(Adventure Comics 052-054, 1940)
A properly fun invisible villain, finally! In order:
-great hat, great mustache
-has to get nude
-filled with hubris vis-à-vis just how much you can get done just by being invisible (world conquest?)
Although to that last point they (they being heroic boxer Socko Strong) had to set a trap to electrocute him in order to stop him.
(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.
(Adventure 044, 1939)
Another early Sandman villain. A fairly standard master of disguise who was later reworked into an axe-wielding maniac in Sandman Mystery Theatre.
(Adventure 041, 1939)
A fanatic radio preacher of no specific religion, Mobrune bolsters his reputation by predicting disasters that he then causes.
SPECIFICALLY, Mobrune seeds snow clouds with nerve toxin, completely wiping two small cities off the map. A bad dude!
(Adventure 040, 1939)
Standard masked crook, remarkable only for being the Sandman’s first foe. Shows up later in one or two crowd scenes.
This story is also notable for being the only time Golden Age Wesley Dodds tucks in a little doll version of himself before heading out as Sandman, a charming bit that was later adopted as an ongoing thing in Sandman Mystery Theatre.
(New Adventure Comics 026-More Fun 072, 1938-1941)
Captain Desmo is a pretty standard Golden Age adventure character: together with his pal Gabby McGuire, the Brooklyn Terror, he jaunts around the world (mostly in Asia), getting into scraps with colonized people on behalf of white folks.
The only thing that really makes him stand apart (aside from the fact that he’s a WWI vet, making him a generation older than most Golden Age protagonists) is illustrated in the moderately homoerotic exchange above: Captain Desmo is kind of always in costume, which kind of makes him part of the “bridge between pulp hero and super-hero” crew, like early Crimson Avenger, early Sandman or the various guys like the Clock or the Mouthpiece who ran around in suits and domino masks in the early days.
The final interesting thing about Captain Desmo is that he never actually got around to explaining just why he wore his goggles an helmet at all times, which I respect.
(Adventure 032, 1938)
British Army officer who lined his own pockets supplying rebels in India. Fought Captain Desmo, a masked aviator whose comics were on the whole drawn as if they took place in North Africa even though quite a lot of them were set in India – not so uncommon a type of thing to happen in all the various times before reference materials became as easy to access as they are now.
Anyway: the Masked Man. Fairly unremarkable, although it is interesting to note just how unsettling a domino mask can be when it’s made out of what looks like leather.
(New Adventure 028, 1938)
Bog standard South American revolutionary villain who is hunted down by agents of the US Navy. Remarkable only due to the one-panel appearance of Rose del Muerte, the Rose of Death.
What a good one-panel appearance! El Diablo can sit in a garbage can, but Rose del Muerte should show up all over the DCU, never as an actual culprit but just a red herring living her best life.