pretty murky, and in 1941 it was a tantalizing enough mystery for Hess to crop up in a fair few comics either as himself or as a thinly-veiled stand-in. This…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 024, 1941) Daka is Namor the Sub-Mariner’s uncle who is the first of many to usurp his throne while he’s off adventuring. He allies with the Nazis and the Seal People in a scheme to invade Argentina and it’s a testament to how little I can bring myself to care about Atlantean political drama that not even the Seal People can inspire me to write more about this guy.
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941) Kai-Mak here (AKA God of Sharks, Lord of Sharks, Lord of the Deep, Master of the Deep, the Man-Shark) is one of my very favourite things in comics: a weird monster pretending to be a god in order to score power or riches or, as in this case, snacks. I’m so fond of this trope, in fact, that I have to make sure to frontload the acknowledgement that it is predicated on the idea that a lot of the varied people…
(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 023, 1941) N-4 is the kind of Nazi spy that really reminds one that the swastika was a costume design go-to for a while there. Gonna be swastikas cropping up basically forever, aren’t there. Like Captain Nazi still shows up from time to time, doesn’t he. More interesting than N-4 being one of our earlier costumed Nazis is that they’re a trend-based crime villain! The trend: highways! Their whole scheme revolves around the recently-completed Pennsylvania Turnpike…