(Human Torch v1 005a, 1941) This is kind of a weird one in a few ways, the first being that the foundation of the plot is that a) Namor the Sub-Mariner and the Angel both own Caribbean islands and b) that they are good enough friends for Namor to pay the Angel a visit. During this visit one of Namor’s servants bursts in and promptly drops dead in an effort to deliver a note cryptically warning of a zombie takeover….
(Human Torch v1 005a, 1941) I think I’ve mentioned the old three-act super-villain story structure of yore a couple of times, but there are a whole host of old comic book story styles that have fallen by the wayside and Dr Smart here stars in one of them: the book-length heist story. Three pages into our tale, Smart and his crew, posing as a funeral procession, rob an armoured car. The remaining 38 or so pages concern the efforts of…
There are various groups of fascist goons in comics and doing an individual entry for each bunch would be a slog, so it’s time for another grouping of jerks! The Yellowshirts here put in a better showing than most and almost manage to take over NYC before they get beaten down by the Patriot. (Human Torch v1 004, 1941) Do the Brown Hoods sound kind of like how the Mafia was described in the 30s? Yes. Is that going to…
(Human Torch v1 004, 1941) Blackjack is your regular style gang boss who is operating at a scale sufficient to be considered super-villainous: he has an ocean liner and a private island equipped with various anti-Human Torch measures, including a fleet of nitrogen bomb-dropping bombers, all in service to one of my personal favourite supercrime setups: the escape ring (which of course involves paying a portion of your take to a third party in order to be spirited away from…
(Human Torch v1 003, 1940) After helping foil a Nazi faux-Japanese* invasion of the US and only committing a few hundred war crimes, Namor is personally thanked by FDR and given a big parade. *confusion arose from the fact that Namor had already tangled with a group of Nazis in NYC and a Nazi-analog invasion fleet in the Atlantic in the same issue, but the invasion fleet that he’s receiving kudos for above was definitely in the Pacific.
(Human Torch v1 002, 1940) As our story opens, what is presumably New York City is under siege by a mysterious killer who drains their victims of their blood. Dr Jack “the Fiery Mask” Castle decides to get involved. He sets a trap by announcing to the paper that he has a lot of blood on hand and then waits for the fiend to show up – too bad for him it’s not just one guy, as twenty blood-hungry maniacs…
(Daring Mystery Comics 008, 1942) Hitler is going to show up more than a few times as you go through the history of comics, even if you set aside all the times he or a pastiche of him show up as the antagonist of a WWII comic you have reams of They Saved Hitler’s Brain or I Recruited the Worst Men of History stories. This here is possibly the first of those and there’s not a lot to it. So:…
(Daring Mystery Comics 008, 1942) Like he says in his dying moments above, Gore is a weird-looking guy who lashes out at society via a series of radio-themed deathtraps, always preceded by a broadcast of the letter D in Morse Code. As a villain he’s all right – he gives the Thunderer a run for his money at least. My major gripe with him is that there was ample opportunity for him to be called the D Killer or the…
(Daring Mystery Comics 008, 1942) A certain number of uboat captains are going to be written villainously enough to meet all of my criteria and Captain Erich von Wolff, AKA the Barracuda, is one such. Like seriously a real stinker of the highest order. It’s a good thing that the Fin is on the case to beat the tar out of him and deliver him to the British. I was going to say that hopefully he was tried and executed…
(Daring Mystery Comics 007, 1941) Lot to like about the Thunderer: great name, trend-based origin (ham radio enthusiast who finds crime on the airwaves/ rigs up a microphone to enhance his presence with a booming voice), nice-looking costume that was ultimately his downfall (because Marvel Comics 1000 established that virtually every Marvel character who wore a full-face black mask were wearing the same mask, and some of them retroactively had to have died for the chain of mask-wearers to continue)….